but the Islamic world, after Europe had invaded it politically and culturally, has come to bow before these blood-soaked, ethnic and nationalistic partisanships, accepting them as an academic axiom, a settled fact, an inescapable reality. Its peoples hurl themselves, with astonishing fervor, into reviving the very loyalties that Islam once laid to rest—chanting their slogans, resurrecting their rituals, and boasting of a pre-Islamic era that Islam insists on calling jāhiliyya, the Age of Ignorance. Allah has graciously delivered the Muslims from that darkness and has urged them to thank Him for this favor.

By nature, a believer should recall any period of jāhiliyya, however distant or recent, only with loathing, aversion and a shiver of disgust. Does a former prisoner who was once tortured remember the days of his detention, torment and degradation without feeling his skin crawl? Does a man who has recovered from a long, deadly illness—one that nearly claimed his life—recall the days of his sickness without his mind clouding over and the color draining from his face? (1) It must therefore be understood that