The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (120 page)

 
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(Arab.). The perjurer or false accuser, a figure in Islamic
eschatology
, the ‘
anti-Christ
’ whose wiles and deceptions ‘cover’ (a root meaning) and resist the truth. He is not mentioned in the
Qur’
n
. By some he is identified with
al Shaytan
al-Raj
m, ‘the accursed Satan’, whom pilgrims on the
ajj
repudiate by hurling stones against his ‘pillar’ outside
Mecca
.

 
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(Heb, ‘It is our duty to praise’). Prayer now recited at the end of the prayerbook services. In the
Ashkenazi
liturgy
, it is customary to prostrate oneself during the recital of the Aleinu on
Rosh
ha-Shanah and
Yom Kippur
. It begins, ‘It is our duty to praise the Lord of all things, to ascribe greatness to the Creator, that he has not made us like the nations of other lands, nor placed us like the other families of earth’.

 
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Alexandria
.

City in Egypt, notable in Christian tradition (stemming, traditionally, from
St Mark
) for its catechetical school in the 2nd and 3rd cents. and in the 4th and 5th cents. especially for the ‘Alexandrian theology’ represented by
Origen
,
Athanasius
, and
Cyril
.

 
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