Sunday, January 5, 2003
Riyadh donates 500,000 Koran copies to Afghanistan
Agence France-Presse Riyadh, January 5
Saudi Arabia's King Fahd has approved a donation of 500,000 copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, to Afghanistan, the official SPA news agency reported on Saturday.
It said the Farsi translations of the Koran were intended for "mosques, schools and universities in Afghanistan."
Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest sites and headquarters of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), often distributes copies of the Koran and funds the construction of mosques in Muslim-populated countries.
The kingdom, which applies a strict form of sharia, or Islamic law, has come under fire in US and other Western media since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States for allegedly tolerating Islamic extremism, a charge it strongly denies.
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