In the early years of his mission, Muhammad spoke of the Jews with reverence, positioning himself as an Arab successor to the biblical prophets and, therefore, a convener of all nations under the ancient Abrahamic covenant. He directed his followers to pray toward Jerusalem. He hoped that the Jewish tribes of Medina would recognize him as a prophet in their own tradition.

They did not.

What followed was a systematic campaign to neutralize Jewish influence, de-legitimize Jewish testimony, and eliminate the Jewish presence from the Arabian Peninsula, ultimately involving the exile, enslavement, and mass-murder of Arabian Jews. The Jews’ ability to demonstrate, chapter and verse, that Muhammad’s “revelations” were riddled with errors and anachronisms posed an existential threat to his prophetic authority.

What the Jews Knew

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On the morning of May 29, 1453, the Emperor Constantine XI took off his imperial regalia, so that he might die as a soldier rather than be recognized as a prince and went down into the fighting near the Blachernae wall. From that moment he disappeared from the record. By nightfall Constantinople had fallen. Mehmed II rode to Hagia Sophia and ordered the call to prayer raised inside the greatest church in Christendom. The last emperor of the East lay dead somewhere in the ruins, and no one has ever found the body.

For eleven centuries Constantinople had been the capital of Eastern Christianity. Its fall closed a chapter that had been written across the five great cities of the early Church, and it left a small mountain people in the Levant carrying a weight far heavier than their numbers should have had to bear. The Maronites.

The ancient Church was governed by five patriarchates: Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 ratified this arrangement, the pentarchy, as the constitutional order of Christendom. The five sees were the load-bearing pillars of the Christian world.

They fell one by one.

Antioch fell in 636, after the Byzantine army broke at the Yarmouk. Jerusalem was surrendered to the Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab in 637, barely five years after the death of Muhammad. Alexandria was taken in the same decade. Three of the five sees were under Muslim rule within a single generation of Islam’s birth.

In the Antiochian lands, what survived of the faithful was driven up into the heights the Arabs called Jabal Lubnan, the mountain of Lebanon. They gathered around the memory of Maron, the fifth-century hermit of the Orontes valley, and they held there with no empire left to protect them.

When the Maronite Church formally renewed its union with Rome at the Council of Florence in 1439, fourteen years before Constantinople fell, it brought with it the apostolic succession of Antioch, one of the original sees founded in the first generation of the Church. The Maronite Patriarch has borne the title Patriarch of Antioch and All the East without a single break ever since: through the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, through the Crusader kingdoms, through the Mamluk sultans and four centuries of Ottoman rule, through the massacres of 1860, when more than ten thousand Maronites were killed in one summer, and through the Great Famine of 1915 to 1918, when something close to a third of Mount Lebanon starved to death under Ottoman blockade.

Constantinople was the last pillar. When it fell in 1453, four of the five ancient sees lay under Islam. Only Rome remained free, and Rome was in the West. In the East, one mountain church still held what the others had lost: a patriarchate, a homeland, and a line unbroken since the apostles.

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The Maronites, and the other Eastern Christians the mountain took in, the Greek Orthodox of Koura and Batroun, the Greek Catholics of the Beqaa, the Armenians who came to Beirut with nothing after the genocide, did more than survive. They built.

Universities, hospitals, schools, newspapers, monasteries, political parties, towns that governed themselves. And a way of living together in which the largest sect did not simply rule the rest. Almost nowhere else in the Middle East was that ever built at all.

Lebanon itself came from this. In 1920, the Maronite Patriarch Elias Howayek went to Paris and stood before Clemenceau and Wilson and asked for a country, not a refuge, a Lebanon big enough to live. What he wanted was a place where the old law of the region did not apply, where a faith did not have to be the majority to be safe.

That country is broken now. Corruption ate it, weak men sold it, and Iran’s proxy took what was left. But it was real, and that it was real is the whole point, because the other paths were taken too, and you can see where they led.

The Copts of Egypt are ancient and they endure, but they live by the state’s permission. The Assyrians of Iraq were about 1.4 million in 2003. Now they are counted somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000, most of a people gone in twenty years, and the world hardly turned its head. Syria’s Christians were once a tenth of the country and have lost more than half their number since 2011.

There is a concept in Roman law, and Antioch was a Roman city, called nemo plus iuris transferre potest quam ipse habet. No one can transfer more rights than he himself possesses.

What passed to the Maronite Church, and by extension to Lebanese Christians more broadly, was not only a liturgical tradition and a set of beautiful vestments. It was the guardianship of the Levant, the land where the faith of Israel and then the Church were born, the ground of Abraham and Moses and the Incarnation itself.

An estimated fourteen million people of Lebanese Christian origin live outside Lebanon today, in São Paulo, Abidjan, Detroit, Sydney, Paris, Caracas, and dozens of other cities. Many families left after 1975. Many more are leaving now. But a Christianity kept only in the diaspora, in festivals and folk dances and parishes far from the mountain, is not the Church of Antioch and Chalcedon. It is the museum of it.

Since Jerusalem fell to the Caliph Umar in 637, the Eastern Church has lived under Islam, day after day, century after century, in violence, in fragile truce, in ordinary neighborliness, and always under pressure. That witness cannot be reproduced from the outside. It is what John Paul II meant when he said Lebanon is more than a country, it is a message, proof that in the East another arrangement is still possible, that the Christian need not choose only between exile and submission.

Lebanon’s Christians are still a third of the country. They still hold land, schools, churches, votes, and the memory of who they are. By every rule the region runs on, they should be a handful of old families by now, their churches kept as museums. They are not. That did not happen by luck. It happened because people decided, again and again, not to vanish.

The task of Lebanon’s Christians now is to keep that message in the present tense. Not to perform it for Western audiences. Not to sell it to diplomats while the pews empty out behind them. To live it, with enough numbers, enough institutions, and enough nerve that it does not slip into the past tense.

Mario Dayba is a contributor to the Ideological Defense Institute.

