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February 2010 – Christianity and Islam. They are the world’s two largest religions and quite similar in important ways, not the least of which is a core belief that its tenets are to be spread throughout the world.

Historically, the two religions have been competitors, each wrestling with the other for influence over entire cultures and over the destiny of the souls of men and women.

While it may have seemed that Western power – built, in large part, by Christianity – had settled the contest, a revival of sorts within Islam has once again made the outcome unclear.

A religion birthed in conquest
Immediately after Islam’s founding in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century, the religion began to spread – at the point of the sword. Islam swept through and claimed as its own some of the most Christianized lands on earth – the Middle East, Northern Africa and much of Asia Minor. During that century and the next, Islam also spread through Persia into India.

According to terrorism and Middle East expert Walid Phares in his book, The War of Ideas: Jihadism Against Democracy, Islam conquered in response to a powerful marching order: “bring all peoples under the word of Allah.”

It quickly became the assumption of the adherents of Islam that the entire world was destined to submit to the rule of Allah and the message of the Prophet Muhammad.

Despite a few setbacks, Islam made tremendous strides. Muslims had taken seriously the call of Allah to bring all the world into subjection to the religion of the Prophet. There was a vibrant transnational Islamic civilization, which in the view of many historians far surpassed the Christian civilization of medieval Europe. Moreover, there existed the umma, the “universal community” of the followers of Islam, with a sense of common destiny among Muslims worldwide.

Islam in crisis
Then things began to change. According to Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington in his seminal work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, the tide began to turn in the 15th century, beginning with the Reconquista – the final step in the reconquest of Iberia by Christian kingdoms. A series of Muslim defeats followed.

“The Ottomans subsequently made one last push forward, besieging Vienna again in 1683,” he said. “Their failure there marked the beginning of a long retreat.”

Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, Western powers used their increasing wealth and military dominance to continue to carve out for themselves chunks of Muslim land.

The final blow seemed to occur following World War I, when the Ottoman Empire, having entered the war on what would be the losing side, was divided as spoil among the victors. Only the secular Republic of Turkey was allowed to remain.

Huntington’s reference to “a long retreat” was just that. According to Daniel Pipes, author of In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power, between 1757 and 1919 non-Muslim powers acquired 92 Muslim territories through Western colonial conquest.

“By 1920 only four Muslim countries – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan – remained independent of some form of non-Muslim rule,” Huntington said.

The Western conquest of lands once controlled by Muslims, even over the course of centuries, was a shock to Islamic self-perception. How could Allah have willed the ransacking of dar el Islam, the “house of Islam,” by infidels?

Resurgence of Islam
Huntington noted, “[A]cross the centuries the fortunes of the two religions have risen and fallen in a sequence of momentous surges, pauses, and countersurges.” Following that pattern, soon after the end of World War I a new wind began to blow.

Following the First World War and also after the Second, Western nations began to divest themselves of their colonial holdings. Muslim nations were among the beneficiaries, so that, according to Pipes, by 1995, 69 of the territories absorbed by Western powers had returned to Muslim rule.

More importantly, the retreat of Islam before the West had led to a great deal of theological reflection, and numerous Muslim thinkers began to blame a lack of faithfulness to Islam and an embrace of Western values as the cause. Beginning in the 1920s but continuing and even accelerating in the last third of the 20th century, there was a revival of commitment to the tenets and practices of Islam.

The magnitude of this revival was so great that Huntington named it the Islamic Resurgence, stating that it was “similar to and comparable to the Protestant Reformation in Western Society.” He said the movement, which continues to grow, “embodies acceptance of modernity, rejection of Western culture, and recommitment to Islam as the guide to life in the modern world.”

Furthermore, Huntington argued, the Resurgence is not a fringe or extremist development but mainstream within the umma; and it is pervasive, not isolated.

For Muslim cultures, according to Hassan Al-Turabi, a Muslim political leader in Sudan, this movement is “a comprehensive reconstruction of society from top to bottom.” This reconstruction has often led to intense pressures on Christians in Muslim countries, as persecution against those who refuse to submit to Allah has, in some cases such as Iraq, decimated a once-vibrant Christian community. (See below.)

The jihadists
Within this Resurgence, moreover, is a growing Islamist movement, filled with dedicated radicals calling for a violent form of jihad, or “holy war,” against all who will not submit to Islam.

Phares said these jihadists have announced to the world that they plan “to impose their own totalitarian system upon all nations.”

Their zeal is rooted in a desire to return the umma to the triumphant earlier days of Islam. Phares said, “The world’s democracies are coming to realize … that the new enemies of international law have a vision of the future that is literally a restoration of the distant past.”

The potency of the Islamist call for jihad – and, in fact, the attractiveness of the wider Resurgence, as well – have been fed by Muslim revulsion at the demand for “progressive” rights in the West.

Public policy analyst Dinesh D’Souza said Muslims despise “the right to blaspheme, pornography as a protected form of free expression, the exclusion of religious symbols from the public square, the right of teenagers to receive sex education and contraceptives, the right to abortion, prostitution as a worker’s right, and so on.”

Jihadists issue jeremiads against what Huntington calls the “Westoxification” of Muslim societies, and the complaints are finding sympathetic ears.

“By portraying the West as atheistic and morally decadent, Islamic radicals can effectively recruit followers by appealing to a shared Muslim antipathy for permissive values,” D’Souza said.

Even if radical Islamists are merely a component of the wider Islamic Resurgence, it still poses a tremendous threat to the West merely in numerical terms. Norman Podhoretz, adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute and author of World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, said Islamists have “a huge number of committed cadres. If Islamists constitute 10% to 15% of the Muslim population worldwide, they number some 125 to 200 million persons, or a far greater total than all the fascists and communists combined, who ever lived.”

Those percentages are estimates, but even the figures used by Dalia Mogahed, senior analyst and executive director with the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and herself a Muslim, are frightening. In Who Speaks For Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, Mogahed estimated that 7% of Muslims worldwide – or 91 million – are Islamic extremists.

Who will win?
That’s a lot of radicals. But even if jihadists suddenly beat their swords into plowshares, it is not clear who will win the war of ideas between Islam and the West.

What is clear is that the Resurgence represents a reinvigorated Islam that intends to win the conflict once and for all. It is, in the words of one prominent Indian Muslim, “the struggle for a new world order.”

One wonders how many in the West are seeing the historic struggle as clearly as Muslims do.   

Review – Facing Extinction: Christians of Iraq
It’s a world of religious persecution that is virtually unknown to American Christians. The opening scenes of violence in the documentary Facing Extinction give way to troubling statistics: More than a million Christians in Iraq – more than half the Christian population in that country – have been forced from their homes by Islamic radicals.

The compelling documentary by award-winning filmmaker Robert Marcarelli tells some of the heart-breaking stories through interviews with the suffering Christians. The film also includes stunning footage, some of it obtained from Muslim radicals themselves as they are shown in the very process of raiding homes and kidnapping Christians for ransom – or worse.

Facing Extinction is sure to make Christians aware of the world outside their own neighborhoods, a world in which their fellow believers often suffer terribly just for holding firm to their faith.