The Islamic word baraka is derived from the word meaning knee, hence from the rapture of a worshiper on his knees before his deity, and it can be applied to almost anything to indicate a kind of beauty and virtue. As Poet Robert Graves explained it last week to the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters in Manhattan, a battered brass cooking pot can have baraka, but not a new spun-aluminum one; an old pair of trousers may have it, or a poem, or a wonderful one-hoss shay.
The King James Bible...
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