David Warren. A must read.

The moral order of Islam, while it overlaps with Judaism, Christianity, and all of the world’s “great religions” in many crucial respects, is nevertheless unique in its emphases. Building upon such essentially tribal values as trust, honour, manliness, loyalty, the duty of hospitality, it builds a moral order in which, I will dare to say, justice is the pre-eminent value. And it is justice, beyond all other values, that is demanded in the confrontation between the Muslim and the world, between the insiders of the Islamic family and the outsiders — the people who still live beyond the Islamic “realm of peace”.

How radically different from the Christian worldview, itself deriving from the Jewish, in which, from its own Gospel beginnings, the worldly virtues are presented as written into the natural order, accessible to all whether Christian or not, so that it is quite possible for a non-Christian to be a good and worthy man. Or, turning this over, in its full universal implications, Christ proclaims that there can be no justice in this world — only in heaven. Every single one of Christ’s parables hinges not on justice but on truth, and at the center of the Christian revelation is this uncanny statement, “That you shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free.”