The anti-religious modernism which now threatens Islam and Muslims everywhere can be fully understood only by understanding the religion of the civilization in whose bosom modernism first developed, against which it rebelled, and whose tenets it has been challenging through constant battle since the birth of the modern world in the Renaissance.

Because Islam, besides coming at the end of the major cycle of revelations, had had an experience of the different religions of the world before modern times. I have always said that Islam is the only religion that had direct contact with nearly all the major families of religions of the world outside of the matrix of modernism.

I believe that modernism itself is based on an error, an error in the understanding of who man is, an error in under- standing the nature of reality both metacosmic and cosmic. Modernism is based on an enormous deception, which is leading us to perdition and destroying the world.

Yes, each religion has to provide instructions for its followers as to how to live in our present- day world. But to take this change itself as the ‘‘principle’’ which should drive us on, as if we were picked up like a horse and driven against our will, that is not only against religion, but also against everything for which the Western ideas of liberty and freedom have stood.