Nipped into a bookstore yesterday to kill some time before seeing a film ("The Simpsons Movie," if you must know), and saw book after book about Islam and the West, most arguing that Islam has never been and never will be our friend - whoever "we" are. They have incendiary titles like America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within and Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West. On the new religion books table I found Religion of Peace? Islam's War Against the World. And today's New York Times Magazine's cover story (below) told a similar story, a bit more worldly wise but as emphatic in asserting that there is a coherent "we" threatened by an irreducibly foreign "them" and equally pessimistic about the possibility of rapprochement, 
let alone the discovery or rediscovery or creation of common traditions or values. This article at least had pretty pictures: photos by Thomas Struth, like the one above (though it's actually out of place because as shows that "we" sometimes do go to church.)What's all this about, besides an obvious bonanza for publishers and pundits? Did I miss something during my year in Australia? Is this background to why "we" should give up on Iraq, or can't afford to? Judging from the front tables at Readings on Lygon Street, the big issue was the atheist retort to religion per se, especially religion in the west: The God Delusion, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Letter to a Christian Nation: A Challenge to Faith, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism and Islam. But of course: Australia is a culturally post-religious place, as mystified and disturbed by American religiosity as by any other, while religion's alive and well in America. To Aussies and atheists all religion's suspect, but for "us" it's only Islam...?
