How Islam and the West went wrong

May 19, 2018 by

by Andrew Gimson, Conservative Home:

The House of Islam: A Global History by Ed Husain.

This is an excellent book which should be read by anyone of a conservative disposition who feels baffled by the Muslim world. For Ed Husain brings out, without labouring, the blinkered attitudes of the modern West, which render that world incomprehensible.

He observes that we have replaced the idea of Christendom with “a strident secularism” which is so sceptical and materialist, it cannot even imagine, let alone approve, a way of life informed at every step by a sense of the divine, conveyed through traditions of behaviour and belief.

In the West, we think of each individual choosing what to believe, with religion (if any) a matter of private observance, an activity to be carried on behind closed doors, rather than a communal endeavour engaged in by society as a whole, in which the soul finds peace through surrender to God.

But I am in danger of giving a misleading impression of the book, which consists of 20 chapters describing the many aspects of the House of Islam, from the origins of the Koran and of the Sunni-Shia schism, to attitudes to the Jews, education, and sex.

Read here

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