#gellner

‘You keep on saying to Akbar…why don’t you accept the human origin of your religion? Well, he can’t’, Ernest Gellner said sharply, coming to my rescue, in a television discussion on Islam. ‘Islam has not’, he further explained, ‘been secularized. This is the great mystery about it. All the other world religions have softened, have permitted the ambiguity of meanings.’ Gellner was right. For those who believe in Islam, the choice is between being Muslim and being nothing: there is no other choice.

Pearls