Word: muhammad
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dozen correspondents, who visited medinas and mosques, and interviewed sultans and emirs, desert tribesmen and professors of Islamic culture. The result is this week's Special Report on Islam, a sweeping exploration of one of the world's great faiths, with side trips through the life of Muhammad, the words of the Koran, and the ancient justice of the Shari'a (Islam's code...
...only a few of the voices of Islam, as powerful and compelling today as the muezzin's ancient call of the faithful to prayer. The voices speak Russian and Chinese, Persian and French, Berber and Malay, Turkish and Urdu?and Arabic, of course, the mother tongue of the Prophet Muhammad and language of Islam's holy book, the Koran. Islam is the world's youngest universal faith, and the second largest, with 750 million adherents, to about 985 million for Christianity. Across the eastern hemisphere, but primarily in that strategic crescent that straddles the crossroads of three continents, Muslims...
...facing Regent's Park in London stands as a symbol of a growing community, now a million strong. Yet Islam itself has had a dynamic manifest destiny; in a sense, it is a political faith with a yearning for expansion. Less than a hundred years after the death of Muhammad in A.D. 632, his followers had burst out of the Arabian desert to conquer and create an empire whose glories were to shine for a thousand years. A cavalry of God, they conquered the Persian Empire and much of the Byzantine, spreading the faith through Northern Africa into Spain...
Islam and Government. Muhammad's teachings are fundamentally democratic, since they proclaim the equality of all men before God. In practice, Islamic nations, like other countries, have both liberals and conservatives, democrats and dictators. The Islamic socialists of Iraq and Libya?not to mention Iranian moderates who want to see a parliamentary democracy established by their new constitution?look with disdain on a semifeudal monarchy like Saudi Arabia. Says Hussein Bani-Assadi, son-in-law of Iran's Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan: "Ideologically, this revolution cannot support systems like Saudi Arabia's. Islam has no kings." The Saudis answer that...
Saudi Arabia. The birthplace of Muhammad is the most strictly orthodox Muslim society on earth; rulers and ruled profess adherence to the austere, fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, noted for its zealous enforcement of the Shari'a. But there is a widening gap between the very rich and very poor, a heavy influx of foreign workers, and a pace of development that may be too rapid for an underpopulated country to handle. Although the Wahhabi leaders have close links to the royal family, there is a small Islamic movement that is critical of the debauchery of spoiled princelings on their sojourns outside...