by Alan Caruba

October 20, 2003

Islam is dying. In its death throes, it has turned not just on its perceived enemies, the modern world, but upon itself, killing with seeming indifference both Muslim and non-Muslim as it thrashes about, filling each day with new corpses, the last of which will be its own.

It took hundreds of years for the Roman Empire to be built and to come to an end. During that long period in the early history of Western civilization, the populations under its control throughout the Mediterranean and up into England were largely permitted to worship any of the many gods in local areas, although they were expected to also honor the state gods of Rome.

By 312 AD, the emperor Constantine began his ascendancy, attributing it to the God of the Christians and, in 325 AD, he called the Council of Nicaea, the first council of bishops to formalize a Christian creed. After that, Christianity, one of many faiths in the vast empire began its path toward becoming, not just the religion of the empire, but one that now numbers more than two billion people worldwide.

In 610 AD, Mohammed began to create Islam to gain control over the desert tribes of Arabia. He built his religion on the wealth acquired through raids on caravans and attacks on cities such as Medina and Mecca. Islam’s text, the Koran, was said to supercede both the Old and New Testaments, disputing the laws of Judaism and the divinity of Jesus.

Following Mohammed’s death in 632 AD, the religion, a warrior cult built around adoration of Mohammed, quickly spread throughout North Africa and into Spain. Today, Islam is estimated to have more than 1.2 billion adherents around the world, although most are largely located in the Middle East and Africa. There are some 31 million in Europe, more than 845 million throughout Asia, and 323 million in Africa. A little over a million are in South America and approximately 2.9 million in North America. It remains a distinctly "Arab" religion.

Islam has literally been at war with all other religions since its inception. It looks at the world as being divided between Islam and the world of the infidel, the unbeliever. The central prayer of Islam, the Kalima, spoken daily, states "There is no God by Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet." A militant religion. Mohammed said, "The sword is the key to Heaven and Hell." By contrast, six hundred years earlier, Jesus said, "He who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword."

A Muslim’s first allegiance is to Islam. One’s nationality and other allegiances are secondary. In the latter half of the last century, Middle Eastern Arabs strove to establish a national identity and it proved a failure from its inception. In late October, 35 heads of state will gather for a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in an effort to achieve a unified voice for Islam and to try to offset perceptions that Islam is linked to the violence being perpetrated worldwide. Observers, however, note that the OIC is unified only in its support for the Palestinian attacks on Israel.

With considerable irony, Libyan ruler, Col. Muammar Al-Qaddafi, speaking in early October, said, "Today, you cannot speak of Arab unity and pan-Arab nationalism," adding "The Arabs have become the joke of the world because they do not think of their future." But the Arab leaders of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Palestine, and other Muslim nations who have funded and unleashed the Islamic Jihad are thinking of the future; the future of Islam.

Since the birth of the Islamic revolution, begun by the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, Islam has been attempting to conquer the modern world by the sword. Despite the schism between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam, both are united in this quest. Jihad or holy war, in the words of Paul Fregosi, an expert on Islam, is "essentially a permanent state of hostility that Islam maintains against the rest of the world."

Islam is losing its war on the world. We are witnessing the earliest stages of its decline, although historians would probably mark that from the end of the Ottoman Empire after World War I when the Western allies divided the Middle East into new nations and areas of economic imperialism.

Islam, however, is the primary reason that the Middle East has long been a cesspool of ignorance, poverty, and oppression. Even Islamic scholars are beginning to openly warn that the path on which it has set itself can only lead to its predictable decline and end.

A recent study by the London-based Transparency International found that Middle Eastern and North African nations form the world’s most corrupt region. Twelve nations out of a rating of 133 come from that region. Among them were Libya, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the Sudan, and Algeria. The study defined corruption as the abuse of public office for private gain, ranging from misuse of public power for private benefit to bribery; not exactly the kind of nations that attract foreign investment. Only the invasion of Iraq to rid it of Saddam has opened opportunities to restructure it into a modern nation.

What is the Islamic revolution the author refers to?