Jacob Williams

Very good review of Marwa Al-Sabouni’s latest book, ‘Mosque’. Particularly: In Defense of a 'Based' Deracination “In truth, this is a feature of our civilizational moment, not a bug. Nominally Islamic cultures are far from perfect; the West is far from uniformly amoral. To conflate the duel between islam and shirk with a kind of spiritually adversarial clash of civilizational blocs is to risk the terrible modern sin of immanentizing the eschaton. Tradition, rightly understood, is not static but generative; the early period of Islamic greatness encouraged tremendous intellectual pluralism and scientific innovation. That the West has, through the twists and turns of history, become the bearer of these goods should not be a cause of Muslim envy or retreat to prelapsarian fantasy, but of a stimulant to learning and adaptation. Islamitself demands this fusion: God and man are in harmony when people are devout, yes, but also when their devotion is protected by modern freedoms and their real but subordinate needs for material prosperity are adequately met. While critiquing modernity is all the rage in our current cultural zeitgeist, it is deeply uncool—indeed, insulting—to imagine that desperately poor, uneducated peasants live more flourishing lives than our own just because they go to the mosque more often. Perhaps the neocons were, after all, right about at least one thing: within limits, a bit of deracination is actually very trad and based. Modern Australia and America, in short, may exhibit fewer acts of religious prostration per capita. But the prostration that does occur may show a deeper ikhlas or sincerity, being free from both coercive state enforcement and the pervasive social pressure of meddling neighbors. And recognizing this possibility may be the real key to escaping Guénon’s reign of quantity.”