Women’s rights are utterly trampled in the Islamic tradition, in Islamic jurisprudence, and across the record of Islamic history. Yet in Muslim countries, anyone who says this openly is accused of “contempt of Islam” (blasphemy). A woman in Aswan, Egypt, Shahira Mohamed Suleiman, was sentenced to six months in prison on a charge of contempt of Islam, because she said: “I refuse to have anyone tell me that my voice is ‘awra [shameful nakedness].”¹

In the documented Islamic tradition and jurisprudence, a woman inherits half a male’s share from her father,² and an eighth from her husband if she has borne him children;³ counts as one-quarter in marriage;⁴ counts as half a witness before the courts;⁵ and her blood-money in the case of killing is half a man’s.⁶ She was created from a crooked rib;⁷ her body is a temptation and her voice is ‘awra;⁸ she must cover her body and hair so as not to seduce men; her clothing must not be sheer, must not be tight, and must not draw the eye, which is why black is preferred for her;⁹ and if she leaves the house wearing perfume she is a fornicator.¹⁰

She is impure: her mere touch nullifies ablution, like a donkey or a black dog.¹¹ She is deficient in intellect and in religion.¹² Women swear oaths and are the liars; they refuse sex while desiring it; consult them and then do the opposite, that is, never act on her counsel.¹³ Her husband may have intercourse with her even on the back of a camel-saddle,¹⁴ and if she refuses sex and the man’s sexual desire at any time, in any place, the angels curse her until morning.¹⁵ She owes her husband blind obedience: if a man has a lawful excuse to break the Ramadan fast, his wife must break it with him even if she has no excuse, because it might occur to her husband to kiss or to take her during the day.¹⁶

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I was wrong. Within days, familiar narratives resurfaced. “It didn’t start on October 7,” critics insisted. “If Israel had just given the Palestinians a state…,” “Netanyahu’s government brought this on itself.” The victims, it seemed, had somehow provoked their own massacre.

This reaction did not surprise me as much as it should have. Years earlier, living in Egypt, I witnessed something eerily similar. A woman in Cairo was sexually harassed and assaulted in public. Instead of outrage directed at the perpetrators, many, including other women, blamed the victim. “She was asking for it,” they said. “Look at how she was dressed,” “She shouldn’t have been out alone.” I was stunned. Why would women turn on one of their own when any of them could have been in her position?

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In Pakistan, Christians frequently face systemic discrimination that forces them into hazardous labor with minimal safety protections. They are often allowed to only occupy lower-status jobs such as cleaning and sanitation work, or as bonded laborers in brick kilns. Many Christians are trapped in debt.

Workers are forced to descend into deep sewers without protective gear (like masks or gloves), exposing them to toxic gases. This exploitation continues to take lives.

On May 7, Shabbir Masih, a 33-year-old Christian sanitation worker in Pakistan, died after inhaling toxic gases after his supervisors forced him to perform a dangerous task.

Masih died working inside a 25-foot-deep mainline sewer operated by the Water and Sanitation Authority (WASA). According to his widow, Masih was fully aware of the danger posed by the work. For three consecutive days, he refused to descend into the sewer. On the final night, WASA officials arrived at his home at 10 p.m. and took him away.

“He knew it was a death trap,” his widow said. “He was very worried for the last three days and told me that they were threatening him [if he did not] go deep into that sewer.”

Masih’s widow is demanding justice for her husband. She says WASA forced him to work in the sewer against his will. WASA has refused accountability in Masih’s death, claiming he was hired as a contractor, a deliberate outsourcing arrangement designed to avoid responsibility.

Masih is not the first Christian to die because of this pattern of systemic discrimination. Labor rights groups assert that the recent fatalities highlight ongoing discrimination and marginalization faced by Christians.

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While Pakistan’s Christians comprise less than 2% of the country’s population, they work 80% of sanitation jobs. These workers are not given proper training or protective equipment to carry out their job responsibilities. They are sent into deep sewers without any safety measures; if they refuse, they are threatened with job loss. The Christian community, which lives below the poverty line, constitutes a large portion of this workforce.

In May and April, at least five other Christian sanitation workers lost their lives. One remains in serious condition after inhaling toxic gases while working in sewers in Pakistan’s Punjab and Sindh provinces.

On May 4, two workers (Shakeel Masih and Samar Masih) died in Sahiwal, Punjab. They were cleaning a manhole without any protective equipment. On April 17, three other workers (Wilson, Waqas, and Nazeer) were killed while clearing a blocked sewer line in Surjani Town, Karachi, Sindh Province.

Justice Raja Inam Amin Minhas of the Islamabad High Court noted that over 70 Christian sanitation workers have died since 1988 due to exposure to toxic gases.

International Christian Concern notes:

“Christian workers are deliberately assigned to the most dangerous, undesirable jobs. According to the Center for Legal Justice (CLJ), from 2011 to 2023, at least 40 Christians lost their lives in manholes due to a lack of proper training and safety equipment. Workers often don’t refuse dangerous assignments, even when they know it may cost them their lives, because sudden job termination is a risk they cannot afford. Most are the sole providers for their families.”

Meanwhile, bonded labor is still a widespread form of slavery. Laborers become trapped, unable to repay their loans due to high interest rates. In 2024, the organization Global Christian Relief reported of this type of “Christian slavery” in Pakistan:

“Today, there are 20,000 brick kilns across Pakistan. An estimated 3.5-4 million people working in the kilns as bonded slaves—many of them are Christians. An estimated 3.5-4 million people working in the kilns as bonded slaves—many of them are Christians.

“As the minority, Christians in Pakistan comprise less than 2% of the population. And many believers in this small bracket are steeped in poverty and hold the most undesirable jobs: sewer cleaners, street sweepers, house cleaners, and, of course, brick makers.

“Bonded slavery is technically illegal in Pakistan, but the government chooses to ignore it or accept it as a societal norm. Here’s how it works: Brick kiln owners, preying on desperation, extend loans to those in dire need—a perceived lifeline for medical emergencies, wedding expenses, or simply putting food on the table. With no other options, many, including Christians, unaware of the trap, accept these offers. However, the relief is short-lived, as the loans become shackles that bind families to the kilns. Interest rates devour their daily wages, leaving them with a meager payout that condemns them to decades of servitude.”

