Word: islam
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that crazy boy," but the consensus of most Middle East analysts is that Gaddafi is as crazy as a fox. To be sure, he is an erratic and irascible revolutionary, convinced of his own genius and wholly committed to spreading his own political gospel, an eccentric mix of Islam and socialism that is summed up in a three-volume work called The Green Book. But it is clear that he also has a broad streak of sanity and shrewdness. "It would be a mistake to underestimate him," says a State Department analyst. "His accomplishments are not inconsiderable, and those accomplishments...
...defense is expected to mount an attack against Sadat's regime as having been corrupt and repressive, while attempting to show that his killing was justified because he deviated from Islam. "Sadat was a dictator," said Defense Attorney Ragaie Atteya. "He closed all channels of legal recourse. He allowed no democracy or freedom of the press...
...against faction-and, increasingly, right-wing mullahs against the revolution's leader, the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Though the disputes have so far been contained, they have become worrisome enough to elicit a pointed warning from Khomeini: "Let no one doubt that if dissension continues between groups committed to Islam, it will spread nationwide and lead to armed confrontation...
...occasions, Naipaul even approaches the religious satisfaction he senses in his subjects. At the end of one long day, sitting in the courtyard of a mosque in Pakistan, he feels "that Islam had achieved community and a kind of beauty, had given people a feeling of completeness-if only the world outside could be shut out, and men could be made to forget what they knew...
Although he tries to limit his criticism to Islam's political extensions, its alarms and excursions, he begins sniping at the religion itself: here, an offhand reference to the "open-and-shut morality of Islam," there, a disparaging allusion to the devotional habits of its most fervent believers, "the five-times-a-day prayers, the unnecessary fasts." He forgets that all religious observances are "unnecessary," except to those who practice them. In his judgments of the new fundamentalism, he begins to sound as harsh as any ayatullah railing at the great satan in the West: "This political Islam...