Here’s the text of the speech given by former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami at the Washington National Cathedral: WNC: Khatami Lecture.

I don’t recommend trying to read the whole thing unless you need a sleeping aid.

He doesn’t rave about jihad or call the United States a terrorist nation; he’s smarter than that. The speech is a weird mix of new age spiritualism and Islamic supremacism, Edward Said by way of Deepak Chopra by way of Noam Chomsky. The hatred of the West is there, but it’s disguised as a sophomore philosophy student’s midterm paper.

Khatami says the West started going wrong with the Renaissance, and it’s been a downhill run ever since.

The Renaissance-era intellectuals and thinkers defined human beings in a different light. Instead of turning his back to the world and despising material life as the primordial human being had done, the newly defined man was an individual who turned to the world and material life. Thus, the human being became the subject of a new religion.

In its turn, worldly life embraced this new creature. The mutual acceptance and admiration of man and the world by each other is the most remarkable peculiarity of the Renaissance legacy. In its essence, this extraordinary religious event started with the purpose of reforming religion, rather than opposing it or pushing it to the background. Yet in its historical development, this process deviated from its original objectives.

Man’s success in controlling the world did not stop there. Rather, it turned into aggression and domination that extended beyond the world of nature and to human societies as well. The development that came to be known as colonialism, and was the natural outcome of the domination of modern science over nature, was extended to human sciences as well. The extreme reaction against the absolute domination of the church over man in the Middle Ages, and the denial of his fundamental rights and freedoms, led to another extreme reaction in the form of an encounter between faith and reason in modern times. In the new environment that was created instrumental rationality confronted faith. As a result, man showed utmost effort to dominate not only nature; but also once this was accomplished, the strong established dominance over weak societies. After the establishment of what we know as Western Civilization, we witnessed the emergence of a belief in both the dominance of that civilization and in the integration of other civilizations or the remnants of other civilizations into a unified Western one.

Got that?

The West, you see, suffers from an over-reliance on reason, and only Islam can save the world.

The West, being the greatest victim of over- reliance on reason, is seeking the help of intellectuals and philosophers to deprive reason of every credit and privilege that was once bestowed upon it.

“An over-reliance on reason” is now one of our LGF rotating titles.