To A Secular Cynic Poem by Rafey Habib

You think you are modern.
You think you are tolerant, humane, enlightened
Beyond the benighted reign
Of other-worldly groping
After false hope and certainty.
You think you are practical, pragmatic, cool,
Scientific, true heir of Enlightenment, breathing
Only rational air.

But your modernity is old, foretold, foregone
In Aquinas and John Donne, Ibn Sina and Ibn
Rushd, al-Ghazzali and many more; your
Tolerance ends sharply at the blade of difference, a
Name for fear of all but conformity.
You think you think for your
Self but you have no
Idea where your ideas were made; your
Pragmatism a code (read Dante) for expedience,
Convenience, and absence of all value. You believe
Nothing, and your morals - if any - come
From the dark night from which you think you have
Emerged. The sun in whose dazzling you drown yourself
Is the bland light of indifference, of ignorance.
Your humanity, your science rest on
Blind, abstract, dog-eared
Devotion.