Winning the Modern World for Islam – Translator’s Forword
The present translation now extends this profoundly powerful message to readers of English. The French title has a degree of shock value -as the singular inversion of the secularist phrase moderniser l’islam (“modernizing Islam”)- that cannot be reproduced in English. “Islamicizing” is no more at home in English than “Christianizing” or “Hinduizing,” and “modernity” is similarly fuzzy. Translating a serious and important argument is not an appropriate occasion for coining novel and ambiguous phrases. The operative sense of islamiser is “to convert to, to transform by means of, Islam,” “to make something or someone Islamic.”