Dr. David Fischler, a pastor and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Here I Am Charitable Foundation, told IDI:

“The US government needs to start taking widespread human rights violations in Pakistan seriously. A first step would be assisting Christians who want to leave the country to do so, enabling them to go wherever they desire, particularly to the US after proper vetting. A second would be expanding sanctions beyond the country’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs. For instance, members of Pakistan’s police forces and judiciary who refuse to enforce basic protections of Christians should be specifically cited and prohibited from receiving funds from the federal government or family abroad. Export prohibitions could be put in place against any sector of Pakistan’s economy where Christians are exploited or mistreated. The US could also cut off all non-humanitarian aid, which would amount to about $150 million.”

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Nick Donnelly, a deacon with the Diocese of Lancaster, also calls on the international community not to ignore the plight of Christians in Pakistan. In an interview with IDI, Donnelly said:

“The international community needs to recognize that Islamist Pakistan is systematically imposing apartheid on Christians, as severe as the daily injustices, cruelty, and violence of apartheid-era South Africa. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, the international community, led by the UN, applied escalating diplomatic, economic, and cultural pressure to isolate the apartheid regime. Just as the international community condemned and punished South Africa, it urgently needs to do the same to Pakistan.

“The US and EU need to lead the world in banning new investments, loans, and imports of goods. We need to encourage consumer boycotts of Pakistani goods and campaign for sports and cultural isolation. Pakistan must be excluded from the Olympics. Pakistan’s politicians must be banned from international travel and their personal bank accounts and assets frozen. Islamist Pakistan must become an international pariah until it abandons its persecution and violence against Christians. If only Pope Leo XIV would consistently speak out against the bigotry and chauvinism inherent in Islam, then the international community might take action.”

Uzay Bulut is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

Muslims insist that Islam is the purest, most uncompromising form of monotheism, the very standard by which they condemn Christians for worshipping the Trinity and Jews for allegedly elevating Uzayr (Ezra) to divine sonship, a charge that has no footing in Jewish texts or history. Muhammad, it seems, needed to invent that particular slander to make the accusation stick.

But the claim that Islam alone delivers untainted monotheism weakens first when we notice how completely Muhammad has, in practice, eclipsed Allah in the hearts and daily devotions of Muslims. It shatters again when we examine where Islamic rituals actually came from.

Yesterday the Islamic pilgrimage season ended, hundreds of thousands of men and women pressing in suffocating waves around the Kaaba, bodies climbing over bodies, hands clawing toward a single black stone set in silver, lips and foreheads desperate to touch it. What is the origin of that chaos?

Identity Theft

Allah was never the invisible, transcendent, jealous, one-and-only Creator who thundered from Sinai and sent prophets to Israel. That was never his face in pre-Islamic Arabia. He was already on the scene, centuries before Muhammad, as a fixture in the Meccan pantheon: a high god, sure, but a pagan high god, enthroned above a family of lesser deities, daughters, consorts, and intercessors who handled the day-to-day divine dirty work. Islam didn’t discover Allah. It hijacked him. It stripped the polytheistic fingerprints, slapped on borrowed Abrahamic rhetoric, and marketed him to the world as the same God who spoke to Moses, drowned Pharaoh, and fathered Jesus through the Holy Spirit. This was one of the most audacious theological identity thefts in human history.

In Jahili Mecca, Allah was never solitary. The Quran, trying to score points, accidentally confesses time after time that the Quraysh and their neighbors already confessed Allah as creator of the heavens and earth, sender of rain, reviver of the dead, controller of destiny (29:61; 31:25; 39:38). But they “associated” partners with him, daughters, helpers, intercessors, exactly the way every ancient Near Eastern polytheist had done for three thousand years: El in Canaan had Asherah and a divine council; Baal-Shamem in Syria had his consort and attendants; Zeus Hypsistos in the Hellenistic world had a whole heavenly bureaucracy. The Meccans were textbook henotheists: one boss god at the top, a loyal supporting cast underneath, and Allah was their undisputed kingpin.

Muhammad didn’t unearth some buried, forgotten monotheistic Allah who had been hiding under pagan rubble, waiting for the true revelation. He seized the existing pagan high god, the one the Quraysh already called creator, lord of the Kaaba, master of fate, and forcibly grafted Biblical clothing onto him. He kept the name Allah. He kept the Kaaba. He kept the Black Stone. He kept the sevenfold ṭawaf. He kept the sacred months. He kept the talbiya chant’s hypnotic rhythm. Then he wrapped the entire stolen package in Abrahamic camouflage: “This is the pure religion of Abraham the ḥanif.” Except Abraham never stepped foot in Mecca. Abraham never laid a single stone of the Kaaba. Abraham never kissed a meteorite fragment. Abraham never acknowledged a high god named Allah who came with three daughters named al-Lāt, al-Uzza, and Manat.

The Biblical God smashed golden calves, cursed high places, and declared, “I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god” (Isaiah 45:5).

Mecca’s Monopoly on Pagan Pilgrimage

The Kaaba wasn’t unique in pre-Islamic Arabia. It was one Kaaba among many, dozens of cube-shaped shrines scattered across the peninsula, each serving as a local or regional cult center. Khalil Abd al-Karim, in his The Historical Roots of Islamic Sharia, counts at least twenty-one documented Kaabas before Islam. Other sources (al-Yaqubi, al-Maqrizi, Ibn al-Kalbi) name prominent ones: the Kaaba of Najran (dedicated to a palm-tree deity), the Kaaba of Dhu l-Khalṣa in Yemen (for the southern tribes), the Kaaba of al-Uzza in Nakhlah, the Kaaba of Manat near Medina, and several others tied to tribal gods like Wadd, Suwa, Yaghuth, Yauq, and Nasr (mentioned in Quran 71:23 as Noah’s idols, but still active in late Jahiliyya). Each had its own custodians (sadana), its own sacred precinct (ḥaram), its own pilgrimage season, its own sacrifices, and its own circumambulation rites. They were miniature versions of what Mecca became: sacred cubes housing stones, idols, or baetyls, drawing pilgrims who shaved heads, offered animals, and performed tawaf.

