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(Hebrew: settlement): Term used to refer to the Jewish community in Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel.
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(Arabic: ancestors): Reference derived from the first generations of Muslims, called al-salif al-salih (the pious ancestors), this is an Islamic intellectual movement that emerged in the late nineteenth century that called for a return to the purity of the first Muslims and their foundational texts, namely the Quran and Hadith; however, the movement was also referred to as Islamic modernism because it was not incompatible with modern (European) innovation and thought.
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A largely covert revolutionary party in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Ottoman Empire, its members mostly located in the Balkans. It was composed of and aligned with the Young Turks movement.
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(Ikhwan al-Muslimun): Islamist party founded by Hasan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928. It became the largest and most influential Islamist (or Islamic fundamentalist) party in the Arab world, with branches or off-shoots established in many Muslim countries.
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(Hebrew: ascent): Zionist term for the waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine and then Israel.
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(Arabic: renaissance or rebirth): Name of the pan-Arab party founded in the 1930s primarily by Syrians. According to its slogan, the Baath advocated freedom, unity, and socialism. It became the ruling party in both Syria and Iraq in 1963 and had small branches in a number of other Arab countries. As of this writing, it remains the ruling party of Syria; however, it was eliminated in Iraq with the removal of the regime of Saddam Hussein in the 2003 Iraq war.
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The period before the advent of Islam in Arabia, referred to by Muslims as the “Age of Ignorance.”
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Credibility