Word: saladin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...feet over the English Channel. Two passengers, cartwheeling and conversing, plummet earthward. One is Gibreel Farishta, India's most popular movie star, who is in disguise and fleeing his fame after suffering a life-threatening illness and discovering in the process that there is no God. The other is Saladin Chamcha, a prosperous performer of voice-overs for commercials on British television, returning to his adopted land after a melancholy visit to Bombay and the haunts of his childhood. Miraculously -- preposterously -- they both survive their descent. And then truly strange things begin to happen...
...Saladin sprouts a pair of horns on his forehead and cloven hoofs; these mutations earn him, a British subject, rough handling by police and immigration officials. Gibreel develops a visible arc of light, a halo, around his head, and must cope with the awestruck reverence of perfect strangers. His new radiance aggravates an older problem, particularly puzzling in light of his newfound atheism: his vivid cinematic dreams, in which he is cast as the Archangel Gibreel, but without a script, and then asked by a series of petitioners to deliver Allah's word...
...lecture Muslims on what they should or should not read would be impudent. But it must also be stated that there is no ridicule or harm in this novel, only an overwhelming sense of amazement and joy at the multifariousness of all Allah's children. As Gibreel and Saladin try to make their afflicted ways through contemporary London, a fascinating tapestry unfurls behind them. This backdrop contains vivid scenes -- among them, the subjugation of an immense subcontinent and ancient cultures by an upstart island, and the upheavals that result when this thralldom is abruptly ended. But the history is parceled...
Maimonides believed it was wrong to receive income from religious scholarship and earned his living as a doctor. Eventually he was appointed a physician to the Egyptian court of the storied Saladin, and became famous for voluminous medical writings...
...Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Nabataeans, Byzantines, Arabs. During the 7th and 8th centuries A.D., Damascus flourished as the capital of the Umayyad Empire, which stretched from Spain to India. In the 12th century the Crusaders' brief reign came to a violent end at the hands of the warrior Saladin, who remains a Syrian folk hero to this day. After Saladin's death, his domain fell...