Bunting: Enlighten me
Madeleine Bunting on how the “hard liberals” misuse the Enlightenment, and how many of their its key thinkers were in fact religious believers:
> Something didn’t seem to be adding up to me when they waxed lyrical about the Enlightenment legacy of rationality, secularism, belief in progress, the rule of law and the basis of all we know and love in western democracy and individual human rights.
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>Then I began bumping into the subject with Muslim intellectuals who were acutely aware of how this legacy was being used (implicitly or explicitly) against Islam. It was as if the debate had shifted from the Reformation – why hasn’t Islam had one? (it dawned on such questioners that a)the Christian Reformation led to several centuries of appalling bloodshed and b)there’s a good argument that Wahabi Islam is precisely Islam’s reformation) – to another tack: why hasn’t Islam had an Enlightenment?)
