Word: westerners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...honor, a system of law and an all-encompassing way of life. To be sure, religious observance varies somewhat from country to country and person to person. Nonetheless, to the average Muslim, his faith is much more in evidence in everyday life than is Christianity to people in most Western lands. On Fridays, the Muslim sabbath, life comes to a halt in the factories, the marketplaces and the public squares. Men assemble their prayer rugs near an amplified sound system if there is no time or inclination to go inside a mosque; women frequently pray at home. Others perform...
Much of Islam's resurgence can be seen as a quest for stability and roots, inspired by a disdain for Western values and for a kind of modernization that exacerbated economic and social problems in many Third World nations. Health clinics cut down on disease, but they also aggravated the population explosion in those Islamic nations where birth control is little practiced. Rapid growth of industry in cities provided jobs, but it also disrupted the sacrosanct family structure in villages as men streamed into cities in search of work...
...Egypt?" he asks. "What are Muslims supposed to do? Emulate those lifestyles? Forget Islam and become a plastic person?" Nadia Fatim, a student at the same university, wears a modified veil and a floor-length robe. Says she: "It is a matter of identity. If you dress and behave Western, then you are compelled to be Western. But if you give yourself to Islam and its way and its dress and thought, then nothing can pressure you away from what you truly are. Islam gives you yourself...
Later Islam fought successfully to preserve its ideological integrity in the face of Mongol invaders, Western Crusaders and, more recently, Western imperialists. But by the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire had been dismembered and large portions of it brought under the domination of the colonizing nations of Christian Europe. European rule demonstrated how important it was for Islam to exercise temporal as well as spiritual power. At its nadir, in all the Arab world, only Yemen and Saudi Arabia, poor and backward, were nominally independent. Iran, Afghanistan and secularized Turkey, where Kemal Ataturk had disestablished Islam...
...number of recent events have combined to focus Western attention on Islam: the resurgence of the faith in African politics, the oil wealth of the Arabian peninsula, the revolution in Iran. But many Muslims feel, with some justice, that this belated interest in their world and their faith has resulted in hostile propaganda rather than empathy and understanding...