Word: islamize
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...that focused each year on a single theme of acute concern. Three months after his rise to the papacy, Benedict XVI continued the tradition with a closed-door encounter in the Vatican's breezy summer residence, Castel Gandolfo. The topic chosen that first year with him as Pope was Islam, and the keynote speaker was Father Samir Khalil Samir, a soft-spoken, Cairo-born Jesuit and an expert on Muslim history and theology...
Thirteen months later, Benedict set off the most explosive moment of his papacy with a lecture at his old university in Regensburg, Germany, about faith and reason and the risk that Islamic theology makes the religion particularly prone to violence. Even as criticism of the speech spread in both Muslim and Catholic circles, Samir was among the first and most steadfast defenders of the Pope's message about Islam. Indeed, they were the same ideas Samir had been espousing for years. (See pictures from Pope Benedict XVI's first year...
...book has just been released by Ignatius Press (the longtime U.S. publisher of Ratzinger's work) that lays out in fine detail the Jesuit's vision of Islam's ancient tenets and current tendencies. Called 111 Questions on Islam, it is the translation of a book-length interview two Italian journalists conducted with Samir in 2002 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The priest says that in reviewing the material before the English-language release, he was struck by how little there was to update. "The major points that I laid out are the same today, after more than...
Samir says that beyond resolving the political conflicts in the Muslim world, there is much hard intellectual work that needs to be done to combat violence and expand freedom within the religion's ranks. "Islam is living a moment of great intellectual weakness. There is a crisis of thought," he says. "Certain things must be cleared up, ambiguities must be removed to arrive at a reading of the Koran in light of the contemporary culture based on human rights." (Read about the Pope's relationship with Islam...
...heated as some of the rank-and-file soldiers accused their superiors of failing to bring their long-standing demands to the government. The jawans started firing at the guards and soon took full control of the headquarters. "Nearly 50 people have been killed in sporadic fighting," Mohammad Quamrul Islam, State Minister for Law and Parliamentary Affairs, said on Wednesday. But after the Prime Minister's address Thursday, the rebels who had detained several hundred officers and their family members for the past two days started to release them in groups. The leaders of the ruling Awami League...