W. Robert Godfrey

and had memorized the Koran, could recite any part of the Koran you wanted recited in Arabic.

Because you can't really translate the Koran.

I mean, you can translate it, but translations never really count.

You can't have much assurance that a translation works.

Only the original Arabic text is authoritative.

And he said, Westerners often say, well, Islam is so difficult for women and so oppressive to women.

He said, the reason that Islam survives and flourishes is because the women support it so passionately.

And I'm not sure of all the psychology of that, whether it's simply the stability that it seems to bring to life, the practices that are so clear and reassuring.

But this was a religion of tremendous power, but not just a religion.

And that's what we have increasingly learned, I think, recent decades in the West.

It is a religion that is also a culture.

The two are

indistinguishable.

They cannot be separated from one another, and that's why Islam believes that wherever it spreads, it must take not only its religion but its whole set of cultural values and laws, that they are indivisible, the culture and the religion, and they have a strong eschatology.

that where Islam spreads, it will never retreat.

And that's why it's so hard for them to recognize the loss of any land to any other person.

And that's what the West, the Christian West, faced throughout almost all the Middle Ages, as Islam would, in wave after wave, sometime in between, beat against the Christian West.

As some in the West felt, well, the empire seems to be disappearing.

There seems to be a decentralization of civilization occurring.

There does seem to be a loss of some of the old Roman structures of society.