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What made Mecca’s Kaaba special, and ultimately unbeatable, was not divine revelation. It was location and economics. Mecca sat at the crossroads of the most lucrative caravan routes in late antiquity: incense from South Arabia (Yemen, Hadramawt) heading north to Gaza and Damascus; spices, silk, and slaves moving south from the Levant and Mesopotamia; African gold and ivory funneled through the Red Sea ports. The Quraysh tribe turned the Kaaba into the peninsula’s premier franchise. They declared four sacred months (Rajab, Dhu l-Qada, Dhu l-Ḥijja, Muharram) during which all intertribal warfare was forbidden, creating the only safe corridor for commerce across a fractured landscape. Pilgrims came not just to worship but to trade. The annual fairs at Ukaz, Majanna, and Dhu l-Majas near Mecca were among the largest markets in Arabia. The Kaaba was the brand: a single, prestigious address where every tribe could deposit its god’s representative (an idol or stone), perform the same rites, and do business under truce. By the sixth century, it had become the monopoly hub. Other Kaabas were regional; Mecca’s was continental.

When Muhammad conquered Mecca in 630 CE, he didn’t destroy the Kaaba. He destroyed every other Kaaba he could reach. Ali ibn Abi Talib was sent to demolish Manat at al-Mushallal. Al-Mughira ibn Shuba razed al-Lat’s temple in al-Ṭaif (and, according to al-Kalbi, the site later became the left minaret of the mosque there). Khalid ibn al-Walid led the destruction of Dhu l-Khalsa (the “Yemeni Kaaba”) and al-Uzza’s shrine in Nakhlah. One by one, the rival cubes were smashed, their custodians killed or converted, their sacred stones broken or buried, their pilgrimages outlawed. Muhammad wanted only one Kaaba standing, only one pilgrimage worth making, only one sacred center worth the caravan trade. Muhammad kept the Kaaba of his own tribe, the Quraysh, and sacralized it as the sole legitimate house of God. All the others were declared idols and erased.

The claim that this Kaaba was built by Abraham and Ishmael has no historical or scriptural support outside Islamic tradition. Neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament places Abraham or Ishmael anywhere near western Arabia. Genesis traces Abraham’s movements from Ur to Haran to Canaan to Egypt and back, never south of the Negev. Ishmael is expelled into the wilderness of Paran (near Sinai), fathers twelve princes, and disappears from the narrative. No Jewish, Christian, or pre-Islamic Arab source links either figure to Mecca, the Kaaba, or the Black Stone. The Quran’s assertion (2:125–127) that Abraham and Ishmael “raised the foundations of the House” is a seventh-century retrofit, an attempt to graft Biblical patriarchs onto an existing pagan shrine to give it legitimacy.

Paganism Preserved Step by Step

Islam markets the hajj as the purified pilgrimage of Abraham, monotheism in seven-day motion. But the entire sequence is lifted almost verbatim from pre-Islamic Arabian polytheism. Muhammad inherited these acts from his own tribe and the wider Ḥijazi cultic world, centralized them at Mecca, eliminated every competing shrine, and then insisted they had always been the property of the one true God. The physical movements, the sacred sites, the timing, the blood, the stones, all of it is pagan continuity dressed in monotheistic costume.

Here is the full hajj ritual cycle as practiced today, exposed side-by-side with its documented pre-Islamic roots.

Ihram (ritual consecration) Pilgrims stop at miqat boundary points, perform ghusl or wudu, put on two seamless white cloths (men), forbid perfume, hunting, sex, cutting hair or nails, and begin reciting the talbiya chant (“Labbayka Allahumma labbayk…”): These exact purity rules, sacred months, general truce (no bloodshed), no sexual relations, no hair/nail cutting, special garments, were already enforced by the Ḥums (Quraysh and allied tribes) for anyone approaching the Kaaba or other major shrines. The miqat stations (Dhu l-Ḥulayfa, Yalamlam, etc.) were pre-Islamic pilgrimage gateways. The talbiya chant itself is older than Islam: Ibn Hisham and al-Kalbi preserve pagan versions (“At Your service, O Allah… You have no partner except the partner You have…”), which the Quran criticizes for allowing “association” yet retains in edited form.

Tawaf al-qudum (arrival circumambulation of the Kaaba) Seven counterclockwise circuits around the Kaaba, ideally touching, rubbing, or kissing the Black Stone at the eastern corner: Sevenfold tawaf was the standard act of devotion at the Kaaba and at rival shrines. Pagans circled nude or in special garments; women sometimes wore only a single cloth over the genitals. The Black Stone was one among hundreds of baetyls/ansab, sacred standing stones, often meteorites, believed to embody divine presence or serve as the “hand” of a god. Pilgrims kissed and stroked them exactly as Muslims do now. Umar’s confession, “I know you are only a stone… if I hadn’t seen the Prophet kiss you, I wouldn’t kiss you”, is an unintentional admission that the rite had no inherent monotheistic logic.

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Say between al-Safa and al-Marwa Seven trips (walking or jogging) between the two hills inside the Masjid al-Ḥaram, men jogging in the green-lit middle section: The two hills already hosted idols, Isaf on Ṣafa and Naila on Marwa (two lovers petrified by Allah for fornicating inside the Kaaba precinct, per Ibn al-Kalbi). Pagans ran or walked between them, touching or invoking the statues as part of the Kaaba pilgrimage. The Quran retains the exact path but removes the statues (2:158: “There is no sin for you in going between al-Safa and al-Marwa”), turning it into a Hagar story.

Wuquf (standing vigil) at Arafat Standing on the plain of Arafat from noon to sunset on the 9th of Dhu l-Ḥijja, praying and supplicating, the “peak” of hajj: Arafat was already the central assembly point for pre-Islamic pilgrims. Tribes gathered there during the sacred months, stood in vigil, listened to orators, traded goods, and performed collective rites at the high place. The name derives from “recognition” or “gathering”, pagans “recognized” their deities and renewed tribal alliances there. Ibn Hisham and al-Azraqi confirm it was integral to the Jahili hajj cycle.

Overnight at Muzdalifa Moving to Muzdalifa after sunset, praying maghrib and isha combined, collecting 49–70 pebbles for the next days: Muzdalifa was a pre-Islamic night halt where pilgrims gathered stones for the rami rite and spent the night in the open. Pebble collection was already part of apotropaic (evil-averting) customs across Arabia.

