Kenan Malik points out that fundamentalism is an idea, not a biology.

Secularism and fundamentalism are not ideas stitched into people’s DNA. They are not born so. Secularist ideas and religious beliefs are like any values: people absorb them, accept them, reject them. A generation ago there were strong secular movements within Muslim communities and fundamentalism was a marginal force. Today secularism is much weaker, and Islamism much stronger. This shift has been propelled not by demographic trends but by political developments. And political developments can also help reverse the shift.

Kaufmann doesn’t deny any of this. But, he insists, nothing can stop the inevitable demographic triumph of the fundamentalists. Why? Because ‘we inhabit a period of ideological exhaustion’.

Grayling’s reply to Gray is a much better read.

Anxious to appear original while in fact pushing a familiar counter-Enlightenment line, Gray has often entertained us with his assaults on logic and historical fact, each time repeating the two tenets of his faith, one acquired from Isaiah Berlin and the other from his Sunday school, namely, that we are condemned to live with the conflict between irreconcilable goods, and that we owe everything of significance in human achievement (not, he gloomily adds, that there has been much) to religion.

Concise, sly, cutting, and funny – also accurate. Gray is extraordinarily repetitive and predictable. I knew what his “review” would say before I read it. “Gray has often entertained us” reminds … Read the rest