I'm re-reading again! Keyes: Beyond Identity.

The book this time is Dick Keyes' Beyond Identity, from 1984!

It has both aged and remains current. The specifics have moved on, the underlying structures of society and people's impulses remain constant.

He writes:

Before the fall, man saw himself as under God, bearing God's image and deriving his sense of identity and coherence from God. But now he identifies himself with creation instead of its Creator. His whole orientation is downward towards what is less than himself, rather than upward toward what is greater. This change of orientation has many psychological results.

In general we have moved from a Covenental 'religion' or understanding of the world, of what is independently real (Clauser) to a mimetic framing (Westphal) which seeks to merge man into the creation.

Many people follow this paganization of humanity in general and the self in particular wherein one has to conjure one's own 'identity' bereft of an external reference. Futile, of course, as personhood is absorbed into the creation rather than expanded into the 'imageness' of the Creator.

Thus, where we are culturally. 

Why the West, late of Christian ethos, is easily led

Western chauvinistic arrogance both obsesses and drives the left to disdain Islam, the Islam of its own terms, and seeks to apply Western-left categories to it.

Thus its categories are wrong, its terms are wrong and its ethos is wrong when it comes to Islam: a complete failure to understand and without the humility to admit so.

It's complete misunderstanding is in a move of implicit hubristic cultural imperialism that produces a Westernized conception of Islam as merely another mystical irrelevance expressed in cute (!) dress habits, prayer get-togethers parties at Ramadan and a generally incomprehensible book.

In fact, the largely, but not exclusively left conception denies Islam's own internal systems of significance, reducing it to superficialities and narrow diagnostics of Western(-left) interest. Denigrating Islam as it does so.

OTOH those ware of Islam do take it seriously and in its own terms. They actually respect Islam and accept what it claims to drive its culture, ambitions and obsessions.