Word: allah
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...whipper would dance back a few steps; turning with acrobatic grace, he would twirl his cane like a drum major's baton and rush forward to strike the next blow. The victim's body writhed in agony with each fall of the cane. He cried out: "Allah Akbar!" (God is great). After four strokes, the young convict screamed out for the doctor. After six, he was given a few sips of water. After twelve, he made no sound. After the 14th, one of the military officials warned the whippers not to go easy. The 15th stroke fell...
Just back from living in Egypt, I was very pleasantly surprised by your open-minded, sensitive, even courageous reporting on Islam. I was inspired by what I saw of the Islamic way, a way that allows people to live and let live, apparently secure in the knowledge that Allah is with them and with all others they meet. Suzanne Grenager...
Thus it was, according to Islamic tradition, that an unremarkable Arab trader from Mecca was inspired to preach God's word in the year A.D. 610. Compared with Jesus or the Buddha, information about the life of the man who became known as the Messenger of Allah is relatively abundant, although the facts have been embellished with pious folklore. Some have claimed that at Muhammad's birth the palace of the Persian emperor trembled, or that a mysterious light ignited at his mother's breast, shining all the way to Syria, 800 miles away. It was said...
...then swirling through the Middle East. He would listen avidly as Jews and Christians argued over their faiths. Those discussions may have fed his dissatisfaction with the traditional polytheistic religion of the Arabs, who believed in a panoply of tribal gods and jinn, headed by a deity known as Allah, Says Muhammad's French biographer, Maxime Rodinson: "Both Jews and Christians despised the Arabs, regarding them as savages who did not even possess an organized church...
...saints. Islam also has spawned a number of heretical offshoots. One is the Alawi sect, a Shi'ite minority group to which most of Syria's leaders belong. The Alawis believe in the transmigration of souls and a kind of trinity in which 'Ali is Allah incarnate. Another is the secretive Druze sect of Israel, Lebanon and Syria, which split away from Islam in the 11th century. America's so-called Black Muslims were once generally regarded by Sunni Muslims as followers of a new heresy. By adopting orthodox beliefs and discarding a rule that limited...