Word: progression
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...missiles in "selected countries." NATO Secretary-General Joseph Luns confirmed that the countries were Britain, West Germany and Italy; he added that "Belgium and The Netherlands may accept the missiles later." Both recalcitrant countries said that they might well accept the missiles on their territory if there were no progress in disarmament negotiations with the Soviet Union; Belgium said it would reconsider in six months, The Netherlands in two years...
...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...
Some Muslims, of course, insist that Islam and modernization are perfectly compatible. Many Islamic countries supply the oil that is, for now, the indispensable ingredient of modernization, and they have tried to use 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...
...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...
Muslims have aggressively sought the material wonders of the West, yet are ambivalent in their 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...