Word: shrine
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...festivals are based on traditional Shinto purification rituals. In Inazawa, where this year's event will be held on March 2, one self-confident fellow is chosen to be the official streaker. He's shaved and then marched through the Kounomiya Shrine, where a throng of around 9,000 men wearing only loincloths attempt to lay their hands on him as thousands of spectators watch. The naked man is supposed to collect the bad luck and impurities of all who touch him. The crowd can get overly enthusiastic (sake is involved), so the man is protected by guards...
...centuries-old mud brick shrine of Abu Feisal, more than a hundred men push into the tiny prayer room. Outside, the temperature is below freezing, but inside the air is thick and pungent with the heavy scent of perspiration. A small microphone is turned on, and a middle-aged man with a face creased with grief began chanting a mournful dirge. The penitents, sitting in rough circles, begin to pound their chests in a powerful rhythm amplified by a hundred chest cavities. Deep and as resonant as a heartbeat, the sound gradually changes tenor as thin cotton shirts split with...
...last day of Ashura is marked by the spilling of blood. This time, the flails are tipped with razor-sharp blades the shape of elongated hearts. This time, it's public. The penitents march through the streets in orderly rows and pause in front of the shrine. Again the mournful chanting, and the whipping begins, blades flashing in the sun. The air is thick with the metallic edge of fresh blood. It is as much a public spectacle as a demonstration of faith. "Everyone who watches is mourning for Hussein as well," says Ali Hosseini, an 18-year...
...planned to lead his followers into Najaf and kill the Shi'a religious leaders there. Chief among the targets would have been Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, the most revered Shi'a cleric in Iraq. His rivals slain, al-Yamani planned to lead his followers into the Imam Ali shrine, the resting place of Mohammad's son-in-law and one of Shi'a Islam's holiest sites...
...northwest Indian state. Sikhs, who make up 2% of the Indian population but form a majority in Punjab, have long wanted greater autonomy from the central government in New Delhi. But even before the Indian army's bloody 1984 invasion of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhdom's holiest shrine, an extremist minority had agitated violently for the creation of an independent state. Shortly after the temple assault, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Rajiv's mother, was gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards...