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Of course some do, and the fact that many of their talented young people are attracted to western culture is a large part of the reason the angry ones in the Islamic world are hostile. And on the other hand, when their writers and thinkers learned things about the west, they do not always look at the more savory aspects of our civilization. They can study anti-westernism in Paris, after all.

Some of the ills of the contemporary Islamic world come from too easy importation of pernicious ideas, which they own culture is less guarded against internally. The jargon of authenticity is imported from 20s and 30s Europe. The Shia fundamentalists are ultramontanes. Syria and Iraq were made tyrannies with the aid of Marxist thought. Said's attacks on western analysis of Islamic history are based on Foucault.

But you may be asking about better reactions. There have been those as well - it is a question of the extent of their influence. Rahman was among the best of them, as a scholar and a farsighted and moderate man. He worked with Lerner on books on medieval philosophy and taught at the University of Chicago. He warned about the shallow tendency to turn Islam into a political slogan and pollute it with justifications of political crimes. Some did useful service in their criticism of wrong-headed ideas in Europe, as when Iqbal turned Nietzsche on his head, by replacing the will to power with love, reversing the many propositions that changes in the structure of Nietzche's thought, and calling the result a consistent idealism.

There are many threads of thought and influence between the two civilizations. But the issues in the article are the central ones. Ghazali's historical influence has been immense, especially on the Islamic mainstream of Sunni, orthodox thought. His skepticism largely crippled indigenous science, which previously had been flourishing. His emphasis on the authority of revelation and the uncertainty of interpretation undermines any settled authority for rational, non-religious law.

Chesterton once said the most vital freedom is the freedom of man to think, meaning by it not absence of repression but the belief that human thoughts matter. In philosophy, skepticism destroys this, where even pragmaticim preserves it sufficiently. In theology, literalism destroys this, where even the most centralised authority allowed interpretation preserves it sufficiently. These issues are still live ones in our own civilization. We usually overlook how much we owe to these arguments not being settled, and in favor of the less fruitful sides.