Word: africa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Yemen and Saudi Arabia, poor and backward, were nominally independent. Iran, Afghanistan and secularized Turkey, where Kemal Ataturk had disestablished Islam as his country's official religion in an effort to forge a stable and progressive nation, were free. But elsewhere?on the Indian subcontinent, in Southeast Asia, in Africa and the Pacific?millions of Muslims were under colonial rule...
Sudan. The largest nation in Africa is linked to Egypt by a defense treaty, and the two countries have moved closer toward a political and economic confederation. President Gaafar Nimeiri endorsed Sadat's visit to Jerusalem and the Camp David accords, but that stand is not universally popular. Despite a policy of reconciliation aimed at ending the intrigues and coups that have plagued the Sudan since it became independent in 1956, Nimeiri still faces opposition from the National Front led by Anwar Sadiq al-Mahdi, who advocates an Islamic state like neighboring Libya. If Sadat were to fall from power...
Islam is not a collection of individual souls but a spiritual community; its sectarian divisions, as well as the man-made barriers of race and class that Islam opposes, dissolve dramatically at the hajj. Once a pilgrimage made mostly by Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa, the hajj has become a universal and unifying ritual. For those who have taken part in it, the hajj acts as a constant testament to Islam's vision of a divine power that transcends all human frailties...
...worst misjudgments followed. As recently as 1967 the head of the Middle East Studies Association wrote a report for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare asserting that the region including the Middle East and North Africa was not a center of cultural achievement, nor was it likely to become one in the near future. The study of the region or its languages, therefore, did not constitute its own reward so far as modern culture is concerned. High school textbooks routinely produced descriptions of Islam like the following: "It was started by a wealthy businessman of Arabia called Muhammad...
...need understanding to note that repression is not principally Islamic or Oriental but a reprehensible aspect of the human phenomenon. "Islam" cannot explain everything in Africa and Asia, just as "Christianity" cannot explain Chile or South Africa. If Iranian workers, Egyptian students, Palestinian farmers resent the West or the U.S., it is as a concrete response to a specific policy injuring them as human beings. Certainly a European or American would be entitled to feel that the Islamic multitudes are underdeveloped; but he would also have to concede that underdevelopment is a relative cultural and economic judgment and not mainly...