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The Resilience of Islam in the Middle East
In the Soviet Union, where there was a deliberate campaign to destroy religion, most of the imams were shipped off to the gulags and almost all the mosques were destroyed. On Karl Marx's birthday, I went to the burial place of Imam Abu Ghari, the famous Hadis scholars. After 80 years of intensive brainwashing from a very young age, it's a bad dream. The mosques are full again and they're rebuilding mosques and the hijab and it's all coming back. In many ways, the capacity of Islam to be decentered has helped.