Word: ritualizes
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Still, the religious attitudes of the main characters do not necessarily reflect Murphy's. The Marine gunnery sergeant, the Associate Justice and Declan Walsh himself a11 express some distress at the new Roman Catholic ritual, with its abandonment of the old music and the Latin. Murphy and his wife Terry (their two daughters now live in other parts of the country) regularly go to an English-language folk Mass...
...make at least once in their lifetime. Participation has been growing steadily since 1974. Last November's pilgrimage was the biggest in history. Nearly 2 million people converged on the arid Plain of Arafat near Mecca to live in tents and perform the arduous five-to seven-day ritual that has remained unchanged for 14 centuries. More than ever before, the pilgrimage was a spiritual kaleidoscope of races and faces and languages from 70 countries, from the wealthiest of oil sheiks to the poorest of the poor...
...interior, now empty, once housed pagan idols, which Muhammad destroyed. The pilgrims also visit other holy sites, act out the search for water by Hagar, the mother of the Arab nation, perform a vigil on Mount 'Arafat (site of the Prophet's last sermon) and conduct a ritual sacrifice of goats, sheep and camels...
Both Sunni and Shi'ite Islam include Sufism, a mystical movement whose adherents seek to serve God not simply through obedience to the law but by striving for union with him through meditation and ritual. Sufism is considered suspect by fundamentalist Muslims like the puritanical Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, because it allows for the veneration of awliya-roughly the equivalent of Christianity's 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...
...souls but a spiritual community; its sectarian divisions, as well as the man-made barriers of race and class that Islam opposes, dissolve dramatically at the hajj. Once a pilgrimage made mostly by Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa, the hajj has become a universal and unifying ritual. For those who have taken part in it, the hajj acts as a constant testament to Islam's vision of a divine power that transcends all human frailties...