János Sebeők on the opposition between the Renaissance and Islam

The writer János Sebeők maintains in the weekly supplement to the conservative daily Magyar Nemzet that the legacy of the Renaissance is what separates the West and Islam: "The real opposition isn't between Europe and Islam - or even Christianity and Islam - but between the Renaissance and Islam. Or to put it even more bluntly: between the Renaissance and the rest of the world, that is to say all other cultures. The Renaissance is the purgatory from which all-dominating modernity arose. Neither Islam nor Hinduism nor China experienced this purgatory. And it is literally a purgatory, comprising as it does the stakes and pyres of the Inquisition. I can hear the flames crackling under the feet of [Italian priest and philosopher] Giordano Bruno. ... The soil of the Renaissance ... nourished the Inquistion and the Enlightenment, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, anti-clericalism and fanaticism, rationalism and mass psychosis, capitalism and the values of the Left. ... But Islam has no place within these ranks."

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