In fact...

In fact, at no time in Islamic history have so many influential intellectual leaders of Islam lived outside the “Abode of Islam” in another civilization, which, interestingly enough, provides the favorable climate for free intellectual discourse not found under present-day conditions in many Islamic countries themselves. The destinies of the West and the Islamic world are intertwined in such a way that one cannot reduce the situation simply to “us” and “them” in total mutual exclusion.

It is in the destiny of not only Islam and the West but all other civilizations to be forced to confront at this particular moment of history the powerful forces of globalization. If secularism sought earlier to demolish and destroy the older worldviews based on the Sacred, the process of globalization as usually understood seeks in an ever more accelerated…