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Showing posts with label turkey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label turkey. Show all posts

Friday, December 23, 2011

Last Minute Shopping Tips for Guys

Maxim Model
We got some help from an AskMen editor to save your procrastinating ass.

Last year you left your holiday shopping to the last minute. It stressed you out, you spent way more money than you had to, and, as you downed a pitcher of Wild Turkey to numb the pain, you also swore you'd never find yourself in the same hole next year. Well, it's next year!


That’s why us guys at AskMen teamed up with Maxim to tell you how to pull off last-minute shopping like a pro. (The Maxim guys disappeared the moment we mentioned "pitcher of Wild Turkey.")


You Have: 24 Hours Left
Lucky you, a whole day. Your first instinct is to use the Internet -- but you’re wrong. Because you’re so late in the game, you’ve missed the shipping deadline, which means you’ll have to hit the mall. Yes, the mall, where you’ll find yourself spending 20 minutes looking for parking and get stuck in line behind a snot factory masquerading as a five-year-old brat. (Quit, eyeballin' us, you little jerk!) You know what? Suck it up -- it’s the price you pay for leaving it till the eleventh hour.


Focus on one store, like a department store, so you can get in and get out. If you’re shopping for her, things like lingerie -- as long as it’s lingerie for her body type -- will be just fine. In fact, in a survey I took among the women at AskMen, they all said they’d love lingerie. And they’re hot, so it doesn’t get more valid than that. Also, since we know you’ve been hanging on to her every last word this year, getting her favorite author’s latest book or her favorite musician’s latest album works. Sometimes small, thoughtful gestures like these deliver a lot of impact.

You Have: Half A Day Left
Forget about the mall; at this point, all you’ll find left are those I’m-not-putting-out-tonight pajamas. Believe it or not, the local chain drugstore is your best bet. A lot of them sell gift-worthy stuff, like perfumes and beauty products for her (we recommend Lola by Marc Jacobs), and electronics for the guys in your life (tablets, Blu-ray players, digital cameras, etc.). Sure, it may seem unsettling knowing that you’re offering a gift to your loved one from the same place you buy your condoms, but remember: No one’s going to know where that perfume came from.

You Have: Less Than Five Minutes Left
Relax, it’s totally doable -- now’s when you go online and buy things that are for a future date. For example, buying tickets to an upcoming concert or a show she wants to see, or booking a weekend getaway in the new year. Just print out the paperwork, stick it in a card and surprise her with it.

You Have: Zero Minutes Left
For some of you, it’s game over. For the rest, you’ll have to convince her that what you got her is on the way, which usually calls for something extravagant or custom-made. But that’s another article.


News by Maxim


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Monday, December 05, 2011

Why Muslims more devout than others?

muslims at pray
Muslims at Pray in Mosques
Conflict, theology and history make Muslims more religious than others, experts say

(CNN) – Every religion has its true believers and its doubters, its pious and its pragmatists, but new evidence suggests that Muslims tend to be more committed to their faith than other believers.

Muslims are much more likely than Christians and Hindus to say that their own faith is the only true path to paradise, according to a recent global survey, and they are more inclined to say their religion is an important part of their daily lives.

Muslims also have a much greater tendency to say their religion motivates them to do good works, said the survey, released over the summer by Ipsos-Mori, a British research company that polls around the world.

Islam is the world's second-largest religion - behind Christianity and ahead of Hinduism, the third largest. With some 1.5 billion followers and rising, Islam's influence may be growing even faster than its numbers as the Arab Spring topples long-reigning secular rulers and opens the way to religiously inspired political parties.

The case against TLC’s “All-American Muslim”

But while there's no doubt about the importance of Islam, experts have different theories about why Muslims appear to be more religious than members of other global faiths - and contrasting views on whether to fear the depth of Muslims' commitment to their faith.

One explanation lies in current affairs, says Azyumardi Azra, an expert on Islam in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim majority country.

Many Muslims increasingly define themselves in contrast with what they see as the Christian West, says Azra, the director of the graduate school at the State Islamic University in Jakarta.

"When they confront the West that they perceive or misperceive as morally in decline, many Muslims feel that Islam is the best way of life. Islam for them is the only salvation," he says.

