Word: prophet
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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...
...architecture and the break with traditions are beginning to influence designers in Muslim nations as well. Sometimes the change is simply a return to the religion's roots. Architect Zeynep Fadillioglu drew on her own experiences praying in mosques when designing the ultramodern Sakirin Mosque in Istanbul. "In the Prophet's time, men and women prayed next to each other," she says. "Lately, with the rise of political Islam everywhere, the women's sections have started to be covered up and boxed off. I've been in mosques like that, and I felt very uncomfortable...
...Joan of Arc; a Sri Lankan tour guide who makes his living at the Temple of the Holy Tooth; a Syrian boy whose playground includes the al-Jami al-Kabir mosque in Damascus; and a Pakistani man who, when asked if he felt closer to Muhammad after beholding the Prophet's purported whiskers, simply replied, "Close? I cannot be close. I come to remind me how far it is I must...
...power of relics: "When the Taliban first attempted to take control of Afghanistan in 1996, they knew where to begin. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar demanded to be let into a shrine containing relics of Prophet Muhammad: hair from his beard, and a cloak he is said to have worn. Seizing the cloak, Mullah Omar went to the roof of the shrine and slid his hands into the sleeves, holding the garment before him for everyone to see. To the crowd watching it looked like he had gone into the relic chamber and come out transformed into the Prophet himself...
...tradition which says ladies are religiously and rationally not complete and of lesser mind," says Ismail Hakki Unal of Ankara University's divinity school, a member of the commission. "We think this does not conform with the soul of the Koran. And when we look at the Prophet's behavior toward ladies, we don't think those insulting messages belong to him." Another hadith insists that women be obedient to their husbands if they are to enter paradise. "Again, this is incompatible with the Prophet," Unal says. "We think these are sentences put forth by men who were trying...