Word: fatwas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...artist and truth-seeker. For much of the 90s, Rushdie was refused entrance into his native India; the country banned his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, followed by Sri Lanka and Pakistan, for its alleged insult against Muslims. A year later, Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa for Rushdie’s head. And though he was later issued a visa to return to India nearly a decade after his exile, Rushdie had already established a reputation as a national and literary outsider, living in hiding and tip-toeing around a troubled society he refused to accept...
...have traditionally adopted a policy of "watchful tolerance" of extremists, aimed at keeping them aboveground. From afar, that policy can look lax. Watchful tolerance makes sense only if someone is actually watching. Abu Qatada, who has been named in American court testimony as a member of al-Qaeda's fatwa committee, disappeared from his home in west London around Christmas, just before he could have been detained under new antiterrorist legislation...
...have traditionally adopted a policy of "watchful tolerance" of extremists, aimed at keeping them aboveground. From afar, that policy can look lax. Watchful tolerance makes sense only if someone is actually watching. Abu Qatada, who has been named in American court testimony as a member of al-Qaeda's fatwa committee, disappeared from his home in west London around Christmas, just before he could have been detained under new antiterrorist legislation...
...terrorism inspired by al-Qaeda needs to be handed down from the top. "They can be self-initiating at the grassroots level," says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at St. Andrews University in Scotland. "Each individual member considers himself to have the authority to issue a fatwa. If we look only for the leadership and traditional nature of authority, it's a mistake...
...power" is cross-grained, and self-subverted. The world might learn to be more alert to another kind, the arrogance of powerlessness--which may take the form of aggressive exaltation suffused with God's righteous, annihilating power. What is more arrogant than a vocabulary of "infidel," "jihad" and "fatwa"? More arrogant than the totalitarian conceit that Allah obliges "the faithful" to wage vicious holy war against the airplanes and office buildings of the ungodly? What is more arrogant, or in worse taste, than hijack heroes' sleazy dreams of paradise, with 72 virgins at the disposal of each "martyr...