Reviewing Islam

A fascinating piece by Michael Knox Beran, appearing in National Review Online:

The Islamic intellectual who seeks the regeneration of his faith finds promise in the mystic saints and learned faylasûfs (philosophers) of Islam’s golden age. But Islam today is very different from what it was in its springtime. A few years ago a U.N. report noted that “Spain translates in one year the number of books that have been translated into Arabic in the past 1,000 years.” Greece alone translates “five times more books every year from English to Greek than the entire Arab world translated from English to Arabic.” ...

Islam, to have flourished as it has, must put down deep roots in the soul. But in the present darkness even the spiritual virtues of Islam are blighted. Whatever is divine and true in its orthodoxy has been obscured by a vengeful and intolerant fanaticism. A wise soul might prefer a high, pure spiritual culture to what Emerson called the “vulgar aims,” the “erudition of sensation,” the “civility of trifles, of money and expense,” characteristic of a wholly materialist culture, as the West’s is perhaps coming to be; but the spiritual culture of Islam, in its most visible forms, seems no longer to be pure. On the contrary, it appears gloomy and bigoted — a machinery of intolerance and obscurantism manipulated by mob-masters and demagogues who, though they masquerade as holy men, derive power and profit from the malignant passions they excite.