Two Items On Islam

No, I am not thinking of converting. Too many things about Islam do not fit with my thinking. However, there has been too much fear and hysteria about Islam since 9/11/2001. Gary Willls is a writer I have been paying attention to for around 40 years now. Seeing Garry Wills and the Q'uran on YouTube, I wanted to hear what he had to say. I think it is sensible.

 

After finding that Englesberg Ideas published The worlds that Islam made by Shiraz Maher. 

Neither McDougall nor Morrissey have written their books as explicit interventions to the current febrility that characterises so much of the public discourse about Islam’s place in the West, but their works are vital interventions, nonetheless. Their authoritative but unobtrusive expositions in a supposedly post-expert era move us beyond a hackneyed and essentialised depiction of a faith that is professed by around one quarter of humanity. Those promoting such a view, McDougall argues, are more often than not engaging in more ‘self-promoting paranoid fantasy than historically informed, judicious realism, but that has not prevented it from selling well’. 

I wonder how much of what think we know of Islam is a fever dream and how much of it is accurate. It could also be that so long as we rave we create our own problems.

sch 7/7