Rémi Brague is an excellent guide, a vastly learned student of Islam, an Arabic speaker conversant with medieval Islamic writings and philosophy, as well as a renowned European medievalist who seems to be able to quote more languages than there were after the Tower of Babel. In this book, he gives a scrupulous, though overall not very flattering, picture of Islam, but he is careful to make the proper distinctions.
For example, we use the word “Islam” to mean more than one thing. First, there is the Islam that means a relationship to the Divine, “the abandonment without reserve of the entire person into the hand of God.” This, it seems to me, can be either a deeply spiritual attitude to life or a smokescreen for the most unscrupulous behavior—as, of course, can many other ideals. Second, there is Islam the religion preached by Mohammed in Arabia in the seventh century (the Islamic view that man is born Muslim need not detain us, any more than Rousseau’s assertion that man is born free).
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