Word: secularization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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According to French press reports of interviews with his mother, Moussaoui led a secular childhood near the southern city of Narbonne. In 1990, however, the arrival of a female cousin--a former student of the Islamic Brotherhood in Rabat--marked the change in his life that would ultimately lead him to his U.S. jail cell. Vexed at the wild ways of her son and unhappy about her niece's fundamentalist opinions, Moussaoui's mother invited the pair to leave--which they did, eventually settling down in Montpellier. There, the young woman began introducing her cousin to acquaintances in the Islamic...
...drawn to bin Laden are said to make up a 1,000-strong brigade fighting as part of training on the front line in the Taliban's ongoing war with the Northern Alliance. The soldiers are not just Arab militants from dozens of Middle Eastern countries aspiring to change secular regimes into Taliban-style states but are revolutionaries from Uzbekistan and Uighur separatists from China as well. U.S. officials believe that bin Laden masterminded the Sept. 9 assassination of the leading military commander of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Taliban's chief rival for national power. In return...
...Koran, this killing violates some of its most sacred precepts. But during the 20th century, the militant form of piety often known as fundamentalism erupted in every major religion as a rebellion against modernity. Every fundamentalist movement I have studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced that liberal, secular society is determined to wipe out religion. Fighting, as they imagine, a battle for survival, fundamentalists often feel justified in ignoring the more compassionate principles of their faith. But in amplifying the more aggressive passages that exist in all our scriptures, they distort the tradition...
Animosity toward the U.S. in the Middle East can be plotted through concentric circles. In the white-hot core are violent ideologues like bin Laden and their acolytes. Then come Arab radicals, including both Islamic fundamentalists and secular nationalists, who are desperate and angry enough to have danced in the streets upon hearing the news of Sept. 11. But the distaste also extends to large numbers of temperate Arabs who were quietly pleased to see American arrogance taken down a notch--business people and family people who smiled and sent messages of congratulations to one another when the Twin Towers...
...demonic Taliban caricature. We are the bin Ladenites' worst nightmare. We are rich. We swagger. We enjoy ourselves. From Wall Street to the media conglomerates of Midtown to the vast immigrant neighborhoods in all the boroughs, we embody the power and the glory of globalization. We are a profoundly secular city; nowhere else in America are people freer to worship their own gods or to be godless. No place outside Israel has more Jews. Blasphemy is common, irreverence is obligatory. Art is at least as important as religion. Eccentric ideas and profane entertainment flourish. Women do just as they please...