.... Caldwell, too, thinks that while the West’s current encounter with Islam may be ‘painful and violent’, it has also been, ‘an infusion of oxygen into the drab, nitpicking, materialist intellectual life of the West’, for which we need to express our ‘gratitude’. The very values against which radical Islamists rail – the values of secular humanism – are also the very values that so disgust many of Islam’s greatest critics. Little wonder the critics both create fantasies about radical Islam's onward march - and feel unable to challenge it.
Whether or not the religious will triumph over the next century, no one can say. What is certain is that if they do, it will not be because secularists have been out-bred, but because they have been out-thought. The real challenge that secularists face is not in bed but in the public square. And it's a challenge that comes as much from Eurabists as from Islamists. [Kenan Malik] Read more [via Butterflies and Wheels]
