Word: muslim
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Beirut was already an international synonym for homegrown anarchy when it added hostage taking as a cottage industry. Between 1984 and 1992, dozens of Westerners became part of the inventory. Most were property of various militias with ties to Hizballah, the Shi'ite Muslim Party of God backed by Iran...
Afghanistan was a powerful catalyst in activating fundamentalist Muslim youth, inspiring if not actually training many militants. During the 1980s, thousands of volunteers from 50 countries rallied to the rebel mujahedin. Most of them worked for relief organizations or in hospitals and schools. A few thousand actually went into the field to fight. Some returned home to cause serious trouble for their rulers. Several of those arrested in the World Trade Center bombing were veterans of the Afghan campaign. The now imprisoned Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman made at least three trips to Afghanistan during...
During the war in Afghanistan, two main organizations provided a pipeline for volunteers, funding and relief workers. One was the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, and the other was the World Muslim League, supported by Saudi Arabia. Linked to them were smaller groups of activists and influential individuals, including charismatic recruiter Abdullah Azzam, a Jordanian-born Palestinian who brought in hundreds of zealous volunteers, and his New York-based agent, Mustafa Shalabi, who ran the Alkifar Refugee Center in Brooklyn, known as "the Jihad office." Both Azzam and Shalabi were murdered in 1991. Another key figure was Saudi...
...religious decree, ordering Sadat's murder, but was acquitted. The assassination of the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel settled nothing. The clash between Islamic religious and political authority is more widespread and in some places more threatening now than it was then. Today every secular Muslim government from North Africa to the Persian Gulf faces a challenge from radical fundamentalists. Their accusation is not just that political leaders have strayed from the holy law of the Koran but that they have done so without solving the chronic unemployment, corruption and hopelessness that plague the Arab world...
...delights of Armstrong's book is her exploration of some relatively unfamiliar pathways to God. She is much taken with a Muslim movement devoted to Falsafah (roughly, philosophy) that emerged in the 9th and 10th centuries. Its advocates, known as Faylasufs, believed that the God of Greek philosophy was identical to Islam's. "Instead of seeing God as a mystery," Armstrong writes, "the Faylasufs believed he was reason itself." But they also acknowledged the chaos and disorder of the universe and recognized that their quest for ultimate meaning was a difficult one. Indirectly, the Faylasufs influenced such medieval thinkers...