Word: functional
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...long assumed that the growth of Islam in Britain was simply a function of immigration. But that underestimates the religion's appeal. Since the early 1980s, Bangladeshi and Pakistani imams, often associated with evangelist Islamic groups, have targeted young black inmates of British prisons. "Islam is a sort of natural religion for underdogs," says Ziauddin Sardar, a British scholar of Islam, "and that's one reason why Afro-Caribbean people have found its message very attractive." Prison authorities have allowed imams to bring literature into the jails--everything from copies of the Koran to anti-American leaflets highlighting the importance...
There's really no reason to get agitated about Britney's generic music or dreadful new film. Her primary function is not musical or cinematic but educational: to instruct girls in the complex lessons of peer envy and to get 12-year-old boys on the fast track to concupiscence. Similarly, Crossroads, whose $10 million budget was put up by Spears' label, is less a movie than a multimedia branding, an extension of the Britney franchise--a marketing tool, exactly like the singer's Pepsi spots, though without their craft, verve or production values...
...Gaza security chiefs, Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan, whose organizations bear the brunt of Israeli retaliation and whose authority is undermined by the existence of independent armed militias in their midst. To the exasperation of his gendarmes, Arafat has refrained from directly challenging the right of those militias to function, even though he periodically orders the arrest of men on Israels wanted list. And such ambiguity may signal his belief that if he plays his cards right, the current escalation of violence may work to his advantage...
Recent student demands for the increasing institutionalization of ethnic studies and queer studies at Harvard get at the heart of one of the central tensions in the idea of the university. It is possible in one sense to think of universities as institutions whose function is essentially conservative: they exist in order to preserve and transmit traditional forms of knowledge, and so maintain profound ties to the past. But at the same time, the relative autonomy of universities has allowed them to function historically as sites of critique and iconoclasm. The strange thing about universities in this sense is that...
...long assumed that the growth of Islam in Britain was simply a function of immigration. But that underestimates the religion's appeal. Since the early 1980s, Bangladeshi and Pakistani imams, often associated with evangelist Islamic groups, have targeted young black inmates of British prisons. "Islam is a sort of natural religion for underdogs," says Ziauddin Sardar, a British scholar of Islam, "and that's one reason why Afro-Caribbean people have found its message very attractive." Prison authorities have allowed imams to bring literature into the jails-everything from copies of the Koran to anti-American leaflets highlighting the importance...