Rami al-jamarat (stoning the three pillars/walls) Throwing seven pebbles at each of three structures (Jamrat al-Aqaba on Eid day, then all three on the following days): Stone-throwing at cairns, pillars, or sacred boundaries was a widespread Arabian rite to drive away jinn, evil spirits, or rival deities. While the exact three-pillar sequence may be Islamic innovation, the act of pelting stones at ritual sites is pre-Islamic Bedouin apotropaic practice.

Nahr / ḥady (animal sacrifice) Slaughtering a sheep, goat, cow, or camel in Mina on the 10th (Eid al-Adha), with meat distributed to the poor: Animal sacrifice was the core of every Arabian cult, offered to Allah, al-Lat, al-Uzza, Hubal, and countless tribal gods at the Kaaba and other shrines. Mina was already a slaughter site during pilgrimage season. The Quran keeps the rite but insists it is directed to Allah alone (22:28–37; 108:2).

Ḥalq or taqṣir (head shaving or hair trimming) Shaving the head completely or cutting a lock of hair to exit ihram: Head-shaving or depilation was standard at the conclusion of pre-Islamic pilgrimage, especially at Manat’s shrine near Medina, where pilgrims shaved to complete their rites. The Quran retains it (2:196).

Other Pagan Footprints

The hajj is the loudest echo of pre-Islamic paganism in Islam, but it is far from the only one. Once you start looking, the traces appear everywhere, small, stubborn survivals that Muhammad either could not erase or chose not to. They were too useful, too familiar, too profitable, or too deeply wired into Arabian identity.

The Crescent Moon & the Lunar Calendar

Every mosque in the world is crowned with a crescent moon. Muslims begin and end Ramadan by sighting the new moon. The Islamic calendar is purely lunar, months of 29 or 30 days, no intercalation to match the solar year. Pre-Islamic Arabia was saturated with moon-god veneration. South Arabian kingdoms worshipped the moon. The crescent was already a widespread symbol of divine power in Nabataean, South Arabian, and Mesopotamian iconography. Muhammad kept the lunar calendar, the moon-sighting rule (Bukhari 1909), and the crescent as a visual marker. Today Muslims still greet each other with “Eid Mubarak” under the same crescent their pagan ancestors saluted.

Friday as the Day of Assembly

Muslims gather for the obligatory congregational prayer on Friday (Yawm al-Jumua). Pre-Islamic Arabs, and many Near Eastern cultures, dedicated Friday to the planet Venus (al-Zuhara / Uzza) or, in some traditions, to the moon. Al-Maqrizi records that the seven-day week in ancient Arabia assigned each day to a planet: Saturday to Saturn, Sunday to the Sun, Monday to the Moon, and Friday to Venus. The Muslim Friday prayer replaced pagan planetary devotions with Allah’s name, but the day itself was already sacred.

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The Kiswa (Black Covering of the Kaaba)

Every year the Kaaba is draped in a new black silk kiswa embroidered with gold Quranic verses. This is not an Islamic innovation. Pre-Islamic Arabs clothed their idols and sacred stones in cloth, especially black or red fabrics, to honor them.

The Zamzam Well & Sacred Springs

Muslims drink from the Zamzam well inside the Haram and carry its water home as a blessing. Pre-Islamic Arabs revered sacred springs and wells as gifts from their deities. Zamzam was already a pilgrimage focal point in Jahiliyya; pilgrims drank from it for health and blessing.

The Direction of Prayer (Qibla) & the Kaaba’s Centrality

Early Muslims prayed toward Jerusalem for about 16–18 months. Then Muhammad abruptly switched the qibla to the Kaaba (2:144). Why the sudden pivot? Jerusalem was the Biblical holy city; Mecca was the pagan one. The change was political and cultural: it yanked the new movement away from Jewish/Christian gravitational pull, after Jews and Christians rejected Muhammad, and anchored it firmly in Quraysh territory. The Kaaba became the sole direction of prayer for 1.9 billion people, not because Abraham built it, but because Muhammad’s tribe owned it.

The Old Gods Never Fully Left

Islam did not arrive on a blank slate. It arrived in a land thick with shrines, stones, seasons, chants, and blood rituals that had shaped Arabian identity for centuries. Muhammad destroyed the idols, banned the goddesses, outlawed rival Kaabas, and killed or converted their guardians. But he kept the Kaaba, the Black Stone, the tawaf, the say, the standing at Arafat, the stoning, the sacrifice, the shaving, the lunar calendar, the Friday assembly, the covering of the shrine, the sacred well, the crescent symbol, everything that could be repurposed without losing the economic engine or tribal loyalty.

The result is a religion that claims to be the final, uncorrupted monotheism while walking, step by step, through the exact choreography of the pagan pilgrimage it replaced. The hajj s the last pagan procession on earth, only now the worshippers chant one name instead of many. The old gods lost their statues, but they kept the shrine, the stone, the circuit, the blood. And every time a Muslim kisses the Black Stone or circles the Kaaba under the crescent moon, the Jahiliyya whispers: “We never really left.”

Danny Burmawi is the cheif executive of the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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‘Oh my god, I’m a Muslim in one minute.’

The recorded words of Afghan migrant, Jan Jahanzeb, moments before he and another Afghan migrant, Israr Niazal, raped a 15-year-old English girl he had kidnapped.[1]

ISLAM’S RAPE PROBLEM

For the last 30 years, objective critical study of Islam has essentially been forbidden in Western academia. Most work is by those who haven’t studied Islamic law (Sharia), much less Arabic, and most of that produced, somewhat understandably, focusses on jihad and terrorism.

However, as Muslims continue to mass migrate to the West and once well-ordered Western societies witness exponential increases in sex crimes, it has become imperative to study and critically assess sexuality within Islam.

The common misconception in the West is that Islam as an institution is sexually conservative; even repressive. This impression flows from the requirements of Muslim women to wear the hijab/niqab/burqa and to stone adulterers; however, this is highly misleading: the institution of Islam is hyper-sexualised with rape and sexual slavery central to Islamic law.

