Friedrich --

The brilliant Roger Scruton has a book on Islam and the west coming out shortly, onsale at Amazon here. This week, National Review Online is running a series of excerpts from it. Installments so far: here, here, and here.

Sample passage:

People in the West live in a public space in which each person is surrounded and protected by his rights, and where all behavior that poses no obvious physical threat is permitted. But people in Muslim countries live in a space that is shared but private, where nobody is shielded by his rights from communal judgment, and where communal judgment is experienced as the judgment of God. Western habits, Western morals, Western art, music, and television are seen not as freedoms but as temptations. And the normal response to temptation is either to give in to it, or to punish those who offer it.

Best,

Michael