An In-Depth Look at Islam’s Achilles Heel

American Thinker:
By Raymond Ibrahim

The history of Islam and the West has been one of unwavering antagonism and seismic clashes, often initiated by the followers of Muhammad.  By the standards of history, nothing between the two forces is as well documented as this long war.  Accordingly, for more than a millennium, both educated and not so educated Europeans knew—the latter perhaps instinctively—that Islam was a militant creed that for centuries attacked and committed atrocities in their homelands, all in the name of “holy war,” or jihad.  In the words of Konstantin Mihailović, a fifteenth-century Serb who was forced to convert to Islam in his youth and made to fight as a slave-soldier for the Turks until he escaped: “the Persians, the Turks, the Tatars, the Berbers, and the Arabs; and the diverse Moors … [all] conduct themselves according to the accursed Koran, that is, the scripture of Mohammed.”

This long-held perspective has been radically twisted in recent times.  According to the dominant narrative — as upheld by mainstream media and Hollywood, pundits and politicians, academics, and “experts” of all stripes — Islam was historically progressive and peaceful, whereas premodern Europe was fanatical and predatory.  Or, to quote the BBC, “[t]hroughout the Middle Ages, the Muslim world was more advanced and more civilised than Christian Western Europe, which learned a huge amount from its neighbour.”

The reason for these topsy-turvy claims is that “who controls the past controls the future,” as George Orwell observed in his 1984 (a dystopian novel that has become increasingly applicable to our times).  It is, therefore, unsurprising to discover that the greatest apologia for politically active Islamists and their leftist allies — and the first premise for all subsequent apologias for Islam — is purely historical in nature.

Recall, for instance, the most popular and oft-asked question to arise after the September 11, 2001 terror strikes: “Why do they hate us?”  Unbeknownst to most, this question presupposed — indeed, was heavily laden with — a historical point of view that had been forged over decades and largely remains unquestioned, even by critics of modern Islam: because Islam was tolerant and advanced in the past, this entrenched perspective holds, its current problems in the present — authoritarianism, intolerance, violence, radicalization, terrorism, etc. — must be aberrations, products of unfavorable circumstances, politics, economics, “grievances” — anything and everything but Islam itself.  Simply put, if they did not “hate us” before — but were rather progressive and tolerant — surely something other than Islam has since “gone wrong.”  read more h/t NAAC.