A mosque in a Turkmen town outside Ashgabat has been closed down by authorities because its imam refused to display President Saparmurat Niyazov\'s book on Turkmen history and traditions, the \"Rukhnama,\" beside the Koran, according to Norwegian-based Forum-18, a group that monitors religious freedom in the former Soviet Union. The town in which the incident took place was not identified, apparently out of fear of retaliation against the imam. Prior to the closure of the mosque by national security agents, a television crew had demanded to film the Koran lying next to the \"Rukhnama\" in order to show that Muslims honored both books equally. The imam refused on the grounds that such an act would violate a basic tenet of Islam. Sunni Islam is one of the two confessions allowed to function legally inTurkmenistan -- the other is Russian Orthodoxy -- but this has not prevented individual Sunni clerics and congregations from being harassed by authorities. (KyrgyzInfor)