Word: muhammad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Meeting in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, Muslim delegates to a shura, or consultative assembly, appeared set to nominate as Prime Minister of their "interim" government Ahmat Shah, 44, a U.S.-trained engineer and hard- line fundamentalist. Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi, 68, a former member of Afghanistan's parliament, was named to fill the largely ceremonial office of President. The shura thus managed to bridge, for the moment, the principal issue dividing the rebel side: whether post-Soviet Afghanistan should be governed as an Islamic revolutionary state, on the Iranian model, or as one that is moderate and secular. Shah strongly...
...Sayed Ahmad Gailani, 56, is the most pro-Western and secular of the mujahedin leaders, despite his claim of direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Gailani's National Islamic Front is nicknamed the "Gucci Muj" for its leader's taste in well-tailored camouflage uniforms. Though he favors the return of exiled King Zahir Shah, Gailani is also a fervent believer in Western-style elections...
...SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie (Viking; $19.95). Charges of blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad have put Rushdie's book into international headlines. But there is no harm, only relentless artistry, in this encyclopedic fiction about the explosive, often comic meetings of East and West...
...must be added that few of those outraged by The Satanic Verses have ever seen it, much less opened it. Their fury, and the timorousness of government officials fearing violent uproars, has been prompted by one accusation: that the novel contains a blasphemous portrait of the Prophet Muhammad and thus amounts to a terrible insult to Islam. The plain, simple truth is that the novel does nothing of the sort, but only those who consent to read the thing will discover this for themselves...
...these -- a businessman named Mahound -- who has settled Rushdie's mulligatawny as far as Islamic fundamentalists are concerned. For the Gibreel-Mahound exchanges are based, in an obviously distorted and hallucinatory manner, on an episode in the life of Muhammad: the Prophet's early willingness to include in the Qur'an an acknowledgment of three female deities and his later repudiation of these verses as satanically inspired. If Muhammad himself was willing to admit that he had been deceived, it is difficult to see why a tangential, fictional version of this long-ago event should cause such contemporary furor...