Word: mullah
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Asked what he thinks about killing, Mohammad Anwar looks puzzled. "I was happy because I killed them," he says. During the attack, Mohammad Anwar's older brother and some other mujahedin seized four soldiers. They bound the prisoners' hands, blindfolded them and marched them to Dara Noor. After the mullah arrived, they lined up the captives and shot them. Mohammad Anwar and his friend watched. How did he feel about that? He lifts an eyebrow and this time answers deliberately, as if talking to a slow-witted child. "I was happy," he says...
...front of Communist Party Central Committee headquarters in Dushanbe, capital of Tadzhikistan. Humiliated, the group of veteran Soviet combat officers and their men sank awkwardly to the ground when ordered to do so by the throng of 10,000 militant Tadzhiks. The troops then listened grimly as a mullah recited the Islamic call to prayer from atop one of their armored vehicles...
...group is more delighted with the new religious liberty than the mullahs who nurtured the Islamic faith during decades of persecution. "They used to shoot us," says a mullah at Tashkent's Tokhta Baitvacha mosque, which was closed in 1937 on Stalin's orders and reopened a year ago. "Now they don't interfere with us. A lot of young people come here these days...
...Tashkent headquarters of the Muslim Religious Board for Central Asia and Kazakhstan, a gaggle of Uzbek teenagers fidget through 2 p.m. prayers while their elders scowl at a visiting photographer. At an elegant medieval-era mosque just outside town, young construction volunteers stop for a farewell word from mullah Kasemi Bey after a Saturday morning of restoration work. Says Kasemi Bey: "The number of believers is growing. Everybody wants to go to Mecca...
...mullah takes the microphone and sings out the traditional Muslim call to prayer in Arabic. "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" the call begins. Mesmerized, the Tadzhiks as one man -- there is not a woman in sight among the 10,000 except Alexandra -- raise their hands in the traditional Muslim posture of worship. The Soviets stiffen. The officers disappear from the windows. Except for the wail of the mullah, a total hush has descended upon the gathering. After the prayer call, the mullah reads a sura from the Koran honoring the dead. Three minutes later, the prayer and reading...