A Burqa is a piece of clothing. It is worn by Muslim women. They can wear it as an outer garment. It only leaves a semi-transparent mesh in front of the woman's eyes, so she can see. The rest of the body is covered by it.
Other garments for Muslim women that cover less of their body are the hijab and the niqab. People often call the hijab and the niqab 'burqa' because they do not know the right word for those garments.
The Quran does not say that women need to cover their faces with a veil, or cover their bodies with the full-body burqa.
In France, Italy, and the Netherlands wearing a burqa in public is illegal.
Motion Picture Association of America film rating system
The Motion Picture Association of America film rating system is a system used by the MPAA. It is meant to help parents and movie-goers which movie is suitable for their families and children.
Current (since 1990) MPAA movie ratings are:
The Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses is a novel by Salman Rushdie.
Part of it was inspired by the life of Muhammad. The title refers to Satanic verses. This is one of the interpretations of the Koran. This interpretation is what Ibn Ishaq did in the oldest surviving text of the work. Some Islamic and most non-Muslim Western historians and commentators on the Qur'an have accepted this story of Muhammad's momentary acceptance of the verses although there are no known sources confirming the presence of these verses in reality in Qur'an in olden times. A common Muslim viewpoint is that the existence of the verses is just a fabrication created by non-Muslims.
The novel caused much controversy when it was published. Many Muslims felt that it contained blasphemous references. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, a Shi'a Muslim scholar, issued a fatwa that called for the death of Rushdie and claimed that it was the duty of every Muslim to obey. As a result, Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese language translator of the book was stabbed to death on 11 July 1991; Ettore Capriolo, the Italian language translator, was seriously injured in a stabbing the same month. William Nygaard, the publisher in Norway, survived an attempted assassination in Oslo in October 1993. On 14 February 2006, the Iranian state news agency reported that the fatwa will remain in place permanently.
In the United Kingdom, however, the book was praised by a lot of critics. It was a 1988 Booker Prize Finalist, eventually losing to Peter Carey's "Oscar and Lucinda".
Satanic verses
Satanic verses is a name given to a number of verses of the Qur'an. These verses became famous because they were introduced into a version of the book. In a later version, they were taken out again. Different groups of people have different views about these verses.
National Democrats (Sweden)
National Democrats () is a minor political party in Sweden. It was formed in October 2001. The chairman of the party is Marc Abramsson.
Broad Green
Broad Green is a small area with a lot of houses at the centre of West Croydon in the London Borough of Croydon, England. The area is mostly filled with a triangular green space which includes shops and large houses. The green was built at the end of the 19th century. Most of West Croydon is in an electoral ward called "Broad Green", hence Broad Green library is some distance from the traditional Broad Green area. Parts of West Thornton and Selhurst wards are also in West Croydon.
West Croydon
West Croydon might refer to:
Kanji
Kanji (漢字) is one of the three forms of Japanese writing. A kanji is an "ideogram": that is, a type of simple picture. These are made to show a word's meaning. It is a symbol of an idea such as an object, thing or quality.
Kanji ideograms (or “characters”) were taken from Chinese characters, and many changed over time. The word “kanji” means “Han characters” (i.e. “Chinese characters”).
There are two other systems used to write in Japanese. These systems are called hiragana and katakana (together they are called “kana”). They show how a word is pronounced because each character stands for a syllable (a, ka, sa, ta etc.). Each kanji could also be written in kana, indeed they are in children’s books or books for foreigners learning Japanese.
Japanese can have many homophones for one pronunciation, e.g. "kami" can mean “god”, “hair”, "paper", or "upper stream". Since each words is made of the same syllables, they are written using the same kana (かみ in hiragana and カミ in katakana), but since they all have very different meanings, the kanji character for each word is quite different. The kanji for "god" is 神, the kanji for "hair" is 髪, the kanji for "paper" is 紙, and the kanji for "upper stream" is 上. However, each kanji character can have several different pronunciations, according to which meaning (which “reading”) is intended.
Kanji was originally written to look like what it means, thus the Japanese symbol for mouth is 口 (which is said as "kuchi"), and looks like a mouth. Another word, 山 (said as "yama") means mountain. The Japanese have for many words. Many can be shown with just one kanji, but sometimes two kanji characters are combined to make new words, such as 山口 ("yamaguchi"), "mountain-mouth", meaning a cave. (It is also a surname and the name of a prefecture).
Kanji is often combined with hiragana to show the grammatical meaning of the word. In English this would be done with endings (e.g. “act” (the verb), “action” (the noun) etc.)
Most kanji characters can be pronounced at least two different ways according to whether the word is a native Japanese word (this is called the “kun” reading, or “kun-yomi”), or whether it came from Chinese (this called the “on” reading or “on-yomi”). Kanji that stand alone usually have kun-yomi, while kanji compound words usually have on-yomi. For example, 山 on its own is "yama" (the Japanese word for “mountain”). When it is combined with another word or name, it is pronounced "san" e.g. “Fuji-san” (Mount Fuji).
However, there are many exceptions to these patterns. For example, some native Japanese words with two or more kanji (usually proper nouns) use their kanji's kun-yomi, like 山口, which is pronounced "yama-guchi", even though the on-yomi for the kanji would be "san" and "kō" in that order. Sometimes, kanji only have on-yomi and have no kun-yomi. For example, the kanji 毒, which means "poison", only has the on-yomi "doku". Sometimes, compound words mix on-yomi and kun-yomi together. For example, the word 金色, which means "golden", is pronounced "kin-iro", in which the first kanji uses its on-yomi, and the second-kanji uses its kun-yomi. Sometimes, the kanji in certain compound words may not even use their kanji readings at all, but are used only to show the word's meaning. For example, the word 煙草 is pronounced "tabako", which means "tobacco" in English. This word was borrowed from Portuguese, and while the pronunciation of the word does not match either kanji, the meaning of the kanji are "smoke" and "grass" in that order, hinting at the word's meaning. There are even some words whose kanji can be used to only show a word's pronunciation and not its meaning. These are called ateji. For example, the word 亜米利加, which means "America", is pronounced "Amerika", but none of the kanji meanings have any obvious connection to America. Usually, however, words of the last kind are usually written in only katakana these days, though sometimes words like "sushi" still written in ateji, like 寿司, because Chinese tourists will recognize the ateji more easily, since the word is written the same way in Chinese.
Kanji characters are classed on the basis of how many brush strokes they are made of. The simplest kanji have one stroke and the most complex may have up to 30 strokes.