Andrew Bostom:
Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) was a British-Czech philosopher and social anthropologist. His anthropological interests extended to Islamdom, notably the 1981 study Muslim Society. In 1995, an obituarist described Gellner as a “defender of positivism, empiricism and rationalism,” who, “with cold clarity” and “sternness” critiqued “…religious and leftist seekers after umma…linguistic philosophy, relativism, psychoanalysis, and post-modernism.”
Here are Gellner’s apposite, and characteristically unapologetic observations on the unique, striking resistance of Islamic societies to secularization, circa 1991, ever more relevant, two decades later as the Spingtime for Sharia in Araby proceeds apace:
