We must begin with an uncomfortable truth: civilization, for all its cathedrals, minarets, pyramids, and pagodas, is not built on faith. It is built on the tempering of faith — that subtle, marvelous ability to hold our gods and our reason in separate hands without crushing either. When we fail at this, when religion takes command of the state and claims the totality of human experience, it leads not to heavenly bliss but to earthly carnage. History, which is nothing if not a patient tutor, has demonstrated this over and over again.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Middle East today. A region that once birthed mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and literature now languishes under the suffocating grip of clerical authoritarianism. This is not the faith of ordinary believers going quietly about their prayers, but the weaponization of belief into a form of political tyranny. It is a tyranny that turns holy texts into instruments of fear, that thrives on the persecution of minorities, and that chokes the very intellectual freedom that once made the Islamic world a beacon of learning.

The truth, which we all know but dare not speak, is that the Middle East needs an Enlightenment. Not a superficial nod to Western ideas, but a genuine, internal revolution of reason — one that will allow its people to separate the altar from the throne, the mosque from the state, the pulpit from the seat of power. Until this happens, no amount of foreign policy, oil revenue, or diplomacy will save the region from the cycles of fanaticism that have rendered its politics so poisonous.

Europe was not always the confident, secular powerhouse it is today. We tend to forget that, for centuries, the continent was a bloody chessboard of religious wars, inquisitions, and witch burnings. One must only recall the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which left much of Central Europe a smoldering ruin, its fields soaked with the blood of millions, all in the name of which variety of Christianity would dominate. When kings ruled by “divine right” and priests dictated law, Europe’s progress was........

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