It's just a throwaway line in a larger story but here's another sign of Islam's brittleness:
"This land has had a great history for thousands of years that pre-dates Islam," I said."Yes," Nadir answered, "an immoral history."
I had never heard of such a thing, but Nadir's idea, like Khaldun's, was part of Islam's all-encompassing nature. If you had it, you needed nothing else. "If I find one thing," Nadir said, "one thing that the Koran doesn't cover, I will renounce the faith." But Nadir could never find that one thing because Islam served as the source of everything. Unlike Even, I was beginning to feel that this, not the hedonism of the west, was the real problem of limits.