Word: muslims
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...RDOBA, Spain—Tourists from all over the world come here for one reason: to see the Mezquita (Spanish for “mosque”) that was built when Cordoba was part of the Muslim-ruled kingdom of al-Andalus. Although it is widely considered to be one of the finest achievements of the Western Islamic Empire, you wouldn’t know it from reading the information pamphlet provided at the entrance...
...Mezquita as an unfortunate hiccup in the history of what was always meant to be a Christian church. Some passages go so far as to dismiss the originality of the structure, claiming that almost all of the architectural elements were copied from Christian buildings, while others accuse a later Muslim addition to the edifice as being merely an “ostentatious display of power,” and even worse, cheaply constructed...
...state solution has put him at odds with a reluctant Israeli government that has now chosen the emotive issue of Jerusalem as the test of how far he's willing to go. If he backs down, Obama pulls the plug on his carefully crafted outreach to the Muslim world and can expect to see his effort to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fail before it has practically begun. But pressing ahead on Jerusalem and the wider peace agenda of which it forms part could, like pushing his health-care plan, come at a rising political cost for the President...
...Sufism now usually provokes paeans to an alternative, ascetic life, backed up perhaps by a few verses from Rumi, a medieval Sufi poet much cherished by New Age spiritualists. But there was nothing fringe or alternative about it. "In many places, Sufism was the way whole populations expressed their Muslim identity," says Faisal Devji, an expert on political Islam at Oxford University. "In South Asia, it was the norm...
...Nevertheless, it has also been Sufism's fate to fall afoul of more narrow-minded dogmas - even during an earlier golden age. The tomb of Sarmad the Armenian, a storied Sufi saint, sits close to Delhi's Great Mosque. Sarmad looked for unity within Muslim and Hindu theology, and famously walked the streets of Lahore and Delhi naked, denouncing corrupt nobles and clerics. In 1661, he was arrested for heresy and beheaded under the orders of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, a ruler admired now by Pakistani hard-liners for his championing of an orthodox Islam and the destruction of hundreds...