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2002 国际贸易专业英语
1.The True, Peaceful Face of Islam
There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, and Islam is the world’s fastest -growing religion. If the evil
carnage we witnessed on Sept. 11 were typical of the faith, and Islam truly inspired and justified such
violence, its growth and the increasing presence of Muslims in both Europe and the U.S. would be a
terrifying prospect. Fortunately, this is not the case.
The very word Islam, which means “surrender”, is related to the Arabic salam, or peace. When the
Prophet Muhammad brought the inspired scripture known as Koran to the Arabs in the early 7th century A.
D., a major part of his mission was devoted precisely to bringing an end to the kind of mass slaughter we
witnessed in New York City and Washington. Pre-Islamic Arabia was caught up in a vicious cycle of
warfare, in which tribe fought tribe in a pattern of vendetta and counter-vendetta. Muhammad himself
survived several assassination attempts, and the early Muslin community narrowly escaped extermination
by the powerful city of Mecca. The Prophet had to fight a deadly war in order to survive, but as soon as he
felt his people were probably safe, he devoted his attention to building up a peaceful coalition of tribes
and achieved victory by an ingenious and inspiring campaign of non-violence. When he died in 632, he
had almost single-handedly brought peace to war-torn Arabia.
Because the Koran was revealed in the context of an all-out war, several passages deal with the conduct
of armed struggle. Warfare was a desperate business on the Arabian Peninsula. A chieftain was not
expected to spare survivors after a battle, and some of the Koran injunctions seem to share this spirit.
Muslims are ordered by God to “slay [enemies] wherever you find them!”. Extremists such as Osama bin
laden like to quote such verses but do so selectively. They do not include the exhortation to peace, which
in almost every case follow these more ferocious passages:” Thus, if they let you be, and do not make war
on you, and offer you peace, God does not allow you to harm them.
Islam is not addicted to war, and jihad is not one of its “pillars”, or essential practices. The primary
meaning of the word jihad is not ”holy war” but “struggle”. It refers to the different effort that is needed
to put God’s will into practice at every level-personal and social as well as political. A very important and
much quoted tradition has Muhammad telling his companions as they go home after a battle. “We are
returning from the lesser jihad [the battle] to the greater jihad,” the far more urgent and momentoustask
of extirpating wrongdoing from one’s own society and one’s own heart.
---Time, October 1st 2001.
2.Women at work
Throughout American history, the proportion of women who work to provide for themselves or their
families has always very high, What has changed---and has changed dramatically---is how many women
earn a wage. After the rise of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century, men increasingly sold their
labor on the market. Most American women, however, continued to work without pay inside the home or
on the family farm. This has changed. Most Americans now regard the rigidly enforced isolation of women
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