Word: islamics
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...have been written long before. The ubiquitous references to terrorism, however, underscore an important point. As a Muslim, a political leader and later a victim, Bhutto was uniquely poised to present an impassioned argument: namely, that the war we should all be worrying about is not that between Islam and the West, but between moderate and fundamentalist Islam...
...original concept of jihad, meaning a personal struggle "to follow the right path," had been appropriated for the purposes of inspiring resistance to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. She puts the treatment of women as described in the Koran into context, demonstrating how, at the time of Islam's founding, such policies were revolutionary and far more progressive than those practiced by Christian and Jewish societies. Islam's problems, she contends, only began with the calcification of its progressive traditions in the 15th century, when the religion was reduced to a tool to consolidate the power of the Ottoman...
...call for a resurrection of ijtihad - the Islamic legal tradition of critical thinking - is a yearning for a return to the progressive origins of her religion. Were she alive at the time of publication, this alone would have seen her charged with blasphemy in fundamentalist circles, but if ever the Koran's message of tolerance bears repeating, it is now. Bhutto's criticism of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory is also pertinent. Huntington posited, in a 1993 essay in the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations magazine Foreign Affairs, that conflict between Islam and the West was inevitable. Bhutto...
...Pakistan, as well as greater economic investment, better education and a "reconciliation corps" of cultural ambassadors modeled after the American Peace Corps program. While no one will deny the importance of such moves, they fail to tackle the fundamental schism of which she writes. Successful ambassadors of moderate Islam can be found all over the world, yet few seem able to stand up to extremism with any kind of vigor...
...honest governance. As her posthumous words show, the tragedy of Bhutto's death is not so much in the loss of a great leader for Pakistan - her record as Prime Minister is hardly to be emulated - but in the silencing of a passionate advocate of moderate, contemporary Islam...