Islam: The Religion and the People

Introduction

The Koran is the Muslim Bible. The mosque is the Muslim church. The mullah is the Muslim priest. Friday is the Muslim Sabbath. All these statements are true; all of them can be dangerously misleading. They reflect the resemblances, even the kinship, between the Christian and Muslim worlds—the many-faceted affinity between these two religions and the religiously defined civilizations to which they gave rise, which makes such comparisons plausible and, in some measure, accurate. But at the same time, they conceal or obscure the real and sometimes profound differences between them.

It is customary to speak of the great dividing line in human civilization, even human history, as that separating the West from the rest, the Occident from ...