The names of the Muslim leaders, and the names of their Islamic groups, are transitory and ultimately unimportant. Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are succeeded by Al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State, but they will all pass from the scene and be replaced by others. While Muslim leaders and regimes have come and gone, Islam itself has remained steadfastly at war with the non-Muslim world for 1,400 years.
Islam does not recognize secular national boundaries. To devout Muslims, there are only two significant realms of the world. First is the Dar al-Islam — the House of Islam, which is the land of the believers. The other is the Dar al-Harb — the House of War, which must be made Islamic by any means, including violent jihad.
The expansion of Islam is sometimes held in check for long periods, but more often Islam is on the march, acquiring new territory. Once conquered by Islam, territory is rarely taken back, Spain being a notable exception.
The Muslim world produces almost no books or new inventions. Short of finding oil under their feet, most Islamic nations are backward and impoverished. So wherein lies the power source for Islam’s nearly constant expansion over the past fourteen centuries? The motor and the battery of Islam are the Koran and the Hadith, or sayings of Mohammed. A messianic Mahdi, Caliph or Ayatollah with sufficient charisma can accelerate Islam’s pace of conquest, but individual men are not the driving force.
Secular “Muslim in name only” strongmen from Saddam Hussein to Muamar Qadafi can hold Islamism in check for a period with brutal methods, but strongmen are often assassinated or otherwise removed from power, and in any event, they cannot live forever. Once the secular strongmen are gone, fanatical mullahs are able to stir their zealous Muslim followers into sufficient ardor to reinstall a radical Islamist regime under Sharia Law, according to the Koran.
This pattern of secular strongmen being followed by fanatical Islamist leaders has recurred many times over the past millennium and longer. Do not be fooled by modernists like King Abdullah of Jordon. To the true believer of Islam, any king or strongman is never more than a rifle shot or grenade toss away from being kinetically deposed, and replaced by another Islamist fanatic.
The persistent virulence of Mohammed’s 7th Century plan for global domination means that it is always ready to erupt in a fresh outbreak. Islam is like a brushfire or ringworm infection: it is dead and barren within the ring, but flares up where it parasitically feeds off the healthy non-Islamic societies around it. What produces this uniquely fanatical motivation, from within nations and peoples that otherwise seem devoid of energy and new ideas?
The motivation lies within the words of the Koran and Hadith. Most simply distilled, in the earthly realm, these Islamic texts offer immoral men sanction for thrill-killing, looting, raping, and capturing infidel slaves, and when these jihadists are killed, they are promised a perpetual orgy with seventy-two nubile virgin slave girls in Mohammed’s sick, evil and perverted Muslim paradise.
Unlike the Jewish and Christian Bibles, the Koran and Hadith appeal not to man’s better angels, but to the darkest aspects of human nature. (Tellingly, Moses and Jesus are said to have climbed to mountaintops to communicate with their God, while Mohammed received his messages from Allah deep inside a bat cave.)
A meaningful or permanent reformation of Islam is impossible, because a new generation of fanatics, wielding the unexpurgated Koran and Hadith as their weapons, will always declare the reformists to be apostates and murder them. In Islam, the fanatics who are holding the unalterable Koran in one hand and a sword in the other always stand ready to seize complete power and exterminate their enemies.
This latent danger breeds fear and causes nearly all non-Muslims to be carefully circumspect in their dealings with Muslims, lest they lose their heads at a later date. This intentionally fostered fear of Islam is used as a cudgel against those who would otherwise resist its domination.
The immutable Koran is the constant fountainhead of bloody Islamic
conquest. Radical Islam is the pure Islam, the Koranic Islam, the real Islam. Anyone
who does not understand this bitter reality is dangerously ignorant of the past
1,400 years of human history.