Word: ibn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ruthless, wrathful, foreign, purely pagan people": so one medieval Irish text described the Vikings. "They are the dirtiest of God's creatures," sniffed Arab Historian Ibn Fadlan, who had seen and smelled a Viking encampment on the banks of the Volga in the 10th century, "and they do not wash themselves after sex." Thus, as Hilaire Belloc sardonically put it in our own century...
...heart of Saudi Arabia's problem is the unfinished task of creating a modern state out of a cluster of Bedouin tribes that were unified by Abdul Aziz (Ibn Saud) under the present kingdom in 1932. The royal leadership is worried by the growing polarization of Saudi society; thousands of young Saudis return from the West every year with university degrees, only to chafe under a puritanical, semifeudal system designed to appease the disparate desert tribes. "When the graduates come back, they are given nice jobs with plenty of money," remarks one educated Saudi. "But how long they will...