The case for TLC’s “All-American Muslim”

That feeling has become stronger since the September 11 attacks, as many Muslims believe there is a "growing conflict between Islam and the so-called West," he says.

"Unfortunately this growing attachment to Islam among Muslims in general has been used and abused by literal-minded Muslims and the jihadists for their own purposes," he says.

But other experts say that deep religious commitment doesn't necessarily lead to violence.

"Being more religious doesn't necessarily mean that they will become suicide bombers," says Ed Husain, a former radical Islamist who is now a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

In fact, Husain argues that religious upbringing "could be an antidote" to radicalism.

American Muslim women who cover explain their choice

The people most likely to become Islamist radicals, he says, are those who were raised without a religious education and came to Islam later, as "born-agains."

Muslims raised with a grounding in their religion are better able to resist the distortions of Islam peddled by recruiters to radical causes, some experts like Husain argue, making them less likely to turn to violence.

But he agrees that Muslims are strongly attached to their faith, and says the reason lies in the religion itself.

"Muslims have this mindset that we alone possess the final truth," Husain says.

Muslims believe "Jews and Christians went before us and Mohammed was the last prophet," says Husain, whose book "The Islamist" chronicles his experiences with radicals. "Our prophet aimed to nullify the message of the previous prophets."

The depth of the Muslim commitment to Islam is not only a matter of theology and current events, but of education and history, as well, other experts say.

"Where religion is linked into the state institutions, where religion is deeply ingrained from childhood, you are getting this feeling that 'My way is the only way,'" says Fiyaz Mughal, the director of Faith Matters, a conflict-resolution organization in London.

The Ipsos-Mori survey results included two countries with a strong link between religion and the state: Legally Muslim Saudi Arabia, which calls itself the guardian of Islam's two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina; and Indonesia, home of the world's largest Muslim population.

The third majority Muslim country in the study is Turkey, which has a very different relationship with religion. It was founded after World War I as a legally secular country. But despite generations of trying to separate mosque and state, Turkey is now governed by an Islam-inspired party, the AKP.

Turkey's experience shows how difficult it can be to untangle government and religion in Muslim majority countries and helps explain the Muslim commitment to their religion, says Azyumardi Azra, the Indonesia expert.

He notes that there has been no "Enlightenment" in Islam as there was in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, weakening the link between church and state in many Christian countries.

"Muslim communities have never experienced intense secularization that took place in Europe and the West in general," says Azra. "So Islam is still adhered to very strongly."

But it's not only the link between mosque and state in many Muslim majority countries that ties followers to their faith, says professor Akbar Ahmed, a former Pakistani diplomat who has written a book about Islam around the world.

Like Christians who wear "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelets, many Muslims feel a deep personal connection to the founder of their faith, the prophet Muhammad, he says.

Muhammad isn't simply a historical figure to them, but rather a personal inspiration to hundreds of millions of people around the world today.

"When a Muslim is fasting or is asked to give charity or behave in a certain way, he is constantly reminded of the example set by the prophet many centuries ago," argues Ahmed, the author of "Journey Into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization."

His book is based on interviews with Muslims around the world, and one thing he found wherever he traveled was admiration for Muhammad.

"One of the questions was, 'Who is your role model?' From Morocco to Indonesia, it was the prophet, the prophet, the prophet," says Ahmed, the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington.

But while Ahmed sees similar patterns across the Islamic world, Ed Husain, the former radical, said it was important to understand its diversity, as well.

"There is no monolithic religiosity - Muslims in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are following different versions of Islam," says Husain. "All we're seeing (in the survey) is an adherence to a faith."

Political scientist Farid Senzai, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding in Washington, raised questions about the survey's findings.

"Look at the countries that are surveyed - Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Turkey," he says. "There are about 300 million Muslims in those three countries, (who make up) about 20% of Muslims globally."

Islam is "incredibly important" in Saudi Arabia, he says.

"But in Tunisia or Morocco you could have had a different result. It would have been nice if they had picked a few more Arab countries and had a bit more diversity," says Senzai.

The pollster, Ipsos-Mori, does monthly surveys in 24 countries, three of which are majority Muslim – Turkey, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. The other countries range from India to the United States, and Mexico to South Korea, and are the same each month, regardless of the subject the pollsters are investigating.

