Word: religion
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...should be a mother, father, children," says the unemployed construction worker and father of two. He says Islam is a regular part of his life, even as he becomes more and more Catalan: "It helps to preserve the traditions. It is not a good thing if you lose roots. Religion remains a constant through the changes of history...
...Bhutto treats the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as personal affront, one that "twisted the values of a great and noble religion and potentially set the hopes and dreams of a better life for Muslims back a generation." Muslims, she says, "became [al-Qaeda's] victims too." For the first half of the book, she attempts to reclaim the religion from the fundamentalists who would use it for political advantage, explaining how the original concept of jihad, meaning a personal struggle "to follow the right path," had been appropriated for the purposes of inspiring resistance to the 1979 Soviet...
...call for a resurrection of ijtihad - the Islamic legal tradition of critical thinking - is a yearning for a return to the progressive origins of her religion. Were she alive at the time of publication, this alone would have seen her charged with blasphemy in fundamentalist circles, but if ever the Koran's message of tolerance bears repeating, it is now. Bhutto's criticism of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory is also pertinent. Huntington posited, in a 1993 essay in the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations magazine Foreign Affairs, that conflict between Islam and the West was inevitable. Bhutto...
...Those passages, at least, are over quickly, and now that Bhutto has herself been slain by extremists, one hopes that she can be remembered for her honest effort to understand and influence the future direction of her religion, if not for her honest governance. As her posthumous words show, the tragedy of Bhutto's death is not so much in the loss of a great leader for Pakistan - her record as Prime Minister is hardly to be emulated - but in the silencing of a passionate advocate of moderate, contemporary Islam...
...report, released today by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is the first selection of data from a 35,000- person poll called the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Says Pew Forum director Luis Lugo, Americans "not only change jobs, change where they live, and change spouses, but they change religions too. We totally knew it was happening, but this survey enabled us to document it clearly...