When the Diseased Spirituality of Watery Post-Christian Secularism…

…meets the diseased spirituality of Islam, you get stuff like this what this reader encounters:

My newest project with the company I work for is helping computers match Arabic names. So I thought I’d pick up a couple of handy references on the alphabet and the language. Thanks to this, I ran across this truly hilarious paragraph, which despite opening with, “In order to understand the Arab world and the Middle East…”, does nothing other than medicate the sensibilities of irreligious Westerners.

*Cultural Note: Religion in the Arab World*

In order to understand the Arab world and the Middle East, you need look no further than the Arabic language to see that religion plays a major role in the culture. Religion is woven into the daily fabric of Middle Eastern society on both a personal and a public level, and this fact is reflected in the Arabic language. Many of the simplest greetings are related in some way to God. Most official state events begin with a reference to God of some sort. Most boardroom meetings begin with a short prayer. At first glance, this may seem strange, especially to people who are not particularly religious. But don’t interpret the frequent references to God as religious fanaticism. Instead, for most Arabs, they simply reflect a broad cultural awareness of Islam, which literally means to surrender to something greater than oneself. Mainstream Islam, like the mainstream varieties of other religions, is peaceful and tolerant, and references to God have developed in the Arab language to remind religious people of something greater than any one person. But of course Arabic speakers, like any other people, are not all religious; so, for many people these expressions can be thought of as similar to exclaiming “God bless you!” after someone has sneezed. They are simply a fixed part of the language.

(Amine Bouchentouf. *Arabic: A Simple Step-By-Step Course for Beginners. Random House Living Language Series, 2008.)

Not that we’re suggesting that there really might be anything greater than any one person, or anything.