Word: scribes
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...preordained for Ethiopia. Liberia and Somalia have provided the worst kind of models in the past year: the government falls, blood splatters the capital, thousands flee the country, tribes and clans clash, anarchy prevails. This time, the foreshadowing has prompted an earnest attempt to rewrite the scenario. The chief scribe is the U.S., which until recently, when the Soviets became less active in the region, had little influence over Ethiopia's quasi-Marxist combatants...
Operatives for the now divorced author are casting around for a professional writer to pen the first of "her" two novels. It's proving difficult to find a well-known scribe willing to accept $300,000 for the uncredited job, especially when Ivana's sitting on an estimated $3 million book contract...
When Middlesex County first began documenting land transactions in the seventeenth century, all that local officials needed to complete the paperwork was a book, a quill and a scribe with no taste for glamour...
There is a character in The Satanic Verses, a scribe named Salman, who commits an unthinkable sin. His job is to write down the revelations of God as recited by Mahound, Rushdie's fictional prophet. But the mischievous scribe repeatedly changes Mahound's words. When the prophet finally realizes that Salman has corrupted the text of his holy book, he explodes, "Your blasphemy can't be forgiven." The proper punishment for Salman's crime is death, but Mahound is merciful and spares his life...
Actually, this passage did not spring from Rushdie's imagination: similar accounts of Muhammad's temptation were recorded a millennium ago by Ibn Sa'd, al-Tabari and other authoritative Muslim historians. Today's Islamic scholars, however, do not consider the story authentic. Like the section dealing with the scribe Salman, this episode is seen by Rushdie's critics as a blatant attempt to undermine the Koran as the word...