Word: pious
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...teachers, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who was a major figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that has played a large role in the resurgence of Islamic religiosity. Bin Laden, who like most Saudis is a member of the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, had been pious from childhood, but his encounter with Azzam seemed to deepen his faith. What's more, through Azzam he became steeped not in the then popular ideology of pan-Arabism, which stresses the unity of all Arabs, but in a more ambitious pan-Islamicism, which reaches out to all the world...
...world free of racial hatred and bias remains only half fulfilled." Robinson hoped the conference would "shape and embody the spirit of the new century, based on [the] shared conviction that we are all members of the human family." But for such sentiments to be more than pious cant, those who went to Durban had to travel in a spirit of generosity, reconciliation and compromise...
...exhibition's auto-eroticism sector does, however, include one triumphal fetish - Larry Fuente's "Derby Racer, 1975." Like some pious Latino decorating a shrine, Fuente glorified a convertible jalopy with an undulating crust of shards, beads, mirror fragments and pearly gewgaws. It is still a convincing, near folk object - an automotive equivalent, perhaps, to Simon Rodia's towers in the Watts neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles...
...centuries, each of the West's great faiths has coveted the city; each alternately has controlled it, and each has constructed around it a separate sacred history. As the myths have collided, the result has been a play of extremes: physical splendor alternating with utter destruction; moments of pious exultation oscillating with the grossest carnage. Or sometimes carnage and exultation at once. "Men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins," wrote an 11th century Crusader fresh from a massacre of Muslims on the Temple Mount. He added, "Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment...
...name Taliban means "seekers of knowledge." Since they seized control of most of Afghanistan in 1996, the clique of fundamentalist zealots who go by that name have eliminated virtually all human rights within their reach. Their proscriptions run from the hideous to the farcically pious--though farce itself, in today's Afghanistan, can and does kill. At one extreme, most girls are denied any education: Afghanistan is the most misogynistic country in the world. At another, a man who trims his beard commits a jailable crime...