Will Durant Answers Reckless Florida Pastor

Normally, I shy away from sectarian religious controversies. But in the case of the Florida pastor who ridiculously put the Koran "on trial," an exception to the policy is well-justified.

The historian Will Durant, himself a one-time divinity student, puts forth in his book, The Age of Faith, what is needed now. In prose which is akin to poetry, Durant sparks the imagination and flames of hope ensue:

As many Christian historians (always excepting Gibbon) can write medieval histories in which all Islamic civilization is a brief appendage to the Crusades, so many Moslem historians reduced world history before Islam to a halting preparation for Mohammed. But how can a Western mind ever judge an Oriental justly? The beauty of the Arab language fades in translation like a flower cut from its roots; and the topics that fill the pages of Moslem historians, fascinating to their countrymen, seem aridly remote from the natural interests of Occidental readers, who have not realized how the economic interdependence of peoples ominously demands a mutual study and understanding of East and West.

-- The Age of Faith, p. 239