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I became increasingly aware of an absorbing desire to know what it was that lay at the root of this emotional security and made Arab life so different from the European:
the problem for man is not how to suppress the demands of his body but, rather, how to co-ordinate them with the demands of his spirit in such a way that life might become full and righteous.
the recognition that whatever has happened had to happen in this particular way and could have happened in no other - that is so often mistaken by Westerners for a 'fatalism' inherent in the Islamic outlook. But a Muslim's acquiescence to fate relates to the past and not to the future: it is not a refusal to act, to hope and to improve, but a refusal to consider past reality as anything but an act of God.
It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any short-comings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it.
It was an answer: an answer so decisive that all doubt was suddenly at an end. I knew now, beyond any doubt, that it was a God-inspired book I was holding in my hand: for although it had been placed before man over thirteen centuries ago, it clearly anticipated something that could have become true only in this complicated, mechanized, phantom-ridden age of ours.
