Malise Ruthven: ‘What Is Islam?’, 8 September 2016
“... For many years now – and especially since 9/11 – there has been much strongly felt disagreement about what Islam is. Is it a religious faith like Christianity, where theological notions such the Incarnation or the Trinity (rejected by Muslims) or the ‘messengership’ of Muhammad (denied by Christians) can be accounted for as variations between different groups of believers? Or does Islam amount – in Ernest Gellner’s phrase – to a ‘blueprint for a social order’, an alternative model to the liberal consensus, which confronts our democracies with a challenge as severe as the totalitarian movements of the 20th century? In the current climate of incoherent foreign policies, bungled interventions and sectarian wars, of humanitarian disasters and disintegrating states, with Islamist atrocities wrecking lives in European as well as West Asian cities – not to mention the ‘collateral damage’ inflicted on innocent villagers by drone strikes – the need for proper answers could hardly be more urgent ...”