Ibn Warraq - Why I Am Not a Muslim

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WHY I AM NOT A MUSLIM
title describes the culture of Islam. Most Westerners who are not simply islamaphobes
are willing to acknowledge where our system of numerical notation comes
from; where algebra got started; how Aristotle was saved from puritan schoolmen
in the Middle Ages; indeed, where scientific thinking in a number of disciplines
originated. The culture of Islam, ranging in its missionary extent from Baghdad
to Malaysia, is humanistically rich and potent. And yet. The Middle Eastern
culture which spurred humanistic learning and scientific thinking remains a religious
culture in a way that befuddles liberal Christians and secularists, and in
a way that has not existed in the West since the decline and fall of Christendom
in the Reformation. At least a part of our befuddlement stems from the fact
that the Reformation is often seen by historians, not as a fall or a falling apart
but as a rejuvenation of Christian culture. The persistence of misperceptions about
what "happened" with the advent of humanistic thinking in the late Middle Ages
stems from the view that the Christian reform was a "back to basics" movement—
an attempt to restore biblical teaching and practice to the church rather than
(as it was at its roots) a radical challenge to systems of religious authority, a
challenge that would eventually erode even the biblical pillars of authority upon
which the Reformation itself was based. Islam underwent no such change and
entertained no such challenge to Koranic teaching; its pillars remained strong
while those of Christianity, unknown even to those who advocated the reform
of the church "in head and members," were crumbling.
To misunderstand the disjoining of Islam and Christianity as religious twins
is, I would argue, the key to Western misunderstanding of the Islamic faith. The
Christian reformation in the West (there was nothing remotely like it in the Eastern
church, which, not coincidentally, provides a much closer analogy to Islamic
conservatism) proceeded on the false assumption that knowlege of Scripture was
ultimately compatible with human knowledge—discovery of the original meanings
of texts, linguistic and philological study, historical investigation, and so on. Without
tracing the way in which this assumption developed, the fragmented churches
that exited the process of cultural, geographical, and denominational warfare
between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries proved the assumption false.
Europe would never again be Christendom, and the New World would emerge
as an archetype of the bifurcations, rivalries, and half-way compromises that the
failure of religious authority had made necessary in the Old. By the end of the
nineteenth century, liberal Christian scholarship, with its inherent historical
skepticism, which did not spare even the divinity of the founder nor the sacredness
of sacred scripture, was verdict enough on the marriage between humanistic learning
and divine knowledge, as it was promoted energetically by the early Christian
reformers. From the end of the eighteenth century to the present day, Christianity
was a recipient religion, which found itself either at war with humanistic learning
(as among the evangelicals from Paley's day onward) or, to use Berger's term,
an accommodationist faith, whose role in the world seemed to be to accept the
truths that culture provided and to express them, whenever possible, in a Christian
idiom. Islam scarcely represented a "fundamentalist" reaction to contemporary