Word: religion
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...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 Islamic skylines dominated by the dome-and-minaret design that first appeared centuries...
...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...
...novel, the otherworldly charm of the opening chapters gives way to a metallic surrealism, interspersed with forced philosophical conversations about the existence of God and what it means to be man. In some rare moments, Lind weaves a new kind of poetry, one blended with religion, philosophy, and Bachmann’s own sensitivity. After being picked up by a peacetime school teacher who hires Bachmann as an assassin, Bachmann pauses to urinate by the side of the road: “With birdie in hand, he looked up at the stars. Eternity, eternity, said a Nietzschean murmur within...
...cover story "On the Trail of Terror," it was nothing short of a romantic attempt to legitimise terrorism [March 16]. No religion preaches the killing of innocent human beings. Every man has the right to choose, and they have chosen to kill. It is immaterial whether they are born in poverty or privilege. A cover story on the extraordinary acts of heroism by ordinary Mumbaikers in the face of this act of cowardice by these terrorists would have been more appropriate. Ajay Swaminathan MD, CREWE, ENGLAND...
...universal values of the nation was central to some of the ugliest episodes in the country's history. The French constitution proudly declares the country "an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic [that] assures equality before the law for all its citizens, without distinction of origin, of race, or religion". That gender- and color-blindness, national ideology holds, protects minority populations by ignoring the differences that divide them into often mutually hostile groups in societies like the U.S. and U.K. Indeed, few words are uttered in France with the same disdain as communitarisme: the proud identification with a component group...