In the survey released in July, about six in 10 Muslims in the survey said their religion was the only way to salvation, while only a quarter of Hindus and two out of 10 Christians made that claim about their own faiths.

More than nine out of 10 Muslims said their faith was important in their lives, while the figure was 86% for Hindus and 66% for Christians.

Ipsos-Mori surveyed 18,473 adults via an online panel in April and released the findings in July. Results were weighted to make the results as representative as possible, but the pollster cautioned that because the survey was conducted online, it was harder to get representative results in poorer countries where internet access is not widespread.

CNN polling director Keating Holland also warns that in an "opt-in" survey, where respondents actively choose to participate, results tend to come from "people who are confident in their opinions and express them openly... not good for intensely private matters like faith or income or sex."

Online surveys in countries that are not entirely free are also open to the possibility that pollsters get "the approved response" in those nations, "where the people who are most likely to be willing to talk about such matters are the ones who hold, or at least verbalize, opinions that won't get them in trouble if they are expressed," Holland says.

That may have been an issue in Saudi Arabia, where respondents were given the choice of not answering questions on religion due to their potential sensitivity in the kingdom. The Saudi sample was the smallest, with 354 participants, meaning "findings for Saudi Arabia must be treated with caution," Ipsos-Mori said.

About 1,000 people participated in most countries, but sample sizes were smaller in the three majority Muslim countries and in eight other countries.

The survey participants did not reflect the true percentage of Christians and Muslims in the world. Christians were over-represented – as were people who said they had no religion – and Muslims were under-represented.

Nearly half the respondents identified themselves as Christian. Eleven percent were Muslim, 4% were Buddhist, 3% were Hindu and 3% were "other." A quarter said they had no religion and 6% refused to say.

Fiyaz Mughal, the interfaith expert, argues that even though the countries surveyed might not be representative of the entire Muslim world, the findings about Muslims rang broadly true. Muslims in different countries were committed to their faith for different reasons, he says.

"Saudi Arabia is an institutionally religious state. Indonesia has religion tied into its culture," says Mughal.

But Muslim immigrants to Europe also show strong ties to their religion, either as a defense mechanism in the face of a perceived threat, or because of an effort to cling to identity, he contends.

He detects a link between insular communities and commitment to faith regardless of what religion is involved. It is prevalent in Muslim Saudi Arabia, but he has seen it among Israeli Jews as well, he says.

"The Israeli Jewish perspective is that (the dispute with the Palestinians) is a conflict of land and religion which are integrally linked," Mughal says.

"What does play a role in that scenario is a sense of isolationism and seclusion in Israeli Jewish religious communities, a growing trend to say, 'Our way is the only way,'" he says.

Religious leaders of all faiths need to combat those kinds of attitudes because of the greater diversity people encounter in the world today, he argues.

They have a responsibility to teach their congregations "that if they are following a religion, it is not as brutal or exclusive as possible," Mughal says. "Things are changing. The world is a different place from what it was even 20 years ago."

Politicians, too, "need to take these issues quite seriously," he says.

"In the Middle East there are countries - the Saudi Arabias - where you need to be saying that diversity, while it may not be a part of the country, is something they have to deal with when moving in a globalized area," he says.

But Senzai, the political scientist, says that it's also important for the West to take the Muslim world on its own terms.

"Many Muslims want religion to play a role in politics," he says. "To assume that everyone around the world wants to be like the West - that they want liberal secular democracy - is an absurd idea."

– CNN's Nima Elbagir and Atika Shubert contributed to this report.



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Friday, November 25, 2011

In Vote in Morocco, Many Stay Skeptical

morocco
Vote in Morocco
CASABLANCA, Morocco — Yassine Bousalim, a 26-year-old chef from the poor neighborhood of Derb Sultan, where lingering smells of garbage fill the air, watched voters come and go on Friday from the polling station across the street, with an air of disgusted detachment.

“I won’t go and vote,” he said. “I just don’t think anything will come out of this.”

