United States or Grenada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The chant rang through a stillness broken only by the low snap and crackle of the fires. "Ashhadu an la illah illa-llah, Ashhadu anna Mohammadar ra-sool ulla." chanted the long robed priest. "God is God, and Mohammed is his Prophet! There is no God but God! To prayer, O sons of the Faithful!

"La illah il Allah, Mohammed rassoul'lah! Allah Akbar! God is great!" One by one the dim towers took it up. The call to prayer rolled between the stars and the town. It searched the white runways. It penetrated the vine-bowered arbour. Little by little, tower by tower, it died. In a fondouk outside the gate a waking camel lifted a gargling wail.

The Sultan opened the book at the last page, pricked through by the needle, and these were the words he read: "He who fears the sword will find the sword his enemy, and better a rust-eaten sword in the hand than a brightly burnished one in a sheath." "La illah il Allah! God is one!" said Achmed bowing his head and kissing the words of the Alkoran. "Make ready my charger, 'tis the will of God."

Tulun spent twenty years at the court of el-Mamun and of his successor, Mutasim, and became the father of several children, one of which, Ahmed ibn Tulun,* known later as Abu l'Abbas, was the founder of the Tulunide dynasty in Egypt and Syria. * Ahmed ibn Tulun was, according to some historians, born at Baghdad in the year 220 of the Hegira, in the third year of the reign of el-Mutasim b' Illah.

A great amount of kissing and embracing took place, Arab fashion, between the two parties; and they all came to kiss my hand and that of my wife, with the exclamation, that "By Allah, no woman in the world had a heart so tough as to dare to face what she had gone through." "El hamd el Illah! El hamd el Illah bel salaam!"

'Is it true that the bold white mem-log live for three times the length of my life? Is it true that they make their marriages not before they are old women? 'They marry as do others when they are women. 'That I know, but they wed when they are twenty-five. Is that true? 'That is true. 'Ya illah! At twenty-five! Who would of his own will take a wife even of eighteen?

The native passengers seemed to take the delay calmly and as a matter of course, some of them spreading their prayer-carpets upon the platform to recite the evening prayer, to which the muezzins were calling from the minarets as we left the town: "La Illah illa Allah! Mohammed du russûl Ala-a-h!"

Only one mile and a quarter from the lake, by this small river, we entered the great White Nile! I cannot describe my joy and thankfulness. My men shared my feelings. We all drank water from the turbid river, so unlike the marsh-filtered water of the swamps; and as each man washed his hands and face in the noble stream, he ejaculated from his heart, "El hambd el Illah!"

But being ignorant of the mode of fighting among the cavalry of the East, the Scots pursued the chase too far, and the Moors, when they saw them scattered and separated from each other, turned suddenly back, with a loud cry of ALLAH ILLAH ALLAH, which is their shout of battle, and surrounded such of the Scottish knights and squires as were dispersed from each other.

My lodgings were very near to one of the principal gates of the mosque, through which the corpses were carried when prayers were to be said over them; and I could hear, from my sick bed, the exclamations of "La illah il Allah," with which that ceremony was accompanied. During my three months' confinement one funeral at least, and often two, passed every day under my window.