Word: prophetic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. Pray five times a day. Give alms. Fast during the month of Ramadan. If you are capable, make a pilgrimage to Mecca. If these "five pillars" seem foreign to you, you may not be talking with your neighbors. Islam is an American religion. There are some 7 million Muslims in the U.S. That's more than the number of Jews and more than twice the number of Episcopalians. Thirty years ago, the Islamic count was a mere 500,000. The number of mosques rose from...
Before Omar left Kandahar, he opened the marble vault in the city's most venerated shrine and held up the Respectable Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, seen publicly only two times previously in more than a millennium. The sight inspired Taliban foot soldiers for a final assault against Kabul in 1996. By then even the U.S. was quietly encouraging Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to back a movement they hoped might eliminate the heroin trade, open access for a gas pipeline and confine Shi'ite Iran...
...makeshift militias. Though the U.S., with billions of dollars in aid, helped the militias in their triumph, bin Laden soon turned on their benefactor. When U.S. troops in 1990 arrived in his sacred Saudi homeland to fight Saddam Hussein, bin Laden considered their infidel presence a desecration of the Prophet Muhammad's birthplace. He was inspired to take on a second superpower, and he was funded to do so: by a fortune inherited from his contractor father, by an empire of business enterprises, by the hubris that comes from being a rich kid whose commands had always been obeyed...
Like Judaism and Christianity, its close religious relatives, Islam honors all humanity--not just believers--as created by God, who is referred to as "the compassionate and merciful." The Judeo-Christian respect for the widow and the orphan is amplified by the fact that the Prophet Muhammad was himself an orphan, notes Georgetown's John O. Voll. And for all the conflict depicted in the Koran, its recognition of pluralism is embodied in a verse that explains that God created humans different from one another so that they can learn from one another...
That opinion rests on the Koran's Chapter 60, Verse 8, which bids Islamic victors to "show [civilians] kindness and deal with them justly." In the Hadiths, or traditions of Muhammad, the Prophet commands, "Neither kill the old...nor children and babes nor the females," and is portrayed as appalled to discover a woman's corpse on a battlefield. Similar protections pertain to farmers and tradesmen. Even the slaughter of enemy soldiers is enjoined if no war has been declared. "It's basically the Geneva Convention," says Jamal Badawi, a well-known Islamic interpreter who teaches at St. Mary...