Word: scholares
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Reams have been written on the differences between Islamic and Western societies, but for sheer pithiness, it's hard to beat a quip by my former colleague, a Pakistani scholar of Islamic studies. I'd strolled into his office one day to find him on the floor, at prayer. I left, shutting his door, mortified. Later, he cheerfully batted my apologies away. "That's the big difference between us," he shrugged. "You Westerners make love in public and pray in private. We Muslims do exactly the reverse...
...ushered in to brief the assembled leaders on trends in energy supply, patterns of urbanization or intellectual-property rights. The discussion can last until the evening, when Hu sums things up, though he reportedly rarely expresses his own opinion. "It's amazing," says Alice Lyman Miller, a China scholar at Stanford University and editor of China Leadership Monitor, "the thought of the entire Politburo sitting around and listening to academics for hours...
...does not have everything his way. Cheng Li, a China scholar and professor of government at Hamilton College, identifies two party factions, which he calls the populists, led by Hu and his allies, and the élitists, made up of so-called princelings--children of top officials--and supporters of former President Jiang Zemin. Many in the latter camp have close ties to Shanghai, China's commercial capital. While both groups share the goal of keeping the party (and themselves) in power, Li argues that they represent "two starkly different sociopolitical and geographical constituencies," with the élitists speaking...
...years after his 10-year term as Israel's chief rabbi, Avraham Shapira was considered a sage by the religious right. Yet for many Israelis, the Talmudic scholar was a hard-line zealot whose theology--that Israel was land given by God to the Jews--anchored the settlers' movement and helped bring about the assassination of peace advocate Yitzhak Rabin. In 2005, despite his call for soldiers to disobey orders to evacuate disputed land or else risk disaster, the "disengagement" succeeded with little violence...
...only serious obstacle could be the same thing that helped Blanco edge out her upstart opponent in 2003 - the impression that Jindal is an overachieving bureaucrat who has little empathy for the poor in a largely poor state. A Rhodes scholar whose parents arrived in the U.S. from India just months before he was born, Jindal was selected to run the state's Department of Health and Hospitals by Blanco's predecessor, two-term Republican Mike Foster, at the ripe old age of 24. The Baton Rouge native guided the bloated department through a rough period of cutbacks, both...