Word: pious
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...whole world is a mosque, the Prophet Muhammad once said. With pious intent, a faithful Muslim can conjure a mosque almost anywhere, transforming a desert sand dune, airport departure lounge or city pavement into a sacred space simply by stopping to pray. The first mosque was Muhammad's mud-brick house in Medina, where a portico of palm-tree branches provided shade for prayer and theological discussion. As the young religion spread, Arabs - and later Asians and Africans - developed their own ideas of what made a building a mosque. But that innovative spirit has slowed in recent decades, leaving most...
...half of them sang flatter than Old Man Grumpy. So I lifted my dress and my head—all the better to march with! Most of the folks grimaced at me or even glared an apology to whoever was standing next to them. But the few pious sheep of the flock (all Southerners, I’m sure) kept to their singing and one boy even flashed me an impertinent grin. But by this time, all of it was impertinent. A faith in what I knew I deserved was firing me up. Like I had that great piece...
With a soft techno beat throbbing in the background, waiters glide about the room offering canapés with champagne or, for the pious, glasses of orange juice. Men in business suits or jeans mix with women, some wearing above-the-knee skirts, some in long dresses and head scarves. It's a typical soirée for Cairo's well-heeled set, yet tonight there's more than the usual Middle East-meets-West twist. The revelers are here to toast an unlikely creative marriage, between Egyptian artist Azza Fahmy, who has spent decades reviving Arab jewelry traditions...
Faith and health overlap in other ways too. Take fasting. One of the staples of both traditional wellness protocols and traditional religious rituals is the cleansing fast, which is said to purge toxins in the first case and purge sins or serve other pious ends in the second. There are secular water fasts, tea fasts and grapefruit fasts, to say nothing of the lemon, maple-syrup and cayenne-pepper fast. Jews fast on Yom Kippur; Muslims observe Ramadan; Catholics have Lent; Hindus give up food on 18 major holidays. Done right, these fasts may lead to a state of clarity...
...generally observed only by the nation's more conservative Muslims, but its advice is nonetheless often sought by government officials. Last year, for instance, the council played a key part in the controversial ban of the Ahmadiyah religious sect by the governor of South Sumatra. (Read "Should a Pious Muslim Practice Yoga...