Daily Inspiration Quote by John Keegan

Keegan is doing two things at once: puncturing a modern Western fantasy of Islam as an eternally “hot” political force, and revealing how quickly that puncturing slides into condescension. The line “nobody bothered about it” isn’t neutral description; it’s a tell about gaze. Islam’s supposed “poorness” is measured less by internal vitality than by whether European empires, diplomats, or journalists found it strategically interesting. In that frame, a religion becomes an index of great-power attention.

The phrasing is loaded with empire-era anthropology. “That funny sort of pure system of beliefs” casts Islam as quaintly abstract and oddly untouched by history, which is precisely the opposite of how Muslims in the 18th-20th centuries experienced it: as law, learning, ritual, reform, dispute, and community under pressure from colonization, modernization, and the collapse of old polities. “Depressed people in the Middle East” makes socioeconomic and political devastation sound like a cultural personality trait, flattening a vast geography into a mood.

Context matters: Keegan wrote in the long shadow of the Iranian Revolution, the Afghan jihad, and then post-9/11 fixation, when Islam was being rebranded in Western discourse from “background religion” to “civilizational antagonist.” His intent is partly corrective - reminding readers that today’s visibility isn’t timeless. The subtext, though, is the historian’s temptation to narrate other societies as dormant until history, meaning the West, “bothers” with them. The quote works as provocation, but it also exposes the blind spot it tries to critique.