Time & Perspective Quote by Aly Khan

Aly Khan’s line has the polite cadence of diplomacy, but its aim is corrective, even accusatory: Christianity’s coolness toward Islam isn’t framed as theological inevitability or civilizational fate. It’s framed as a failure of attention. By blaming “lack of knowledge,” he turns centuries of antagonism into an avoidable misunderstanding, a move that both disarms his audience and quietly indicts it. The sentence flatters Christian listeners with an escape hatch (you’re not hostile, you’re uninformed) while insisting the burden is on them to learn.

The rhetoric is carefully asymmetrical. He doesn’t say Islam has misunderstood Christianity; he says Christianity has withheld “intimacy, affection, and regard” from Islam. Those are relational words, not policy words, implying that the real rupture is emotional and cultural, sustained in everyday attitudes as much as in crusades, colonial administrations, and missionary narratives. “Great human and spiritual ideals” is strategic vagueness: it invites agreement before specifics can provoke disagreement. He’s not litigating doctrine; he’s selling Islam’s moral seriousness in a language that mid-century Western publics could recognize.

Context matters: speaking from a public-service posture in the era of decolonization, Aly Khan is addressing an audience shaped by imperial histories and postwar institutions that preached internationalism while still carrying old hierarchies. The quote’s intent is bridge-building, but not the soft kind. It’s a demand that “regard” be extended to Islam as a fully formed spiritual civilization, not merely a geopolitical problem or an exotic other.