Whilst it is true that the Quran requires Muslim women to draw cloaks around them, and that this has morphed into the requirement to don the hijab/niqab/burqa, the specific Quranic instruction requires this be done so that Muslim women ‘are recognised and not harmed’ (Surah Al-Azhab, 33:59).

Thus, the theological requirement to wear the hijab etc is not one of modesty per se but one of demarcation; it protects them from Muslim men and prevents them from ‘harm’.

Likewise, stoning adulterers applies to Muslim relationships. It is entirely lawful under Sharia for Muslim men to rape slaves.

THE ISLAMIC FRAMEWORK

To fully understand Islam’s rape problem, one must grasp six key Islamic concepts:

First, morality in Islam, particularly Sunni Islam, is entirely shaped by the Quran and the Hadith. That is to say, the direct word of their god and the sayings and doings of their prophet, Muhammad, shape the entire Islamic moral framework. What is set out therein is referred to as Sharia, or Islamic law, but this is, in many ways, a false distinction: Islam is Sharia and Sharia is Islam.

Second, as evidenced by the command to demarcate Muslim women, Islam principally delineates humanity into two castes of people: Muslims and non-Muslims.

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Third, within this already highly discriminatory framework, Muslim women are treated differently again. Whilst women are discriminated against in a range of areas, from inheritance to their standing as witnesses, there is no concept of consent in inter-Muslim sexual relations.

Fourth, whilst there is an austere sexual environment for young Muslim men outside of wedlock, particularly for those who are poor, a major and divinely ordained outlet is the sexual slavery of non-Muslim women.

Fifth, prostitution is lawful in Islam under certain conditions. It is specifically provided for in the Quran and there is strong evidence to suggest the relevant verse has been relied on by the Muslim rape gangs in the United Kingdom.

Sixth, it is important to understand that Islam is a belief system that leans into carnal pleasures: Contrary to Judaism and Christianity, their heaven, or ‘paradise’, is simply the promise of lustful worldly desires.

MORALITY IN ISLAM

Morality in Islam is merely the rules set out by their scriptures. The word ‘morality’ in this context carries no deeper meaning. Whatever is termed ‘halal’ is fine and whatever is termed ‘haram’ is forbidden. It is, quite literally, no more complex than that. Mehdi Hasan, prior to refining his apologia, summed it up perfectly:

‘…in Islam what is halal is halal what is haram is haram. We do not bend our law, our morality… never… We know that keeping the moral high ground is key. Once we lose the moral high ground, we are no different from the rest of non-Muslims, from the rest of those who mean to live their lives as animals, bending any rule to fulfil any desire. Once we do that, we are lost!’[2]

Thus, a Muslim of good Islamic moral standing is one who follows the law i.e. Sharia, and in so doing does only that which is ‘halal’. There is no further consideration and, when a Muslim uses the word ‘moral(s)’, there must be a rebuttable presumption the word takes the meaning of ‘conduct in accordance with Sharia’.

MUSLIMS AND NON-MUSLIMS

Islam is, on a literal construction, the most discriminatory framework ever constructed with discrimination against non-Muslims a central Quranic theme. Selected passages say, inter alia:

• Non-Muslims are the worst of creatures (Surah Al-Bayyanah 98:6)

• Non-Muslims are no better than animals (cattle) (Surah Al-Araaf 7:179)

• Non-Muslims are the ‘clear enemy’ (Surah An-Nisa 4:101) – note this is identical terminology used for Satan (e.g. Surah Al-Baqarah 2:208; Surah Ya Sin 36:60)

• Non-Muslims wish to lead Muslims astray (Surah 5:41)

• Non-Muslims are deluded (Surah 67:20)

• Non-Muslims are dirty (Surah At-Tawbah 9:28)

• No other religion is acceptable (Surah 3:85)

• Former Muslims who do not repent cannot be saved (Surah 9:66)

• Non-Muslims are allied against Muslims (Surah At-Tawbah 9:32–33)

• Muslims should not be allied to non-Muslims (Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:51)

• Muslims should not trust non-Muslims (Surah Al-Mumtahanah 60:1)

• Their god has forsaken non-Muslims (Surah Muhammad 47:12)

• Their god will punish non-Muslims in a brutal fashion (Surah Al-Hajj 22:19–22)

• Their god will punish Muslims who take non-Muslims as friends (Surah Al-Mujaadilah 58:14–15)

• Muslims should “cast horror/terror” into disbelievers (Surah Ali Imran 3:151)

As is plain, Islam’s rigid theological doctrine imposes the ultimate ‘in-group – out-group’ moral framework. It is not a case of cherry-picking verses, it is a core irrebuttable theme. On a strict interpretation, there are no ‘human rights’ or even ‘universal rights’, there are simply rights for Muslims with non-Muslims protected only to the extent they have treaties with Muslims or, in the case of Christians, Jews and Sabaeans (now extinct), are subjugated and pay to the Muslims a yearly tax (the Jizya) (Surah At-Tawbah 9:29).

INTER-MUSLIM SEXUAL RELATIONS

Most will recognise that Muslim men may have four wives (Surah An-Nisa, 4:3) and most will also recognise that Muslim men may beat their wives (Surah An-Nisa, 4:34).

However, what is almost totally absent from discourse is the fact that Muslim men may, on a strict interpretation of Sharia, rape their wives:

‘Your women are fertile soil for you so go to your fertile soil* as you wish and send before and fear God and know that you will meet him and give good tidings to believers.’ (Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:223)

*the word is ‘tilth’ which is tilled soil i.e. soil conditioned for growing crops.

Thus, Sharia provides that sexual relations between a married Muslim man and Muslim woman are not conditional on consent and, if a wife rebels, for example, does not allow intercourse to occur, the husband, on a literal reading of Sura An-Nisa 4:34, has divine authority to beat her.

Many may struggle to accept the existence of such a moral framework but of all the MENAPT countries (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey), founded on Sharia as they are, only Tunisia expressly provides a criminal sanction for the act of spousal rape.

Additionally, Sharia provides that sexual maturity for girls is nine years of age. Although there is some further discourse about maturity of mind and body, the Quran makes plain a pre-pubescent girl can be married (Surah At-Talaq:1;64-65), there is a significant body of Hadith traced through Aishah (one of Muhammad’s many wives) that Muhammad had sex with her when she was nine (Sahih al-Bukhari:3896;5133;5134;5158; Sahih Muslim:1422a;1422b;1422d).

