Word: fatwas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...martyrdom lies beyond understanding; we recoil from it. Of all the pronouncements of Osama bin Laden, none baffles Westerners, shaped (as they suppose) by rationality and the Enlightenment, as much as his celebration of the martyr's sacrifice. We puzzle over bin Laden's apparent conviction, in a 1996 fatwa, that at the moment of death, a martyr will feel no more pain than if he were being pinched. We giggle nervously at the rewards bin Laden says a martyr will receive in paradise--marriage to 72 virgins, divine intercession on behalf of 70 relatives...
...sentence. The Jordanian royal family has made the rare move of condemning honor killings, but the government, fearful of offending conservatives, has not put its weight behind a proposal to repeal laws that grant leniency for killers. Jordan's Islamic Action Front, a powerful political party, has issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, saying the proposal would "destroy our Islamic, social and family values by stripping men of their humanity when they surprise their wives or female relatives committing adultery...
...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...
...sentence. The Jordanian royal family has made the rare move of condemning honor killings, but the government, fearful of offending conservatives, has not put its weight behind a proposal to repeal laws that grant leniency for killers. Jordan's Islamic Action Front, a powerful political party, has issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, saying the proposal would "destroy our Islamic, social and family values by stripping men of their humanity when they surprise their wives or female relatives committing adultery...
...portrait painted of Salim in the embassy-bombing trial is of a powerful and malignant personality. Prosecutors described Salim (whose alias was Abu Hajer al Iraqi) not only as one of Osama bin Laden's council of advisers, the Shura, but also as a key member of the fatwa committee, which helped formulate the theological justification for al-Qaeda's actions. Salim derived his prestige from being a religious scholar who has memorized the Koran, and he would alternate with bin Laden in delivering regular sermons to the al-Qaeda faithful. The government's star witness, a former...