I agree with Kenan Malik on this:
what we now regard as "Western values" – individual rights, secularism, freedom of speech – are modern values, distinct from those that animated European societies in the past. And it's not just medieval Europeans who would reject contemporary European values. Many contemporary Europeans do too. The British writer Melanie Phillips is militantly hostile to what she sees as the "Islamic takeover of the West" and what she calls "the drift towards social suicide" that comes with accepting Muslim immigration. Yet she is deeply sympathetic to the Islamist rejection of secular humanism, which she thinks has created "a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets." Muslims "have concluded that the society that expects them to identify with it is a moral cesspit", Phillips argues. "Is it any wonder, therefore, that they reject it?" Caldwell, too, thinks that while the West's current encounter with Islam may be "painful and violent", it has also been, "an infusion of oxygen into the drab, nitpicking, materialist intellectual life of the West", for which we need to express our "gratitude".
There is, in other words, no single set of European values that transcends history in opposition to Islamic values. Nor indeed is there a single set of western values today. The very values against which radical Islamists rail – the values of secular humanism – are the very values that so disgust some of Islam's greatest critics.
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