Word: lites
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...give the same answer - "everything has its place," which I take to mean that religion can be fun and dating acceptable, both worthy of inclusion in their lives. This kind of casual religious identity is a new phenomenon in Iran. For my parents' generation, there was no such Islam Lite. Back then, Iranians were either traditionally religious or whiskey-drinking secularites; fusion of the two lifestyles seemed virtually impossible. The same goes for Iranians of my generation, who grew up during the Iran-Iraq War, years when young people stuck close to their families and ended up resembling them...
...part-time-practicing young Muslim is one of the most intriguing and unworkable things ever created by the Islamic regime. It reveals both the success of the regime's Islamic indoctrination campaign, but also its failure to keep out global culture and to control public space. The Muslim Lite generation is what happens at the meeting point between a repressive theocratic state and Western modernity. When I observe these kids in the throes of young adulthood, their identities seem schizophrenic, irreconcilable. But as I watch how my friends' children grow up, being this way seems the most natural thing...
...these dissonant influences into your life, and found it wasn't so difficult to be many things at once. That's how kids from religious families ended up more independent and modern, and how kids from Westernized families worked religion into their lives. Everyone became Muslim Lite...
...being Muslim Lite, for all its fluidity, is ultimately messy. At its heart, there lies a tremendous confusion about values. When you're running around playing in a band and keeping up your religious hobbies on the side, this is not immediately obvious. Usually Muslim Lite claims its victims around marriage age, when young people discover their parents haven't changed at all, and that tough choices must be made. A family friend realized this when he found his parents refused to consider his girlfriend a suitable marriage candidate. Though polite and educated, to them, she was loose and tainted...
...fourth of eight children in a large house in Lorraine. Her father's regime was a strict one (the family intoned Gregorian chants on Sundays). Royal attended a Catholic boarding school and the University of Nancy before attaining the classical educational polish of the French political élite: a degree from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and another from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), where her class included the current Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, and her partner, Socialist Party secretary François Hollande. She met Hollande there in 1978 and had their first child...