Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Cairo lawyer who represents many of the militants arrested in the past two years, claims that 20,000 Egyptians fought alongside the mujahedin. The government's experts put the figure closer to 2,500 and say that as many as half of them have returned home. A senior Western diplomat in Cairo insists that both estimates are too high. He says 2,500 Arabs went to Afghanistan and that only about 200 Egyptians received combat training and returned to fight their government. Even so, says the diplomat, "it only takes a few to create the myth." In Algeria several hundred...
...Western Senators delay his grazing-land fee increase...
...revived her interest in religion. "What I really am is a historian of ideas," she says, "rather than a theologian, which sounds a bit narrow." She considers herself an unaffiliated monotheist who appreciates many aspects of Eastern Orthodoxy but finds it easier to pray with Jews and Muslims. "Only Western Christianity makes a song and dance about creeds and beliefs," she says. "The authentic test of a religion is not what you believe. It's what you do, and unless your religion expresses itself in compassion for all living things, it is not authentic...
...experienced -- albeit by a dedicated elite -- rather than defined. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the mystical Sufi movement was the dominant force within Islam. In the 15th century, facing persecution and exile, European Jews found solace in the mystical writings known as the Cabala. Even Western Christianity, which has been strongly suspicious of ineffability, had its mystical tradition, exemplified by such figures as the German Dominican Meister Eckehart and the Spanish saint, Teresa of Avila...
Modern monotheism, as Armstrong sees it, has had two main flaws. One is a tendency toward "belligerent righteousness," which has led to pogroms, inquisitions and other shameful manifestations of intolerance that defile the image of God as a benevolent creator. The other -- most apparent in Western Christianity -- is a tendency to define God in terms compatible with secular thinking. Thus the Jesuit theologian Leonard Lessius (1554-1623) argued that the existence of God could be demonstrated scientifically, like any other fact. Similarly, the 19th century German exponents of the Science of Judaism argued that their religion was a wholly rational...