All is not well with Islam. In fact, it is seriously ailing. I have ventured to diagnose this ailment and to prescribe the cure in four previous books written since the horrendous attacks of September 11, 2001.¹ This new work is an extension of the scrutiny undertaken in those earlier ones. I open with a reminder that this ailment can be best summed up as the use of violence in the name of God. I will pursue this point of inquiry, asking whether it is somehow a fate peculiar to Islam, or whether we are dealing here with a structural...

My relationship to Arabic, particularly Koranic Arabic, is at the core of who I am as a person. As a child, my experience of Arabic diglossia was a very physical one. My mother tongue was the Tunis vulgate, used by my mother and the women in my family home. Next, at the age of four, I was inducted into what I will call the “father tongue,” a notion I borrow from Dante and his relation to Virgil, his father figure and guide in the first two parts of theDivine Comedy. Dante’s father tongue was Latin, regulated by “grammar,” as...

In order to understand the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism and to devise the best means of resisting it, we need to go back to the founding text, in all its ambivalence, and to engage the conflict, if not the war, of interpretation. Fundamentalism concerns first and foremost the way Islam relates to the two earlier monotheisms, Judaism and Christianity. To investigate more closely these other believers in the single Godhead, it is important to consult the Koranic text itself and to scrutinize its ambiguities. Two verses in particular could be considered emblematic of its ambivalence.

The first has come to...

To be Arab today is first of all a source of pride, to descend from an immense intellectual and creative tradition. But it also denotes a sadness linked to a feeling of decline, uneasiness, and monumental failure. One cannot but be struck by the gap between what was once Arab civilization at its height and today’s cultural desert.

A 2002 report by the United Nations Development Programme provides a chilling illustration.¹ Among Arab nations, 50 percent of women are illiterate. Only 330 books are translated every year in this vast part of the world. This is three times fewer than...

Islam is a civilization and a religion, but with political ambitions. Today, the first two attributes have been eclipsed by the violence of seditious factions that perpetrate their crimes in Islam’s name. The shocking attacks of September 11, 2001, were committed in the name ofjihād, sometimes translated as “holy war,” which had been the historical vector of Islamic expansion. But the question is this: Is the reactivation ofjihādby today’s terrorists theologically legitimate? Are these two forms ofjihādcomparable, and can the same criteria of analysis be applied to the expression of holy war past and present?...

Two distinct periods in Islamic history can be described as doubly infused with an Enlightenment spirit: the early participation in the surge of civilization from the ninth century onward, and the desire to join the civilizing movements of the nineteenth century. Upstream, so to speak, as early as the mid–eighth century, Islam was establishing the beginnings, and downstream, during the nineteenth century, it was experiencing the effects and attempting to adapt, without ever really succeeding.

Between 750 and 1050, authors were giving evidence of an astonishing freedom of thought in their approach to religions and the phenomenon of belief....

The notion of nature does not exist in the Bible, any more than it does in the Koran, where it is assimilated to creation. Thus perceived, Nature is a divine gift bestowed upon Man to have dominion over and enjoy. Humans forever marvel before the spectacle of divine Creation, a boundless work founded upon the separation of heaven and earth, light and darkness, day and night.

In the heavens, God placed the sun, the moon, and the stars. Of the earth, he made a stable abode, a bed, a carpet. He raised mountains and created rivers, gardens, and fruits. The...

Andalusia, with its three cultures, has often been evoked as a moment when Islam, Christianity, and Judaism were able to live and thrive together. Without falling into the vision of a golden age of history that filters out violence and conflict, I must acknowledge that this entente did take place and that it produced recognizable vestiges, a few examples of which we have brought to mind here. One need only survey the architectural legacy to be convinced of the fact, for it is the most visible proof of a shared community within the city, a semiotics to be read as...