We are accustomed to talking of church and state, and a whole series of pairs of words that go with them lay and ecclesiastical, secular and religiou… - Bernard Lewis

The movement nowadays called fundamentalism is not the only Islamic tradition. There are others, more tolerant, more open, that helped to inspire the great achievements of Islamic civilization in the past, and we may hope that these other traditions will in time prevail. But before this issue is decided there will be a hard struggle, in which we of the West can do little or nothing. Even the attempt might do harm, for these are issues that Muslims must decide among themselves. And in the meantime we must take great care on all sides to avoid the danger of a new era of religious wars, arising from the exacerbation of differences and the revival of ancient prejudices.
To this end we must strive to achieve a better appreciation of other religious and political cultures, through the study of their history, their literature, and their achievements. At the same time, we may hope that they will try to achieve a better understanding of ours, and especially that they will understand and respect, even if they do not choose to adopt for themselves, our Western perception of the proper relationship between religion and politics.

In the Islamic world, from the beginning, Islam was the primary basis of both identity and loyalty. We think of a nation subdivided into religions. They think, rather, of a religion subdivided into nations. It is the ultimate definition, the prime definition and the one that determines, as I said, not only identity, but also basic loyalty. And this is quite independent of religious belief. In Islam, there isn't or rather, there wasn't until recently any such thing as the church, in the Christian sense of that word. The mosque is a place of worship. It's a building, a place of worship and study. And in that sense, it is the equivalent of the church. But in the sense of an institution with a hierarchy and its own laws and usages, there was no such thing in Islam until very recently. And one of the achievements of the Islamic Revolution in Iran has been to endow an Islamic country for the first time with the equivalents of a pope, a college of cardinals, a bench of bishops and, above all, an inquisition. All these were previously unknown and nonexistent in the Islamic world.

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."