Word: pasts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Islamic countries, as, for example, Britain and France did. The U.S. has no large Islamic minority and thus, unlike the Soviet Union, has no record of bitter internal relations with Muslims. Besides (as some Muslim leaders know), Communism is far more inimical to Islam than capitalism. But in the past 30 years, the U.S. has been a chief participant in a cultural encounter that is in some ways even more traumatic to the world of Islam than colonialism: the full onslaught of secular, materialist modernization, 20th century civilization sweeping into the timeless Muslim villages. The vast apparatus of Western progress...
Islam is not inherently or inevitably antiWestern, despite the often bloody encounters of the past. Muslims have historically occupied a geographically vulnerable position, which may account for their militant touchiness. But the religion has become the vehicle for certain antiWestern, anti-American resentments and antipathies. In some ways, the specifically Islamic religious component is almost incidental: Islam is, as much as anything else, the repository for grievances, envies and hatreds that Third World have-nots harbor for the privileged of the globe. Islam gives cohesion to complaints about the injustices of the world. The Muslim tradition provides the language...
...reactions have been, all things considered, remarkably mild, the Iranian crisis has legitimized among Americans a new stereotype of the demented Muslim. Says University of Wisconsin Historian Kemal H. Karpat: "Khomeini has done more harm to the Islamic image in one month than all the propaganda of the past 15 years...
...should be possible for Americans to preserve an intelligent sympathy for the Islamic perspective without feeling vaguely guilt-stricken by the past. Anti-Americanism-the specific, sharper focus of anti-Westernism-is in some ways the Islamic world's excuse for its own failures, confusions and periodic collapses into incoherence. It is more convenient morally to blame the West than to gaze steadily at the Islamic dilemma, easier to devise revenge for the past than ideas for the future. Khomeini, with his absolutist pretensions and aggressive fantasies of jihad (holy war) against the West, demeans Islam; he gives...
...campus dissidents who still resent his long association with the past regime, he is the "dictator's henchman." To almost everybody else in South Korean politics, however, he is perhaps the most skilled and experienced civil servant in the land and an incorruptible "Mr. Clean" who has always put duty above ambition. Even opposition party leaders give him considerable credit for having kept the country calm in the traumatic aftermath of President Park Chung Hee's assassination...