Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

REFLECTIONS AFTER A BREAKFAST t 275
to history, compounded by a secular disinclination to take religion
seriously as a cause of anything. But many earlier generations of
Jews and Christians and almost as many generations of Europeans
have been vividly aware of the worshipers of Allah and the devotees
of the Quran. It was the message of Islam that persuaded
vast numbers of Jews and Christians from Iran to Spain to abandon
their ancestral faith and embrace this new—or was it merely
pristine?—version of monotheism. Muslim swords and Muslim
galleys dominated, and often terrified, the Mediterranean basin
from the eighth to the sixteenth century; Muslim merchants controlled
international trade for extensive periods; Muslim artisans
surpassed their European counterparts in techniques and materials;
and Muslim intellectuals supplied many of the works and
much of the energy and curiosity that reignited philosophical and
scientific studies in the new university centers of Europe. By the
sixteenth century, however, that picture began dramatically to
change. Both Islam and Muslims dropped down behind the political
and religious horizons of Europe. It has taken oil, Zionism, and
Muslim Fundamentalism to bring them rushing back in the twentieth
century and, more urgently, in the twenty-first.
What has returned to Western consciousness under the name of
“Islam” appears both exotic and threatening. It has seemed so on
occasion in the past as well, though somewhat more threatening
than exotic perhaps. It is a small matter to predict that eventually
it will look less exotic to us as well since increasing numbers of
Muslims now live in “Christian” societies of the West, and they in
turn are assimilating in much the same fashion that Jews did in
Europe and America in the nineteenth century. Islam too will one
day pass as a “Western” religion, just as its two monotheist siblings
do. As for the threat, it is as real as fanaticism can make it.
Fanaticism runs deep into the dna of all three monotheist communities,
but with least restraint in Islam, which from the beginning
has recognized no sovereignty other than God’s, whereas Jews and
Christians have had to accommodate to, and, more recently, be
constrained by the secular states that are now their masters. The
fanaticism of monotheism embodied in a society that is both a
church and a state has been and remains a dangerous threat in a