Many in the West simply cannot comprehend that the Islamic construct of morals permits a fully grown man to have sex with a nine-year-old child whether she wants to or not but that is simply the way it is. It is ‘halal’ and therefore it is moral. That is the Islamic moral universe. This framework is so antithetical to our Western morality, founded on Christianity as it is and refined by millennia of European philosophy, that most simply cannot comprehend this objective evil, let alone define and recognise it. It is so frightening that, to many, it is best ignored.

Which brings us to another ugly point. In Sharia, there is no word for ‘rape’. Instead, there is the concept of ‘Zina’ which roughly takes the meaning ‘unlawful sexual intercourse’.

There is a body of Sharia concerning Zina drawn from the Quran and Hadith but, for Muslim male-female relations, it is sufficient to say that unmarried individuals face 100 lashes (Surah An-Nur 24:2), an unmarried Muslim with a married Muslim could additionally face exile and married Muslims are to be stoned to death (Sahih Muslim:1697/1698a).

However, what does not fall within Zina is sexual intercourse with slaves – this is not unlawful within Sharia. In fact, it is morally right.

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SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH NON MUSLIMS

Arguably the largest gap in modern discourse is the fact that slavery isn’t just a quaint relic of Islam, it is central to it. It is referenced throughout the Quran with the focus on sexual relations between Muslim men and their female slaves.

Muslims are, by theological doctrine, slaves to their god. It’s why so many are called ‘Abdul’, followed by one of the many names of their god, which translates to ‘slave of god’. Non-Muslims, on the other hand, are unclean (Sura At-Tawba, 9:28), forsaken by the god of Islam (Sura al-Mu’minum, 47:12), no better than cattle (Sura Al-Araaf 7:179) and are, in fact, the worst of creatures (Sura Al-Bayyana 98:6). They are subordinate to Muslims in every way and may be taken as slaves by Muslims.

Slavery in Islam is incredibly different from the understanding of slavery in the West. In the Western psyche, when images of slavery are conjured, they are commonly associated with the use of black men to pick cotton and black women as house help. The concept of slavery is very different in Islam, flowing as it does from killing all male combatants and enslaving their women and children which become ‘booty’. Central to it is sexual slavery where Muslim men may do as they please to non-Muslim female slaves.

For example, many in the United Kingdom will be familiar with the current discourse about cousin marriage in the Pakistani community. This flows from Surah An-Nisa (4:23) which provides a precise listing of the types of women forbidden to Muslim men and cousins are not on it; they are therefore ‘halal’. What doesn’t currently form part of that discussion is the next verse which, much more egregiously, prescribes that Muslim men may have sex with their slaves, even if those females are already married.

The consequence of that verse is that a Muslim man may rape his female slaves as often as he desires without fear of consequence from his god, even if that female slave is already married and even if that slave is as young as nine. This is reflected elsewhere in the Quran, for example, Surah al-Mu’minun, 23:1-6 and Surah Al-Ma’arij, 70:28-30 which both expressly provide Muslim men will be successful/free from punishment where they have sexual relations with their slaves.

In classical Islamic jurisprudence, slaves are generally only permissible through conquest. Islam apologists often state women and children are not to be killed in war and, whilst Hadith validate this argument (Sahih al-Bukhari:3014; Sahih Muslim:1744b), what they don’t tell you is their fate is worse than death: Women and children are to be taken as slaves (Sahih al-Bukhari:4024).

Of course, many will rightly point out that we in the West are not ‘at war’ with Islam and thus this element of Sharia is redundant. Whilst it is true that the West is not at war with Islam, it is also an inescapable fact that Islam is, by theological doctrine, at war with the West. Whilst a larger topic, it is sufficient to note the Quran gives global dominion to Islam (e.g. Surah Al-Baqarah 2:115;255; Surah An-Nisa 4:131; Surah At-Tawbah 9:33), multiple verses directly command Muslims to fight non-believers (e.g. Surah An-Nisa 4:76; Surah At-Tawbah 9:29;73) and Muhammad is quoted in Hadith as saying he was ‘…ordered to fight all of mankind until they say there is no god except god…’ (Sahih al-Bukhari:392).

Taken together, this branch of Sharia puts the West in what is referred to as the Dar al-Harb which roughly translates to the Abode of War. Although without a strict Quranic basis, this doctrine splits the world in two i.e. Dar al-Islam which is the Islamic world and Dar al-Harb. The latter is to be conquered, subjugated and forced into Dar al-Islam.

This approach to conquest and women isn’t just abstract theology; it plays out in the real world backed up by no less than 1,400 years of well-documented history. The most obvious modern example being the genocide of the Yazidis in Iraq by the Islamic State followed by the sexual slavery of their women and children. In that case, there have at least been some prosecutions in Germany for Crimes Against Humanity but far from enough.[3]

PROSTITUTION IN ISLAM

Perhaps the most troubling verse in the Quran is Surah An-Nur 24:33. This verse provides that a Muslim man may force his young slave girls into prostitution for money provided she doesn’t wish to remain chaste (and it logically follows if she isn’t chaste already then she cannot wish to remain so). If there is no money involved, it appears the qualification of chastity is removed and the Muslim man may simply force her into prostitution. It sets out a very precise test and there is clear evidence it has been deployed by Muslim men in the United Kingdom. In fact, this verse explains the entire typology of sexual slavery and enforced prostitution illustrated by the Muslim Rape Gangs (aka the Grooming Gangs).

ISLAM’S PARADISE

As is perhaps unsurprising for an ideology born in the desert, paradise in Islam includes luscious terrain, flowing rivers and, crucially, wine and maidens (Huris). The Quran is replete with references to marrying Muslim men to these ‘Huris’ (Surah Ad-Dukhaan 44:54; Surah At-tur 52:20), untouched by man or jinn (Islamic spirits) (Surah Ar-Rahman 55:56; Surah Ar-Rahmaan 55:74) who will have eyes like pearls as a reward for the Muslim men’s earthly deeds (Surah Al-Waaqiah 56:22-24; Surah As-Saaffaat 37:48).

