Auschwitz was a dark epiphany, providing us with a terrible vision of what life is like when all sense of the sacred is lost and the human being — wh… - Karen Armstrong

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.

Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in practice to give the faithful a sense of sacred transcendence.

The new radical Islam is not simply inspired by the hatred of the West, however. Nor is it in any sense a homogeneous movement. Radical Muslims are primarily concerned to put their own house in order and to address the cultural dislocation that many have experienced in the modern period.It is really impossible to generalize about the rise of this more extreme form of the religion. It not only differs from country to country, but from town to town and from village to village. People feel cut off from their roots: Western culture has invaded the interstices of their lives.