What William Butler Yeats might say about the reality of Contemporary Islam.*

March 2020

What need you, being come to sense,

But fumble in a greasy till

And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer, until

You have dried the marrow from the bone;

For men were born to pray and save:

Romantic Islam’s dead and gone,

It’s with Muhammad in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,

The names that stilled your childish play,

They have gone about the world like wind,

But little time had they to pray

For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,

And what, God help us, could they save?

Romantic Islam’s dead and gone,

It’s with Muhammad in the grave.

Was it for this the Sahaba spread

The grey wing upon every tide;

For this that all that blood was shed,

For this Salahudin died,

And Abu-Bakr and Uthman,

All that delirium of the brave?

Romantic Islam’s dead and gone,

It’s with Muhammad in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,

And call those exiles as they were

In all their loneliness and pain,

You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair

Has maddened every mother’s son’:

They weighed so lightly what they gave.

But let them be, they’re dead and gone,

They’re with Muhammad in the grave.


*poem adapted from "September 1913" by William Butler Yeats.