Resenting the Disaster

“This inner sense of confidence helped imbue Muslims with an unparalleled loyalty to their religions. Added to this internal confidence was the fact that Muslims enjoyed outstanding success during their first six or so centuries. To be a Muslim meant to belong to a winning civilization. This pattern of success started right at the beginning: …

How Do You Solve a Rose?

“Take a rose. How will you proceed to solve a rose? You can cultivate roses, smell them, gather and wear them, make them into perfume or potpourri, paint them or write poetry about them; these are all creative activities. But can you solve roses? Has that expression any meaning?” (Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the …

The Demand for Originality

“The demand for ‘originality’—with the implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work—is a recent one and would have seemed quite ludicrous to poets of the Augustan Age, or of Shakespeare’s time ” (Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, p. 121).

A Fun House Mirror

“The Lord raised up Islam as a parody or mirror of Christianity, which is designed to expose our failings and to call us to faithfulness. Indeed, Mohammed’s life strikingly recapitulates the history of Israel. Called (so he claimed) by Allah, Mohammed led his people out of Mecca to Medina, established his rule in Medina, and …

Back to Lateral Metaphors

“Our minds are not infinite; and as the volume of the world’s knowledge increases, we tend more and more to confine ourselves, each to his special sphere of interest and to the specialized metaphor belonging to it. The analytic bias of the last three centuries has immensely encouraged this tendency, and it is now very …

A Second Battle of Tours V

Introduction: In this series we have referred from time to time to the concept of Sharia law. This is a distinctively Islamic concept, but it is important for us to see exactly where the distinction is. It is not because Muslims believe that their god should make the laws—everyone believes that. The issue is more …

Like a Coal Seam

“But the hatred of Jews and of Israel that neo-Nazis, skinheads and violent Muslims share makes the possibility of collusion between them a danger for which law enforcers should prepare. Anti-Semitism underlies Europe like a black coal seam: thin here, thick there; deep here, surfacing there” (Richardson, Secrets of the Koran, p. 197).