WILLIAM E. CONNOLLYHere I am closer to Strauss along one dimension and critical of both along another.
I think, first, that exclusionary variants of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and atheism could
all profit from going through the Enlightenment and, second, that the secularism emerg-
ing from the Enlightenment is today too unalert to the role that enactment and ritual
play in its own mode of being and too self-confident in projecting a separation between
reason and faith. We need to passthroughthe Enlightenment, in its dominant modes,
coming out at a place that respects its opposition to theocracy while simultaneously mov-
ing beyond the overweaning confidence in reason the two dominant wings within it pur-
sued.^18 If and as you call upon Muslims in Europe and America to be receptive to co-
existence with other faiths on the same territory and across territorial divisions, it is
indispensable to work upon your own faith—theistic or nontheistic—to come to terms
affirmatively with its deep contestability in the hearts and minds of others.
Bennett also believes that both ‘‘we’’ and ‘‘they’’ need to rethink things, but he means
that we need to affirm our superiority more confidently, while they need to admit our
superiority more humbly. When we identify the sources of attacks on us:
Too often we have tacitly accepted a share of that blame, tacitly behaved as if we
needed to ask forgiveness for the weakness and backwardness, the corruption and
evil, that others have brought on themselves and for which they are solely responsible.
If the Islamic world is ever to experience the uplift it has demanded, all this will have
to change—on both sides. They will have to cease rejecting Western civilization and
instead begin to study it; we will have to cease indulging ourselves in guilt and in-
stead, as the writer Shelby Steele has finely put it, ‘‘allow the greatness of Western
civilization to speak for itself.’’^19For Bennett, Arabs should study the greatness of Western civilization, not, however,
as it today unveils itself in film, TV dramas, novels, pop music, the professoriate, many
Protestant Christian churches, and liberal politicians. Its greatness stands against such
relativistic and rootless forces. ‘‘Western civilization’’ functions, in his hands, as a weapon
to wield against traditions outside the Westandthe majority of things that now constitute
the West. He seeks to wage cultural war within ‘‘the West’’ and cultural-military cam-
paigns against Islam outside it.
Bennett does praise Islam in the late Middle Ages. But I can find no moment where
a crack opens to encourage him to listen with new ears to faiths different from those
already on his official register of those to be honored. Cultural pluralism, for him, is not
something you draw upon to open yourself a bit. It is a weapon to wield against places
and faiths that do not conform to the fixed range of diversity you now accept.
The neoconservative policies of invasion and occupation, combined with efforts to
tighten borders and security arrangements at home, both humiliate and outrage many in
the Middle East and turn pluralist democracies against themselves, fostering more closed
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