Word: seculars
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...hand. A peace process triggered by mass protests in April 2006 against the autocratic rule of Nepal's King Gyanendra brought the Maoists into the political mainstream, paving the way for the extraordinary transformation of a country ruled for two and a half centuries by Hindu kings into a secular republic. Both the Royal Nepalese Army and the Maoist guerrillas - the civil war's bitter foes - returned to their barracks and camps with the stated intention of eventually reforming into one new national force. "We all want democracy. No one here wants to fight again," Sandhya insists. Even her father...
...eerily practiced, beatific smile, a secular philosophy that tamped down religious extremism, and an anticommunist bent that made him a key cold war ally for the U.S. Yet army general Suharto was also a brutal dictator who purged hundreds of thousands of critics as Indonesia's ruler from 1967 to 1998. He was forced to step down in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, but the controversy over his reign continued. Indonesia's new government launched inquiries into the corruption. Suharto sued TIME after it published its own 1999 investigation into his ill-gotten gains. He won his lawsuit...
...most pro-immigration, pro--free trade, pro--Wall Street candidate in the race. The third-party candidate he would most resemble is John Anderson, the fiscally responsible, culturally liberal Republican who ran as an Independent in 1980. Anderson won 7% of the vote, mostly among the young, educated and secular. But today those people are partisan Democrats. After Ralph Nader, there's simply no way that liberals are going to take a flyer on a candidate like Bloomberg, who is almost ideologically identical to their nominee but lacks a D next to his name...
Nowhere is the tension between work and faith more pronounced than in France. There, laïcité, or secularism, dictates that religion should be confined to the private sphere. Though the 1978 Islamic Revolution in Iran shattered the long-cherished view that modernization inevitably pushes people away from faith and toward secularism, French Muslim professionals say they often face the assumption from their colleagues that career success will have this effect. "If you're doing well, they assume you're one of them, and so you're secular," says Parisian Muslim Zoubeir Ben Terdeyet, a consultant with an international...
...sent company profits dramatically downward; Jakarta's stock market crashed. Food prices spiked upwards, leading to rioting in the streets and the death of perhaps hundreds of people clamoring for food in the capital. The country's divisions re-emerged: Muslims vs. non-Muslims; Malay-Indonesians vs. Chinese-Indonesians; secular Muslims vs. orthodox Muslims. The ghosts of the old Indonesia that Suharto thought he had exorcised had returned to haunt the country...