Such are the times we live in that a certain polemical power resides in the calm statement of historical facts: “Democracy is . . . neither new or strange to many Muslims.” Buruma’s elegant short book considers “Religion and Democracy on Three Continents” (US, Europe, Asia) and ranges from America’s first evangelical “great awakening” in the 18th century to Mao’s boasts of burying thousands of scholars and the “rush hour of the gods” in postwar Japan. Voltaire, De Tocqueville, Hume and Spinoza are set talking among themselves, watched over by the book’s éminence grise, Confucius.
Buruma’s guiding principle is secularism, informed by “a certain discretion about the religious beliefs of others”. Along the way, we witness a calm demolition of the scaremongering about “Eurabia” promulgated by certain high-profile cranks on both sides of the Atlantic, and throughout Buruma evinces a telling way with parenthesis – as when he refers to “what we now call ‘Enlightenment values,’ or ‘western values’ (as though these were identical)” – and an amiable attitude of ironical forbearance. Speaking of the rebel Christians of China’s Taiping movement, he writes, sagely: “But within a decade things began to unravel, as they usually do in godly kingdoms on earth.”
