But it was essential that religious debates be conducted “in the most kindly manner,” to quote the Qur’an. A vicious polemic is likely to exacerbate already existing tensions. We have seen that when they feel under attack, fundamentalists almost invariably become more extreme. Hitherto Muslims had little problem with Darwin, but a new hostility toward evolutionary theory is now developing in the Muslim world as a direct response to Dawkins’s attack. In a world that is already so dangerously polarized, can we really afford yet another divisive discourse?
