Word: seculare
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...crucial legislation. This time the splinter parties got only 24 seats as voters rallied to either Labor or Likud. In the final analysis, though, it was Labor that demonstrated the most significant gains. The party managed to overcome deep divisions of its own to maintain its following among the secular-minded professional and urban population, and showed impressive strength (up to 30% in some places) among Israel's Arab citizens, largely because of a belief that Labor is more concerned than Likud for their day-to-day welfare...
...ruling clergy is determined to dash all hopes of combining modernism with Islam in Iran, which had been the idealistic and forlorn plan of Banisadr. For the fundamentalists, the Paris-educated economist who became President represented a suspiciously Western, secular influence in the revolutionary government. It made no difference that his father, the late Ayatullah Seyed Nasrollah Banisadr, had been an Islamic leader revered by Khomeini. Supporting the suspicions about the deposed President, Khomeini declared last week, "Banisadr and his ilk are Muslims, but their Islam somehow leaves room for U.S. domination." He also charged that Banisadr had urged...
Then there is the refusal to submit to external schemes or narratives. The Gates of Hell cannot be read as clearly as a Renaissance fresco or a medieval Last Judgment. It is less about divine doom than the condition of secular despair, mauvaise foi, the unrooting of the self-a vast and almost illegibly complex dirge that touches now and then on the original imagery of the Inferno but does not, in any strict sense, illustrate it. Yet its formal properties-the sudden shifts of scale, the aggressive protrusions of figures from the bronze skin, the sense of strain...
...easier to reconcile Israel's Ashkenazim and Sephardim than to bridge the chasm between the country's powerful Orthodox Jews and those who hew to more liberal religious views, or simply to secular values. The state is secular, but in personal matters the strict judgments of the Orthodox Rabbinates rule, a hangover from the years when the British, following Ottoman Empire custom, left such powers in the hands of local religious leaders. Thus marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption-all are under the jurisdiction of the religious, not civil, courts. The 250,000 Orthodox Jews wield a political clout...
...been scrapped because the best site was near an Orthodox community -and its inhabitants abhor Sabbath soccer. A bypass has been built around the Kiryat Zanz district in the northern part of the city to circumvent a longstanding, almost ritual, conflict: violent clashes that erupt almost every Saturday between secular neighborhood bands and militant vigilantes, who are so strictly Orthodox that they do not allow cars to drive on their streets on the Sabbath...