Found this at AOSHQ, quoting Bernard Lewis from a 1976(!!!) essay:
...This recurring unwillingness to recognize the nature of Islam or even
the fact of Islam as an independent, different, and autonomous religious
phenomenon persists and recurs from medieval to modern times..Modern
Western man, being unable for the most part to assign a dominant and
central place to religion in his own affairs, found himself unable to
conceive that any other peoples in any other place could have done so,
and was therefore impelled to devise other explanations of what seemed
to him only superficially religious phenomena..
To the modern
Western mind, it is not conceivable that men would fight and die in such
numbers over mere differences of religion; there have to be some other
"genuine" reasons underneath the religious veil..This is reflected in
the present inability, political, journalistic, and scholarly alike, to
recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current
affairs of the Muslim world and in the consequent recourse to the
language of left-wing and right-wing, progressive and conservative, and
the rest of the Western terminology....
That tells us two things: 1) The West has become far too secularized--particularly its "leaders", including GWBush, Merkel, and whoever's running England these days; and 2) Mohammedanism has not changed since its founding.
It is true that some Mohammedans are also secularized. But betting on "how many" and "how much" is a fool's game, as the Austrians, Swedes, Germans, and Brits have found.
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