The Arab faith, the Arab language, Arab names, the fez: twelve hundred years after the conquest of Sindh, this affirmation of separateness, of imperial and racial and religious authority: there probably has been no imperialism like that of Islam and the Arabs. The Gauls, after five hundred years of Roman rule, could recover their old gods and reverences; those beliefs hadn’t died; they lay just below the Roman surface. But Islam seeks as an article of the faith to erase the past; the believers in the end honour Arabia alone; they have nothing to return to.
