Word: westernization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...reinforced nightly when newscasts show armed men outside the embassy who look more like combat soldiers, an impression both accurate and misleading. The men in dark green fatigues are not students: they are members of the Pasdaran, the Islamic revolutionary guard. But there is general agreement among Iranians and Western diplomatic sources that the 200 or so young men and women who are always inside the embassy compound are indeed legitimate students...
...charter makes bows to such Western-style rights as freedom of the press and political parties. It also endorses equal rights ("There is no distinction on grounds of race, color, language or creed. Men and women have equality before the law"). Yet in each case there is a variation of an important proviso: these freedoms will operate only if "Islamic principles of the Republic are not flouted." As one Tehran resident acerbically put it, "The new charter creates the world's only 20th century theocratic nation...
...past 30 years, the U.S. has been a chief participant in a cultural encounter that is in some ways even more traumatic to the world of Islam than colonialism: the full onslaught of secular, materialist modernization, 20th century civilization sweeping into the timeless Muslim villages. The vast apparatus of Western progress, a machine overwhelmingly vigorous, profoundly tempting and yet decadent by all the disciplines of the Prophet, has threatened Muslim identity...
...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...
...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...