The flag of the Organization of the Islamic Conference coordinates several of the central symbols of Islam, including the color green, the Red Crescent on a white disk, and the words “God is great” (Allahu akbar) in Arabic calligraphy. The colors white and black also have symbolic meaning in Islam. White symbolizes purity and peace, and many Muslims wear white when attending Friday prayers, or while performing the sacred rites of pilgrimage. Devout Iranian Shi’i women wear black chador, and the Iranian ayatollahs wear black cloaks. The male sayyid, or descendants of the Prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatima and son-in-law Ali, wear black turbans. Others associate the color green with a hadith attributed to Muhammad, which says that “Three things of this world are acceptable: water, greenery, and a beautiful face.” Still others find special status attributed to the color green in the Quran, which says in surah 18:31 that in paradise, the blessed will wear garments of green silk. Covers of green silk cover the graves of Sufi saints, and Qurans are bound in green. Some believe that the color green was the color of Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraysh, while others believe that green was the Prophet’s favorite color, and that he always wore a green turban.

Although the origins of this are obscure, by the time of the Crusades, the European Crusaders avoided using the color green in their coats of arms so that they would not be mistaken for Muslims during battle. The Red Cross and the Red Crescent are placed on humanitarian vehicles and buildings during wartime to protect them from military attack. The absence of representations of human or divine figures in mosques, monuments, and other public buildings is in striking contrast to the decorative arts of other religious traditions, such as Christianity and Hinduism. Together the Koran and the Traditions, along with consensus and analogy, make up the sharia, the rules and regulations that govern the day-to-day lives of Muslims. His sayings and deeds were remembered by his associates and preserved in the Traditions, known in Arabic as hadith. The primacy of Arabic as the language of God’s revelation has also helped to preserve the purity of the Arabic language, for Muslims constantly call to mind the noble and magnificent words and phrases of the Koran. The Traditions came to be considered second in authority to the Koran and also help explain and elaborate the circumstances under which obscure passages in the Koran were revealed.

820) came to consider the sunna, or custom of the Prophet, the second most important root of Islamic jurisprudence after the Koran. Although the Arabic language has evolved over the fourteen centuries since the Koran was revealed, it has not changed as much as English has changed in the six centuries since the time of Chaucer. Having learned to use Arabic as the language of religion, the new converts also used it as a language of literature, science, commerce and social intercourse. Finally, the primacy of the Arabic language has encouraged the spread and use of the Arabic script, which is known and used from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific to render a variety of languages, including Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, Pashto, Kashmiri, Urdu, Sindhi, Ottoman Turkish, Chaghatay, and Malay. The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has made a habit of using special effects to make actors look younger in flashback scenes, as seen with Michael Douglass in the original Ant-Man, Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America: Civil War, and Kurt Russell in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.

Ceremonies and observances honoring or appealing to their deities were interwoven throughout the year, and their rulers were seen as important intermediaries to the gods. World War I was fought between the Allies and the Central Powers. A few years later, during the Russo-Turkish war of 1876-1878, the Ottoman Empire replaced the Red Cross with a Red Crescent, fearing that the cross would alienate Turkish Muslim soldiers. The International Committee of the Red Cross secured Ottoman agreement that it would respect the sanctity of the emblem of the Red Cross, and Russian agreement that it would respect the sanctity of the Red Crescent. When the Ottoman Turks conquered the Byzantine Empire and captured its capital city Constantinople in the mid-15th century, the Ottoman Empire adopted the city’s existing flag and symbol of crescent moon and star as its own. In the modern world, a number of Islamic nations have a version of the crescent moon and star on their flags, including Algeria, Malaysia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, and Turkey.