Word: islamic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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 indeed religious zealots, the majority were politically motivated guerrillas who were trying to destabilize...
...party boycotted the referendum on the theocratic constitution, and it refused to surrender the arsenal it had built up during its long struggle against the Shah. Persecuted by Khomeini forces, the Mujahedin nevertheless feel they are spiritually akin. Says a party leader: "The struggle is between two kinds of Islam, two kinds of Shi'ism, not them...
Muslims have aggressively sought the material wonders of the West, yet are ambivalent in their souls. Berque locates the central dilemma of Islam: If Islam is ever to become an economic and political competitor of capitalism and Marxism, it must embrace a progress that may forever weaken its ethical and spiritual structures, just as other religions have been drained by the secularization of the Western world. So far, Islam has not proved itself a vehicle of social change, a program to confront the modern world...
...this encounter of East and West, the rage on either side has a way of spiraling up in a murderous double helix: the anger of the Muslims may feed on itself, and the countering anger of the West may further ignite the anger of Islam. So great is the mutual incomprehension that international relations degenerate rapidly to the chaotic psychology of the mob. Although U.S. reactions have been, all things considered, remarkably mild, the Iranian crisis has legitimized among Americans a new stereotype of the demented Muslim. Says University of Wisconsin Historian Kemal H. Karpat: "Khomeini has done more harm...
...should be possible for Americans to preserve an intelligent sympathy for the Islamic perspective without feeling vaguely guilt-stricken by the past. Anti-Americanism-the specific, sharper focus of anti-Westernism-is in some ways the Islamic world's excuse for its own failures, confusions and periodic collapses into incoherence. It is more convenient morally to blame the West than to gaze steadily at the Islamic dilemma, easier to devise revenge for the past than ideas for the future. Khomeini, with his absolutist pretensions and aggressive fantasies of jihad (holy war) against the West, demeans Islam; he gives...