Word: feudality
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Nowhere is concern over the future more manifest than in Saudi Arabia, where a feudal monarchy rules a sparsely settled (estimated pop. between 4 million and 7 million) land containing 23.2% of the world's proven oil reserves. The ruling House of Saud was badly shaken by last month's attack on the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, the holiest shrine in Islam. It was originally reported that the attacking guerrillas were religious fundamentalists who were seeking the recognition of their leader as the Muslim Mahdi or Messiah. Saudi officials later confirmed that although some of the intruders were...
...Shah sees his failure as political. Every relaxation of controls was interpreted by his enemies as a sign of weakness. "There was a strange alliance between certain Tehran merchants, a feudal pseudo-theocracy and parties of the extreme left with the backing of a religious fanaticism foreign to the principles of Islam and Iranian traditions...
...this century's worst tyrants. Probably the Shah's greatest failing was a megalomania that led him to think he could haul Iran from the camel age to the heights of industrial and military technological power in one lifetime, while retaining the political structure of an absolute feudal monarchy...
Although pre-communist Tibet closely approximated a feudal society, with the majority of the population serving as herders or farmers while the lamas, or monks, reigned as the nobility, anyone was free at any time to become a lama. The monasteries provided spirtual education and organized the administrative aspects of government, while the rest of the Tibetans lived mostly in villages, owned their own means of lievelihood, and above all, practiced Tibetan Buddhism...
...Washington some Administration officials believe that Afghanistan may become a Viet Nam-like quagmire for the Soviets. They must soon face the critical choice of disengaging or going in with thousands more troops to prop up a tottering regime that has been unable to communize an ancient feudal society with profound religious, geographic and ethnic divisions. Even with Soviet advisers on hand, the war against the rebels is not going well. The effectiveness of Kabul's largely conscripted 80,000-man army has been diminished by a string of mutinies and defections: since the beginning...