Enlightenment’s Islam: A “Necessary Fiction”
…ued to echo throughout Enlightenment culture. When Napoleon’s army invaded Egypt in 1798, the Muslim world’s moment of “first contact” with the modern West, its better-read officers would have known Condorcet’s Progress of the Human Mind. Published just three years earlier, it singled out Islam among the world’s religions as “the simplest in its dogmas, the least absurd in its practices, and the most tolerant in its principles.” Faith in progress…
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