A Sign of the Times

Religious enthusiasm is perhaps the most dangerous of threats to the humanistic enterprise, since it is patently anti-secular and antidemocratic in nature, and, in its monotheistic forms as a kind of politics, is by definition about as intolerantly inhumane and downright unarguable as can be. Invidious commentary about the world of Islam after 9/11 has made it popular wisdom that Islam is by nature a violent, intolerant religion, much given to raving fundamentalism and suicidal terrorism. There have been no end of "experts" and evangelists repeating the same rubbish, aided and abetted by discredited Orientalists like Bernard Lewis. It is a sign of the intellectual and humanistic poverty of the times that such patent propaganda (in the literal sense of the word) has gained such currency and, even more disastrously, that it is carried on without the slightest reference to Christian, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalism, which, as extremist political ideologies, have been at least as bloody and disastrous as Islam...Religious fanaticism is religious fanaticism no matter who practices it. It is inexcusable to take an "ours is better than yours" attitude toward it.

--Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 51.