Word: persianism
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...avid reader of Agatha Christie novels, Okonjo-Iweala is also an aficionado of African art and Persian rugs. She loves Nigerian food and traditional music, her children say. Her desire to promote what Uzodinma calls “the cultural patrimony,” combined with her love of travel, has translated into her wildly successful career...
...prophecy sometimes attributed to Ali that the arrival of the Mahdi - a messiah-like figure who, Shi'ites believe, will ultimately defeat evil - will be presaged by the appearance of a messenger, a tall black man who will rule the West. Others read meaning into Obama's name. In Persian, O-ba-ma means "He's with us," and Barack Hussein can loosely be translated as "blessings of Hussein," an allusion to Ali's son, another imam revered by the Shi'ites. Obama's strenuous denials made no difference to these theorists: they simply reasoned that he must be practicing...
...Most seemed sensible enough to realize you could lower or raise the spirituality volume of yoga as you pleased, and that doing downward facing dog didn't make you a bad Muslim. One of my girlfriends even attended a Sufi yoga class where the teacher played the daf (a Persian frame drum) and everyone chanted to the Shi'a Imam Ali. Many, like my mother, like to note the similarities between the physical sequence of Muslim prayer and asanas, claiming harmony, or at least fatwa-free ground, between Islam and yoga...
...days in August. That's when the stern gate of the U.S.S. San Antonio - needed to roll vehicles onto and off the nearly 700-ft. vessel - wouldn't work. The Navy eventually got the gate fixed in time for the ship to leave Norfolk and sail to the Persian Gulf, where its mission is to hunt down smugglers. But now the San Antonio has been forced into port in Bahrain for at least two weeks of repairs to leaks in the hefty pipes feeding fuel to two of its four engines. Hinting at the seriousness of the problem, the Navy...
...other elements of the President-elect's name are no less enchanting in these parts. Barack is a word of Semitic origin meaning "Blessing," and Obama, when written in Persian, transliterates into "He is with us." But it's not his name that has most Iranians I talked to on Wednesday elated by Obama's victory; it's the fact that they take the leader at his word and believe that he intends to end President Bush's policies of war and aggression...