Word: muslims
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...scene was sickeningly familiar: an ambush on a twisting mountain road, gunfire and death. This time, however, the victim was not a hapless villager caught in the middle of sectarian strife. He was Kamal Jumblatt, 59, leader of Lebanon's Muslim left and feudal landlord whose power base was rooted among the 150,000 members of the Druze sect. His assassination last week threatened to reopen the bloody civil war in Lebanon, which since November has been living under a "peace" enforced by three divisions of Syrian troops...
Confronted by the prospect of renewed fighting, Syrian troops refrained from going on alert in order not to create a crisis atmosphere. Christians in East Beirut fired rifles in joy, and Syrian troops had to keep gangs of Muslim leftists from setting up the kind of barricades that had divided the city at the height of the fighting. Outside the 300-year-old family castle in the mountain town of Mukhtara, some 50,000 mourners, including Premier Selim Hoss, a Muslim, gathered in the rain for Jumblatt's funeral...
...said to Khaalis. "I would like you, my brother, to join in a prayer to Allah that it will be a day of compassion, honor and bravery." Khaalis protested that the place where he was appeared "unclean." This remark convinced the negotiators that Khaalis was a devout Muslim who would pray only in clean surroundings, as Islamic tradition prescribes. Now there was hope, for a source of leverage existed-the compassion cited in the Koran...
Armed with a knife, Khaalis emerged from an elevator. He shook hands, received the traditional Muslim hug from the ambassadors, and sat down. Not until the meeting passed its 15-minute mark did the police begin to relax. Speaking in a low, soothing voice, Zahedi brought up the deaths of Khaalis' children, and suddenly the terrorist broke into tears. Then Zahedi returned to the Koran. "You could see a rapport building," recalls Ghorbal. "Trust and confidence were sinking in." Finally after two hours, Khaalis blurted out what was most on his mind: he did not want...
Producer-Director Moustapha Akkad was confronted by a unique problem: the strict Muslim prohibition against representing the Prophet's face or form, or even his voice-in any medium. A wiser or less determined man might have bailed out right there, but Akkad, 43, a Syrian-born American who studied film making at U.C.L.A., pressed on, raising $17 million from Arab sources to make two versions of the story, one in English, the other in Arabic. His actors constantly address an empty space where the audience must imagine a silent Prophet to be standing...