Word: religion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...providing a new context for the renaissance of Islamic identity and perhaps of Islam itself." Islam makes no distinction between the secular and the religious. The Moslem doctrine of jihad (holy war) has an immediate, literal significance. As the Vatican's guidelines on Islam observe, "Islam is a religion, yet it is also inextricably bound up with the notion of community, culture and civilization...
...nots-with the line drawn between the religious communities. But again, as in Ireland, the religious identifications have served as a deeply embittering factor. Observes Ralph Potter, professor of ethics at Harvard Divinity School: "We pick out that factor which puts most things into immediate order for us. Where religion satisfactorily encompasses the whole logic, it becomes the prime identifier. At the same time, that shorthand also traps people into a primarily religious identity...
Other conflicts involve longstanding secular grievances. They are perhaps primarily not religious so much as they are exertions for recognition and even survival. Yet the element of religion gives all these wars an odd phosphorescence. What is important is usually not a deep spiritual faith but rather an intense loyalty to the religious community. The phenomenon has something to do with a clinging to identity, especially in such enclaves as Northern Ireland and Lebanon, whose national identities are fractured and cannot in themselves command patriotic followings. One of Egypt's leading intellectuals, Political Scientist Magdi Wahba, sees signs everywhere...
...religious wars tend to be extra furious. When people fight over territory for economic advantage, they reach the point where the battle isn't worth the cost and so compromise. When the cause is religious, compromise and conciliation seem to be evil." Possibly the transcendent nature of both religion and war encourages an especially lethal kind of fanaticism. As Shinn says, "War is one of the few occasions when people are asked to give of themselves in a cause that is greater than self. People are asked to forget self - and human nature rises and falls to the occasion...
...case, men who have fought in the name of religion and journalists who have observed them detect an eerie difference from more conventional warfare - a note of retribution and atonement, a zealotry that exists outside time and immediate circumstances, an implacability that is directed from within. The fury of fighting in Lebanon suggests as much. That, of course, is a definition of faith - but saintliness has its dark, bloody side...