The European history of ecclesiastical withdrawal from secular politics and from secular intellectual problems to specialized religious spheres is the history of this whole movement from primitive to modern.
Purity and Danger, by Mary Douglas, p 115.
Yet she claims that Muslims are not primitive (p 114). I'm not sure she's right, indeed one could argue that Eastern Orthodox Christians have not made the same secularizing moves that she rightly recalls in European history. This is not to belittle Muslims or Orthodox, but rather to point out how shaky the foundations of 'modernism' are.
--AD
