The historian and theologian, Father Richard Neuhaus, opined that the difficulty for today’s Muslims is that Mohammad is the only founder of a major modern religion whose life falls within an era of pedigreed historical inquiry. Islam’s spectacular spread was brought about by brutal military conquest, rapine, spoliation, and slavery. Its culture was derived from the vanquished.
What this means is that unlike, Jesus of Nazareth, who lived in a remote corner of the first-century Roman Empire which produced few source documents for modern historians to study, the historical record of Mohammad and his immediate followers, those who conquered two-thirds of Western Christendom, is readily available to historians. The history is anything but pretty. Consequently, for today’s Muslim apologists, such as our 44th president, it is a record that must never be remarked upon.
When practically every day, news organs around the world report on the Islamic-inspired massacres of innocent civilians (almost always of fellow Muslims), one cannot help but ask—What would life be like in the West if our example of a life well lived were not Jesus but Mohamad? It’s a rhetorical question which needs no answer.
In the early months of 2017, sixteen years after 9/11, militant Islam continues kill the infidel as well. Now that ISIS is losing ground in Iraq and Syria, it has ordered its minions to kill Coptic Christians in Egypt who still represent approximately 10% of the population. Due to a recent series of killings in the Sinai Peninsula, Coptic families are fleeing their homes with only the clothes on their backs.
With Obama’s premature withdrawal from Iraq and his painfully slow response to the conquest of a vast portion of the Middle East by ISIS, the most ferocious terrorist organization yet constituted in modern times, he has allowed it to metastasize. It now has cells plotting attacks in many other countries including in Europe and in the US. Despite President al Sisi’s best efforts, ISIS can now kill Christians at will in Egypt.
Yet There is Good News – The Islamic Reformation is Building
As I write in my new book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, Vol II,
On New Year’s Day 2015, the president of Egypt, el-Sisi, chose the citadel of Islamic jurisprudence, the most prestigious center for Sunni religious thought, Al-Azhar, to tell an assembly of Muslim clergy that he was calling for nothing less than a “religious revolution.” He asked Muslim leaders to help in the fight against extremism, I say and repeat, again, that we are in need of a religious revolution. You imams are responsible before Allah. The entire world is waiting on you. The entire world is waiting for your word… because the Islamic world is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost. And it is being lost by our own hands. We need a revolution of the self, a revolution of consciousness and ethics to rebuild the Egyptian person – a person that our country will need in the near future.
It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible that this thinking – and I am not saying the religion – I am saying this thinking… This is antagonizing the entire world.71
One of the unintended consequences of the Iran deal (the JCPOA), one that Obama, the US president most hostile to Israel, could never have envisioned, is that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates are now allied with the US and Israel in countering the Iranian threat to the region. Israel in now allied with these same Arab countries attacked her three times since the creation of country in 1948. Despite the US mainstream media’s inability to see its importance, this new alliance has trumped the past forty years of fruitless peace-process negotiations. Now the plight of the Palestinians and the problem of Israel’s existence are not as important to the Sunni Arab countries as is their survival. And this may hasten the coming of the Islamic reformation.
