Feb. 9, 2019
At the height of Western dominance over Islam in the early twentieth century, the European historian Hilaire Belloc (b. 1870) made a remarkably prescient observation that may have seemed exaggerated at the time:
Millions of modern people of the white civilization — that is, the civilization of Europe and America — have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past” (from Belloc’s The Great Heresies, emphasis added).
Anyone who doubts that Islam has been “the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had,” should familiarize themselves with that civilization’s long militant history vis-à-vis the West.
According to Islamic history…