Word: west
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...these collisions inevitable? The mutual misunderstandings of the West and the Islamic world have a rich patina of history. Jews, Christians and Muslims, all "People of the Book," draw much of their faith from the same sources. Yet from the time of the Muslim conquests and the Crusades, West and Islam have confronted each other by turns in attitudes of incomprehension, greed, fanaticism, prurient interest, fear and loathing. The drama has lost none of its historic tension in the stagecraft of the Ayatullah Khomeini. "This is not a struggle between the United States and Iran," he has told the faithful...
Khomeini may even wish to transcend Iranian nationalism and export his fundamentalist Islamic revival. The prospect of such contagious piety disturbs other Muslim leaders, the Saudi royal family, for example. But it also raises apprehension and a certain amount of bewilderment in the West. When Mahdist Saudi zealots took over the mosque in Mecca last month, the Islamic world displayed a disconcerting readiness to believe Khomeini's incendiary report that the attack had been the work of Zionists and U.S. imperialists. "The Americans have done it again," many Muslims told themselves reflexively. Some Americans have responded by asking with...
Western science and technology have wounded the deep pride of Islam. The success of the unvirtuous, the infidel unfavored of Allah, is psychologically confusing. "Seen through Muslim eyes," writes Berkeley Historian Peter Brown, "the emergence of [the West] as the temporary master of the world remains an anomaly in the natural unfolding of the course of history." Muslims have recoiled from modernization in exact proportion to the force of its temptation for them. They have been attracted by secular materialism, have tried it in the guise of both capitalism and Marxism, but they have often been disappointed by it, have...
...that is, for now, the indispensable ingredient of modernization, and they have tried to use their staggering and sudden wealth to buy the machines of progress without the devils that often inhabit them. Conservative Saudi leaders, for example, a pursue a selective strategy regarding the technological riches of the West: they seek to modernize without the garish libertine free-for-all that Western secular individualism has promoted...
...Muslims, the dilemma remains: if they are to develop economically, they must import Western technology. To master Western technology, they must send their young to be educated in the West. And that invariably means diluting their culture. Progress means better medicine and other mitigations of life's harshness, of course, but it also means the young women returning from Paris or Palo Alto in short skirts instead of chadors; it means 30% inflation, pollution, an open door to all the depressing vitality of the junk culture; it means the young leaving the villages and becoming infested with all kinds...