It would seem that neither numbers nor majority status alone are enough to define a nation's religious identity. According to common statistics, there are more Muslims in America than there are in Bahrain, Kuwait and other countries commonly considered Muslim.

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The great Spanish Muslim, Ibn Hazm, once wrote that the most consistent feature of human life is anxiety. Anxiety, he argued, traversed race, gender and social status, all religions, cultures and philosophical commitments.

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The great Spanish Muslim, Ibn Hazm, once wrote that the most consistent feature of human life is anxiety. Anxiety, he argued, traversed race, gender and social status, all religions, cultures and philosophical commitments.

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My understanding of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has always been that “knowledge” -- in his case scientific knowledge – constitutes more of a horseshoe that we tend to treat as a fully closed circle.

In the space between the two extremes of the horseshoe, there are always “counterfactuals” that our theory can’t quite explain. Ultimately, when the number of counterfactuals grows to the point that the theory’s explanatory power falls below the level of effort it takes to sustain the theory itself, it is exchanged for another theory, and thus we get a scientific revolution. Ultimately, however, this too will be a horseshoe that we treat as a circle. And thus the cycle continues.

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