Word: western
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...language (Persian), religion (Shi'ite Muslim) and historical tradition (ancient Persia was conquered by Muslims in the 8th century), Iran is different from the rest of Middle Eastern Islam. It was never colonized, in the usual sense of the word, by the West. And yet the penetration of Western ideas was deeper in Iran than in some other parts of the Middle East and came to be seen in a considerably more sinister light...
While leaders in other Muslim states (Saudi Arabia and Libya, for example) have moderated Western influences, the Shah embraced the West with (as it turned out) a heedless enthusiasm. He set up a secular state, destroying the classic and crucial unity in Islam between church and government. Under the Pahlavis, women were liberated from the traditional chador, permitted to vote and divorce their husbands. The Shah made the mistake of ignoring the mullahs (priests). The U.S., in turn, embraced him, and even had the CIA engineer a coup to restore him to power in 1953. Corruption, dislocations of life...
...souls. Berque locates the central dilemma of Islam: If Islam is ever to become an economic and political competitor of capitalism and Marxism, it must embrace a progress that may forever weaken its ethical and spiritual structures, just as other religions have been drained by the secularization of the Western world. So far, Islam has not proved itself a vehicle of social change, a program to confront the modern world...
Still, oil has convinced the Islamic world-or half-convinced it-of its worth and power. The presence of oil in the complicated psychology of anti-Westernism makes the volatility of the Islamic world especially perilous. It is an interesting point of Muslim psychology that the Arabs who grow unimaginably rich off Western payments for oil (and squander their petrodollars on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Rolls-Royces and golden bathroom fixtures) have still in them enough desert asceticism to be contemptuous of the West's energy addictions. So here the old relation is reversed: the West...