Readers coming to the Guide of the Perplexed for the first time may find themselves perplexed by the work’s opening sections. Perhaps expecting some profound pearls of wisdom about God, the world or human nature, what they discover instead is a long series of entries – over three-dozen chapters – on Hebrew semantics and etymology, along with exegeses of passages from the Hebrew Bible (also called TaNaKh, the Hebrew acronym for the Pentateuch/Torah, the texts of the prophets/Nevi’im, and other writings/Ketuvim). Chapters are devoted to the ambiguity of such mundane words as “foot,” “eye,” “standing and “sitting,” “rock,” and “touch.” Maimonides explains how the Hebrew word for “eat” can refer both to the taking in of food by living beings and to any kind of destruction or undoing, and that “face” can signify either the familiar front part of the head or emotional states like “anger and wrath” (as in “He set his face against them”).

In the prologue to the Book of Job, we are told that the eponymous protagonist of the story is a blameless and upright man (in Hebrew, tam ve-yashar), that he fears God and turns away from wrongdoing. When Job’s tribulations begin, he accepts them unshaken in his faith and unwilling to speak ill of God. “If we accept good from God, shall we not accept evil?” (Job 2:10). As his losses mount, however, it is, ultimately, all too much even for him. When Job is finally overcome by his suffering, when he has been robbed of everything that was dear to him, when all seems lost, he raises his voice to complain to God about the way he, a righteous individual, has been treated. While Job recognizes God’s wisdom and power, he nonetheless questions God’s justice. God, he insists, “rains blows on me without cause … He destroys blameless and wicked alike” (Job 9:17–22).

This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of Pascal’s legacy, his renown and neglect throughout the centuries, and his profound influence on philosophy, science, religion, and much else. The metholodgy of this book is then addressed: the aim is not primarily exegesis, though there will be plenty of that too. Rather, the aim of the book is to argue that there is much in Pascal’s work that is philosophically relevant to us today. Our cultural, social, political, and technological moment requires a deep look at our natures and aims, and this is what Pascal’s philosophy can offer, if we can get past the sometimes obscure theological disputes he was engaged in and the fragmentary nature of his writings. An overview of the book’s chapters is then provided.

The question “Why read X today?” can legitimately be raised with respect to any premodern thinker, major or minor, in the history of philosophy, and many modern ones as well. Why, one might ask, should we continue to be interested in what philosophers who are so distant from us in time and circumstance had to say? The question is especially acute with respect to those who were writing out of very different concerns and for very different audiences, and whose ideas are uninformed by any philosophical developments (whether new solutions to old questions or new questions altogether) that may have occurred after their time. Indeed, it is not difficult to find contemporary philosophers suggesting that a knowledge of the history of philosophy is irrelevant, and perhaps a genuine hindrance, to doing philosophy – much as scientists might argue that a knowledge of the history of science is irrelevant to doing science – and that perhaps the only reason to learn what earlier thinkers had to say is either to avoid reinventing the wheel or out of purely antiquarian interest.

This chapter explores Pascal’s skeptical outlook, highlighting his innovations as well as his reliance on older, more familiar arguments. To begin with, Pascal thought that reason itself could not provide the foundations or first principles of geometry or our knowledge of space. These first principles are not only unsupportable by any proof, so that reason itself provides them no certainty, but they in turn provide materials for further uncertainty given potential infinities in space – both the largeness and smallness of space seems to have no bounds. The result is that we cannot, by appeal to reason alone, find our place within the physical universe. Similarly, and contra Descartes, no proof of God can guarantee that life is not one long dream, so belief in the external world itself cannot be supported by reason. Nor can our experience of the world prove the existence of God in any useful way. The result is that our reason and experience, operating on their own, are insufficient to establish much of anything foundational. The appeal to proofs and evidence cannot resolve other controversies of our day, either, as anyone who has tried to convince a conspiracy theorist by such methods will know.

This chapter demonstrates that South African-based security research institutes (think-tanks) and the popular media are key actors in the construction of Islamophobia. These actors are often complicit in representing African Muslims and Islam as sources of terror and terrorism. The chapter shows that think-tanks and the media manufacture terrorism knowledge and expertise in support of the so-called global ‘War on Terror’ in ways that are consistent with western discourses on Islamophobia. They represent Muslims’ identity in static and negative terms to exclude them from the constructed ‘We’. Using securitisation theory as a theoretical lens, the chapter confirms that South African think-tanks and media have manufactured Muslims as a security threat and have created a climate of widespread fear of Muslims that has the potential to justify anti-Muslim racism or anti-Islamic prejudice – Islamophobia. Drawing on Samuel Hunting’s so-called ‘Clash of Civilizations Thesis’, both the local media and think-tanks represent Muslims as violent, dangerous, suicidal, irrational, and barbaric. In contrast, these actors characterise Western civilisation and practices as good and virtuous. In its totality the chapter contends that, as integral to and a continuation of coloniality, the South African media and think-tanks are central actors in the propagation of Islamophobia in Africa.

Islamophobia is a term that frequently describes anti-Muslim racism, as well as the ‘Othering’ of the Muslims in settler societies and European nations from the global North. Increasingly, the term Islamophobia has been used to describe systemic racism and anti-Muslim violence from the global South. This chapter investigates the phenomenon of Islamophobia in Myanmar, which culminated in the Rohingya genocide in August 2017. The accusation of genocide has been denied by the state of Myanmar. Furthermore, recent violence against the Rohingya has been sanitised as an unfortunate consequence of the War on Terror. This chapter examines both institutional Islamophobia, as well as Islamophobia enacted by private actors in Myanmar. The central argument in this analysis demonstrates that the co-dependent relationship between institutional and interpersonal Islamophobia since military rule in Myanmar, in the absence of a strong and unified resistance, contributed to the genocide. This analysis provides insights into the troubling logic used to defend the state-sponsored violence and killing of Rohingya in post-democratic Myanmar and its relationship to the War on Terror.