I guess that’s the closest thing to a religious symbol Islam has, the Star and Crescent were a Byzantine thing that just got spread by the Ottomans
Cat Stevens.
The sound of the prayers (there was a prayer room in the room above mine when I was in university, so I heard them praying a lot).
Muslim
lā ʾilāha ʾilá l-Lāh, Muḥammad rasūlu l-Lāh, i.e. the Shahada.
The crescent, sideways.
Pizza. (Don’t ask, my mind is a weird place.)
How dare you smear hundreds of millions of people with the terrible actions of one horrid monster?:mad::mad::mad:
A woman in niqab/hijaab (although not burka, funnily enough). Clearly my mind is visual as that’s genuinely what I cam up with, even though I know a shit ton about Islam and would put that very far down the list of significant things about the religion.
Repression of women. Sorry.
Mamluk cavalry.
I’ve been playing too much Medieval 2 lately.
the ritualistic washing of hands
I get a very specific visual picture every time I’ve read the thread title (although I haven’t opened the thread until now.)
There are three men in long robes standing on the dusty ground, about to begin kneeling in prayer. If they’re facing East, then I’m standing in the southeast looking at them on a bit of an angle. The center one has on peach/orangey colored robes and a white hat (those hats that sort of look like soft-sided pillbox hats but are worn low on the head…I have no idea what they’re called.)
The man to his right (“closer” to me in my mind’s eye) is wearing white, dusty and dirty now. The man to his left (“in back”) is bent over, further towards kneeling than the other two.
This picture is so solid and specific in my mind (and I’m usually crap at “visualization”), that I suspect it must be an actual photograph that I only half-consciously remember.
The first *concept *to come to mind: oppression of women. Sorry.
Bearded man in white robe thing.
Capt. Richard Francis Burton. The dude was awesome and he converted to Islam (maybe, sort of) so there must be something worthwhile to it.
Ditto
Zero tolerance. Death to innocents. Suicide bombers.
Strangely enough, the show “Little Mosque on the Prairie”
I think of the Middle East’s funky music and classic architecture: onion domes, minarettes, stone lattice. Oddly I don’t think of non-ME Muslims very much and I still don’t associate Islam with violence in the way “That Guy!” creeps in when I think about Germany. That’s probably because, while there certainly are some vile nutters trying to justify their madness with Islam, they never seize control of minds of an entire country and push evilness to critical pressures in quite the same way. Bin Laden, to me, was just a dickhead who happened to be an Arab.
Like several others, the call to prayer. Beautiful and exotic.