They used to get it (a new series based on old historians)

This is a sequel to my post from Living Religions of the World written in 1956.

A few decades earlier Andre Servier made similar astute observations in ISLAM AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE MUSULMAN (1924).

“To sum up: the Arab has borrowed everything from other nations, literature, art, science, and even his religious ideas. He has passed it all through the sieve of his own narrow mind, and being incapable of rising to high philosophic conceptions, he has distorted, mutilated and desiccated everything. This destructive influence explains the decadence of Musulman nations and their powerlessness to break away from barbarism…”

...

“Islam is Christianity adapted to Arab mentality, or, more exactly, it is all that the unimaginative brain of a Bedouin, obstinately faithful to ancestral practices, has been able to assimilate of the Christian doctrines. Lacking the gift of imagination, the Bedouin copies, and in copying he distorts the original. Thus Musulman law is only the Roman Code revised and corrected by Arabs; in the same way Musulman science is nothing but Greek science interpreted by the Arab brain; and again, Musulman architecture is merely a distorted imitation of the Byzantine style.”

...

“Islam was not a torch, as has been claimed, but an extinguisher. Conceived in a barbarous brain for the use of a barbarous people, it was—and it remains—incapable of adapting itself to civilization. Wherever it has dominated, it has broken the impulse towards progress and checked the evolution of society.”

Now we have MESA professors, Saudi money tainting everything, lawsuits chasing anyone who dare speak the truth about Islamic theology or history, and dhimmi politicians.

I doubt Servier's book will ever see a reprint.