Word: secularizing
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...visitors, which is a tragedy, for Syria makes the rest of the world's raciest lingerie seem staid by comparison. "In Syria lingerie is manufactured by very conservative religious families for a religiously conservative clientele," says Halasa. Where frank sexuality and skimpy outerwear are commonplace, such as in the secular West, there is no need to "manufacture lingerie as racy and inventive as this," she theorizes...
...miles from the Iranian border. U.S. Navy SEALs have trained teams to guard the Caspian's underwater pipelines, and U.S. Customs agents have overseen border and airport security systems. With Baku just a couple of hours' drive from Iran, "Azerbaijan could be the world's only secular country with a Shi'ite majority," says the State Department official...
Azerbaijan might be secular, but it is hardly democratic. Local elections in 2005 and the presidential vote that brought Ilham Aliyev to power in 2003 were both flawed, according to U.N. and American election observers. A free press? Hardly. One afternoon in December, TIME's team was taken to a police station near Baku and questioned for three hours about our activities. In Baku, the late former President's face peers down from billboards, and a huge statue of him stands in one of the many Heydar Aliyev parks. On the third anniversary of Aliyev's death, in December, government...
...Iraq in 1969, at 32, he nationalized the country's oil industry and used the revenues to launch a massive program to modernize the country's infrastructure: roads, bridges, factories, universities, hospitals. By the late 1970s, Iraq was the Middle East's most progressive state--rich, modern and thoroughly secular. A Baghdad political scientist described Saddam to me as "the world's best Vice President--until he became the world's worst President...
...architects had hoped that toppling Saddam would set in motion a train of events that would see liberal democracy triumph in the Arab world. Instead, the biggest beneficiary from his demise has been Islamic fundamentalism. Saddam's execution marks the final nail in the coffin of Arab nationalism, a secular ideology of pan-Arab unity and independence. Originating with the Arab Revolt against Ottoman domination of the Middle East nearly a century ago, the ideology took on a militant edge following Arab independence after World War II. Partly as a reaction to Israel's defeat of the Arabs...