Word: islamize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Islam is frequently stereotyped as unmitigatedly harsh in its code of law, intolerant of other religions, repressive toward women and incompatible with progress. Salem Azzam, Saudi secretary-general of the Islamic Council of Europe, feels that the present resurgence is considered "retrograde and reactionary" because Westerners confuse what is happening in Islam with a revival of Christian fundamentalism. "Not only is this a baseless and arrogant assumption," says Azzam, but it is tantamount to "a return to colonialism?indirect but of a more profound type." Defenders of the faith further argue that Islam is not monolithic, that it is compatible...
Muslims can survive well enough as minorities, as they do in Britain, for example, where a huge new mosque facing Regent's Park in London stands as a symbol of a growing community, now a million strong. Yet Islam itself has had a dynamic manifest destiny; in a sense, it is a political faith with a yearning for expansion. Less than a hundred years after the death of Muhammad in A.D. 632, his followers had burst out of the Arabian desert to conquer and create an empire whose glories were to shine for a thousand years. A cavalry...
...Later Islam fought successfully to preserve its ideological integrity in the face of Mongol invaders, Western Crusaders and, more recently, Western imperialists. But by the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire had been dismembered and large portions of it brought under the domination of the colonizing nations of Christian Europe. European rule demonstrated how important it was for Islam to exercise temporal as well as spiritual power. At its nadir, in all the Arab world, only Yemen and Saudi Arabia, poor and backward, were nominally independent. Iran, Afghanistan and secularized Turkey, where Kemal Ataturk had disestablished Islam...
...number of recent events have combined to focus Western attention on Islam: the resurgence of the faith in African politics, the oil wealth of the Arabian peninsula, the revolution in Iran. But many Muslims feel, with some justice, that this belated interest in their world and their faith has resulted in hostile propaganda rather than empathy and understanding...
...Islam and Government. Muhammad's teachings are fundamentally democratic, since they proclaim the equality of all men before God. In practice, Islamic nations, like other countries, have both liberals and conservatives, democrats and dictators. The Islamic socialists of Iraq and Libya?not to mention Iranian moderates who want to see a parliamentary democracy established by their new constitution?look with disdain on a semifeudal monarchy like Saudi Arabia. Says Hussein Bani-Assadi, son-in-law of Iran's Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan: "Ideologically, this revolution cannot support systems like Saudi Arabia's. Islam has no kings." The Saudis answer that...