Allah O Akbar

"Allah O Akbar" begins the call to prayer that resonates from minarets in towns and villages from Sinkiang to Morocco, from Paris to Timbuktu. Wherever in the world you are, the message is the same: "God is Great". It is also, however, the cry of fundamentalists throughout the lands of the faithful. Abbas, a member of the prestigious agency Magnum, spent seven years travelling through the Islamic world taking the photographs for this book. As a photojournalist he has covered major political events in the Third World, including wars and revolutions, and is driven by a desire to understand and expose the internal strains pulling within Muslim societies, Abbas takes a "telling" picture, and the immediacy and subtlety of the photographic images create a constant visual stimulus.