Success Quote by Carroll Quigley

Quigley’s sentence performs a neat bit of intellectual triage: it treats Islam less as a self-contained tradition than as the “third” installment in a Near Eastern monotheistic series, then grades it on two separate report cards: theology (monotheism) and ethics (a “version” of Jewish and Christian moral teaching). The form is coolly academic, but the subtext is loaded. By calling Islamic ethics a derivative “version,” he quietly denies it interpretive originality, casting Islam as a transmission belt for earlier moral systems rather than a producer of its own moral vocabulary. That choice of framing matters because it smuggles a hierarchy into what sounds like a neutral chronology.

The key rhetorical move is the split between belief and behavior: monotheism spreads “very successfully,” ethics only “moderately.” It’s a classic civilizational diagnosis, the kind mid-20th-century grand synthesizers loved, where history becomes a story of ideas failing to fully civilize a people presumed resistant. The phrase “to the Arabs” narrows a global faith to an ethnic target, echoing an older Western habit of reading Islam primarily as an Arab project, then using that reduction to explain away complexity and diversity in legal, philosophical, and devotional developments.

Contextually, Quigley wrote in an era when comparative religion in Anglophone scholarship often leaned on evolutionary models: earlier religions supply the ethical template; later ones succeed or fail at dissemination. The sentence’s polite tone masks a blunt judgment: Islam’s greatest triumph was doctrinal simplicity, while its moral program, in his telling, didn’t fully take. That’s not just analysis; it’s a verdict dressed as taxonomy.