Word: arabize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Look around. The Arab street is deathly quiet. The mobs, exultant on Sept. 11 and braying for American blood, have gone home. There are no recruits headed to Afghanistan to fight the infidel. The old recruits, battered and beaten and terrified, are desperately trying to sneak their way out of Afghanistan...
...same token, with the total collapse of the Taliban, everything has changed. Omar has lost his robe. The Arab street is silent. The joy is gone. And recruitment? The Pakistani mullahs who after Sept. 11 had urged hapless young men to join the Taliban in fighting America and now have to answer to bereaved parents are facing ostracism and disgrace. Al-Qaeda agents roaming the madrasahs of Pakistan and the poorer neighborhoods of the Arab world will have a much harder sell. The syllogism of invincibility that sustained Islamic fanaticism is shattered...
...with a confidence we did not have before Afghanistan. Confidence that even religious fanaticism can be defeated, that despite its bravado, it carries no mandate from heaven. The psychological effect of our stunning victory in Afghanistan is already evident. We see the beginning of self-reflection in the Arab press, asking what Arab jihadists are doing exporting their problems to places like Afghanistan and the West; wondering why the Arab world uniquely has not developed a single real democracy; and asking, most fundamentally, how a great religion like Islam could have harbored a malignant strain that would rejoice...
From Baghdad to Jerusalem, senior foreign correspondent JOHANNA MCGEARY has extensive experience in reporting the big stories from the Arab world, and has been covering the war in Afghanistan since its beginning. This week she writes on the terror threat still out there even after the Taliban are routed from Afghanistan and whether al-Qaeda can regroup. Chat with her on Monday...
...Islam itself is nothing new in Europe. After advancing as far as Tours in 732, the Arabs remained in Spain until 1492, when they were driven from Granada. Over those centuries they bequeathed the Spanish their distinctive pronunciation of the letter J as well as masterpieces of Moorish architecture. The Islamic scholars Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd reintroduced Greek philosophy to the West during the Middle Ages, while Arab mathematicians revolutionized science with the invention of algebra. And when the Ottoman armies pushed west through the Balkan peninsula in the 14th century, they established Muslim communities in Central Europe that...