The surest test of one's understanding of a text in another language is translating it into one's own. - Bernard Lewis

Europe will be part of the Arab West, the Maghreb. This is what migration will mean for demography. Europeans marry late and have little or no children. But it has strong immigration: Turks in Germany, Arabs in France and Pakistanis in England. They marry early and have many children. According to the current trends Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population at the end of the 21st century at the latest.

I think that the way that Ahmadinejad is talking now shows quite clearly his contempt for the Western world in general and the United States in particular. They feel they are dealing with, as Osama bin Laden put it, an effete, degenerate, pampered enemy incapable of real resistance. And they are proceeding on that assumption. Remember that they have no understanding or experience of the free debate of an open society. Where we see free debate and criticism, they see fear, weakness and division; they proceed accordingly, and every day brings new evidence of that from Iran.

The attitude to black Africans remains on the whole negative. Some Muslim authors give balanced and factual accounts, based on personal knowledge, of the black kingdoms; a few even write pious treatises to defend the dark peoples against their detractors. Such defense was clearly felt to be necessary, because of the survival of old prejudices. Even the great geographer Idrisi, in concluding his account of the first climate (geographical zone) with some general remarks on its inhabitants, repeats the old cliches about furrowed feet and stinking sweat and ascribes "lack of knowledge and defective minds" to the black peoples. Their ignorance, he says, is notorious; men of learning and distinction are almost unknown among them, and their kings only acquire what they know about government and justice from the instruction of learned visitors from farther north. The thirteenth-century Persian writer Nasir al-Din Tusi remarks that the Zanj differ from animals only in that "their two hands are lifted above the ground" and continues, "Many have observed that the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanji."