https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-west-still-doesnt-get-islam/
The spectacular destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure by Israel and the U.S. is a long-neglected restoration of America’s deterrent power. Yet the subsequent cease-fire President Trump imposed on Israel bespeaks again the West’s long failure to understand the nature of traditional orthodox Islam–– particularly its sanctified violence in fulfillment of Allah’s command to wage religious war “Until,” as the Islamic Republic’s godfather, the Ayatollah Khomeini, announced, “the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world.”
Nor was this sentiment a modern deformation of Islam in response to Western imperial aggression. One of the most significant Islamic exegetes, the late-14th century writer Ibn Khaldun, wrote in the Muqaddimah, “In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”
This jihadist imperialist ambition guided Islamic conquests and occupations of lands that had been Christian for millennia, and remained a threat to the West up to Europe’s expansion into Muslim lands began to accelerate in the 18th century.
But the rise and spread of secularism in the West diminished the influence of religion, which once was the heart of our understanding of human affairs and change. By the late Thirties, Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc observed, “Millions of modern people . . . 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.”
These changes over multiple decades also profoundly impacted Islam, and incited calls for reformation: “From the beginning of Western penetration in the world of Islam,” Middle Eastern historian Bernard Lewis writes, “until our own day, the most characteristic, significant, and original political responses to that penetration have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and the community overwhelmed by infidels.”