Mr. Bousalim is among the many young and disenchanted Moroccans who chose not to vote in their country’s first parliamentary elections since the passage of a new Constitution last year. That document, an effort by King Mohammed VI to respond to local and regional unrest during the Arab Spring, was approved in July. It gives more powers to Parliament and the prime minister, but preserves most of the king’s prerogatives, including absolute control over military and religious issues.

“Corruption is too big,” said Mr. Bousalim, one of about 57 percent of the 13.5 million eligible voters who are under the age of 35. “Each time we are confronted to an institution, we want to be treated with respect,” he said. Results are expected Saturday.

In contrast to Tunisia, where millions flooded to the polls to vote last month on the first free elections after the overthrow of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the turnout here is expected to be lower. Still, this election is being watched closely as a significant and calibrated step toward democracy. The Tunisian elections were won by the main Islamist party, Ennahda.

The Interior Ministry said that by 5 p.m., two hours before polls closed, about 34 percent of registered voters had cast ballots.

But the change here may still be significant. The Islamist Justice and Development Party (PJD) is expected to do well, it could even become the country’s largest party and, in a coalition government, provide the next prime minister, who will have the power to appoint ministers and dissolve Parliament.

“We believe that we will be the No. 1 party,” said Abdelilah Benkirane, the PJD’s general-secretary in an interview. “Therefore the prime minister will be from our party,” he said.

The PJD was founded in 1998 and is the largest opposition party, with 47 seats in Parliament. It has broadly appealed to Morocco’s large numbers of poor voters by focusing on economic and social issues. It has paid attention to the success in Turkey of the governing AK Party, which has fused religion and modern politics.

“They want the best for the country,” said Iman Bajebour, 20, who took a break from her work as a nurse to cast a ballot for the PJD in Derb Gharaf, a poor neighborhood here. “From my prospective, the PJD will fight corruption,” she said.

But some Moroccans are nervous that the party would back anti-Western policies if brought to power. Last week, the French-language weekly “Tel Quel” splashed the headline, “Morocco will be Islamist,” across its cover.

Other main contenders out of the many parties seeking seats include the Party of Authenticity and Modernity (PAM), created in 2009 out of several smaller parties by a close friend of the king, and Istiqlal, the historic party of independence, founded in 1944, and currently in power.

For some Moroccans voters, though, the elections could consolidate the king’s recent democratic push.

“I think it is the duty of citizens to come and vote,” said Marwan Sayarh, a 30-year-old businessman who voted for the first time. “Morocco is becoming more democratic and I want to support it.”

The country’s loyalty to King Mohamed VI, who has been in power since 1999 and has responded this year to calls for democratic change, contrasted with the revolts against secular nationalist governments in Egypt and Tunisia.

“We are on a path of continuity, mobilization, and of coherence,” said Salaheddine Mezzouar, the country’s finance minister and head of the moderate RNI party, a prominent political force in the country. Some commentators have speculated that he could be prime minister.

Analysts say that given Morocco’s complex proportional electoral system and the few requirements for aspiring candidates and parties — there are 5,873 candidates from more than 30 parties — it is unlikely that one party would emerge with a majority.

But discontent toward the political elite is real among voters here, and some social activists have called for a boycott of the vote. The February 20 Movement for Change, which led the protests against the government this year, is urging its supporters not to vote.

Mr. Bousalim, the chef, said he was tempted to join the February 20 movement because “they would really help.” But he fears police retaliation, which according to Human Rights Watch, detained more than 100 of its members since October to question them about the distribution of pro-boycott leaflets or other activities.

The February 20 movement is a hybrid and youthful coalition of students, independents, leftist activists and Islamists. It has held regular demonstrations and played a key role in pushing reforms and orchestrating protests against political corruption. It favors a constitutional monarchy, in which the king reigns but does not rule. But Morocco is conservative and the monarchy has deep roots, and the February 20 movement has been criticized outside the large cities.

The movement has denounced the king’s reforms as insufficient and argues that the new Constitution in fact reinforces the king’s prerogatives. Parliamentary elections would bring another corrupt assembly to power, they say.

Fouad Abdelmoumni, an economist and a leading coordinator of the movement, said that the king “still has the main authority in his hands.”

“The conditions for democracy are not there,” he said. 

News by NYTimes


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