Word: worldlys
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...which may account for their militant touchiness. But the religion has become the vehicle for certain antiWestern, anti-American resentments and antipathies. In some ways, the specifically Islamic religious component is almost incidental: Islam is, as much as anything else, the repository for grievances, envies and hatreds that Third World have-nots harbor for the privileged of the globe. Islam gives cohesion to complaints about the injustices of the world. The Muslim tradition provides the language and symbolism to express a wide social message: it is not necessarily a religious phenomenon. It is not antiChristian. In fact, Muslims really regard...
...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...
...should be possible for Americans to preserve an intelligent sympathy for the Islamic perspective without feeling vaguely guilt-stricken by the past. Anti-Americanism-the specific, sharper focus of anti-Westernism-is in some ways the Islamic world's excuse for its own failures, confusions and periodic collapses into incoherence. It is more convenient morally to blame the West than to gaze steadily at the Islamic dilemma, easier to devise revenge for the past than ideas for the future. Khomeini, with his absolutist pretensions and aggressive fantasies of jihad (holy war) against the West, demeans Islam; he gives...
After the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian radicals, some of Washington's Middle East experts predicted that this outrageous violation of international custom would brand Ayatullah Khomeini as a pariah in the Islamic world. The experts were wrong. Certainly the majority of Khomeini's neighboring rulers disapprove of the embassy invasion and the holding of diplomatic hostages. But the denunciations of the Ayatullah have not been as loud or as specific as the U.S. would like. That is partly because Khomeini's skill at rousing Iranian mobs to a pitch of zealotry...