Word: group
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...renewed interest in Islam is most pronounced among the young. A prominent judge in Algiers is surprised to discover that five times a day his 14-year-old son joins a group of friends at a mosque for prayer. In Tunisia, whose President Habib Bourguiba has promoted equal rights for women, including divorce and abortion, students belonging to the militant Muslim Brothers wage war on "sin and evil" by painting over sexually suggestive cinema billboards and chalking quotations from the Koran on city walls. At Cairo University (enrollment: 130,000), hundreds of female Egyptian students have donned the veil...
...expert in the area, "Islam has proved to be the major unifying theme for the rebels." Many of them have moved to armed camps in Pakistan. Taraki has tried to highlight his own credentials as a good Muslim; recently the government publicized a letter of support from a group of Soviet Muslims across the border. But a number of mullahs have been arrested for speaking out against the government in the mosques, and some Iranian ayatullahs have called for support for the Afghan rebels...
Some observers believe that the Muslims have more freedom than any other religious group in the Soviet Union to practice their faith. The mosques are full on Fridays and holy days, and small delegations have been allowed to leave the country to take part in the hajj. Muslim leaders, the muftis, have apparently worked out a kind of modus vivendi with the government; in exchange for being allowed to practice their religion they often support the government on major policy questions. Any kind of Islamic resistance to the Soviet system would probably emerge from a large network of Sufi brotherhoods...
...Sufism is considered suspect by fundamentalist Muslims like the puritanical Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, because it allows for the veneration of awliya-roughly the equivalent of Christianity's saints. Islam also has spawned a number of heretical offshoots. One is the Alawi sect, a Shi'ite minority group to which most of Syria's leaders belong. The Alawis believe in the transmigration of souls and a kind of trinity in which 'Ali is Allah incarnate. Another is the secretive Druze sect of Israel, Lebanon and Syria, which split away from Islam in the 11th century. America...
...early '80s. The first A310s are due to begin flying in 1983 for Swissair, which last month signed an order for ten planes. That was a key deal because Swissair has depended heavily on U.S. planes in the past, and Switzerland is not a member of the Airbus group or of the Common Market, and thus was under no visible pressure to buy European...