What we in the West view as debauched desires form the basis of heaven in Islam. An objective cynic might observe that these revelations concerning sexual slavery and paradise tapped into the fact Muhammad’s male followers, it seems, were motivated to fight by the reward of sex, either in this world or the next. This is particularly the case when read against Surah al-Baqarah 2:216 which betrays the fact Muhammad’s male followers did not enjoy fighting and had to be compelled by their god to do so.

EUROPE’S RAPE PROBLEM

After the Second World War, for reasons that cannot be sensibly explained,[4] Muslims have been permitted to self-import en masse into western Europe. The last 30 years have seen an exponential increase with waves upon waves of male, fighting age illegal migrants from Muslim countries supplementing unsustainable levels of legal migration from the same.

These illegal migrants are often of little means and their education and morality, unsurprisingly, flows from religious education in their home jurisdiction. Their moral universe, which can only be objectively described as deeply supremacist, includes the following:-

• they are now in the Dar Al-Harb;

• their ultimate reward in paradise includes sex;

• non-Muslims are slave material;

• there is no concept of consent for having sex with slaves;

• girls as young as nine are permissible; and

• Sharia takes primacy over man-made laws i.e. the laws of the land.

It is even reasonable to conclude that raping European females is a driving factor for some migrants given Quranic exegesis gives Muhammad as personally authorising the rape of European women, seen as extra seductive, by his subordinate in return for jihad.[5]

This theological doctrine bears out in the evidence. Illustratively, it is not uncommon in court for these Muslim migrants to plead ignorance to the concept of consent as a mitigating factor.[6] In one recent case, a convicted Iranian rapist was sent for lessons in ‘understanding consent’.[7] In another, involving the gang rape of a young woman by an Iranian and two Egyptians, one migrant put it more bluntly, simply saying: ‘Rape to me is sex.’[8]

Thus, when considering the underlying ideology, the almost daily headlines of rape and sexual violence, particularly targeting of young girls, is wholly unsurprising. Most European nations feel it, from the 2015 New Year sex attacks in Cologne, Germany, to the almost daily headlines in the UK and wider Europe where Muslim men kidnap girls off the streets and rape them. It is similarly unsurprising that European countries with mass-migration have seen up to 500% increases in rapes since the early 2000s whilst countries like Poland, which has refused to take migrants, have experienced no material increase.

Moreover, this isn’t simply a problem for recent illegal immigrants. Taking the United Kingdom as an example, there are over 2,000 mosques and Pakistani communities, famous for practising cousin marriage, live in ethnic enclaves as evidenced by census data. You do not need to spend more than five minutes on Google or YouTube to discover Sharia views on consent and slavery are being taught in mosques across the UK and polling suggesting a third of British Muslims view the imposition of Sharia as desirable.[9]

-Video from Al-Furqan Islamic centre in Manchester of imam providing an exegesis of Surah An-Nisa 4:24

The logical conclusion of concentrating men with such a moral framework leads to controversies like the UK’s ‘Grooming Gangs’ scandal. Of course, ‘grooming gangs’ is a gross misnomer. They are, in reality, gangs of Muslims engaged in sexual slavery and enforced prostitution of non-Muslim girls, permitted as these acts manifestly are by a literal reading of Sharia.

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The reality is there is no difference between the ideology these men follow and that of the Islamic State. Contrary to what many politicians would have you believe, Islamic State was simply what it said on the tin: An Islamic state. In other words, Muslims, following Islam in its raw, unfettered form. It is precisely the reason we see Muslims carrying out the same depraved acts i.e. rape, sexual slavery and enforced prostitution, in Europe as they have in the Middle East.

The difference, of course, is that where Western governments were all to keen to take action against the Islamic State, they remain unwilling to grasp the nettle and instead are busily engaged in downplaying the crimes they have visited on their people through mass migration. For example, alleging the perpetrators were involved with drugs and alcohol. Maybe the men did drink, maybe they didn’t. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is these men subsist within a moral framework that permits these acts. Branding victims with initials,[10] beating them,[11] and, in at least three cases, killing them.[12] This is notwithstanding the most depraved sexual activity with children that simply cannot be processed by most Western minds.[13]

And it is far from isolated. An analysis suggests that 1 in 16 Pakistani men Rotherham were suspects.[14] With a circle of knowledge this broad, these acts cannot be anything other than institutional. The scale of these atrocities would simply be impossible in a non-Muslim community. It should similarly come as no surprise that the wives of these men regard white girls as ‘filth’[15] and that the men have reportedly prayed in the next room after raping a victim.[16] What’s worse, Muslim sex slavers have been found to subsist in over 50 British towns and cities.[17]

Of course, apologists and those complicit in the crimes tend to revert to the slogan ‘it’s just bad men’, deliberately obfuscating the truth. But the evidence speaks for itself:

Afghan migrant Jan Jahanzeb was recorded as saying, moments before he and another Afghan migrant raped a girl he kidnapped: ‘Oh my god, I’m a Muslim in one minute.’[18]

In another case from 2024, a victim made the following statement:

‘I was only 11. You made me do a test to see if I was still a virgin or not. At that moment my abuse started. You made it sound like it was a crime to be a virgin. You made me feel ashamed of being a virgin. That same day you sent me off and forced me to commit a sexual act and my innocence was stolen. You started to pass me around as if I was a fresh piece of meat, man to man, city to city.’[19]

As is evident, the Muslim man tested whether his child victim was chaste. Having presumably been a virgin, the Muslim man appears to have then convinced her that she did not wish to be chaste and, apparently successful in this endeavour, immediately started prostituting her out.

It is the exact test for forced prostitution as set out by Quran 24:33.

In fact, the typology prescribed by Quran 24:33 neatly plays out in every rape gang. That is, as explained by Sir Trevor Phillips OBE, former chair of the United Kingdom’s Equality and Human Rights Commission:

‘The girls are first attracted by usually young men from within those communities. Flash cars, cigarettes, they give them drugs, all the rest of it... and I did… this film 10 years ago, and what the girls tell you, “This is my boyfriend” because they think that is what’s happening. Only later do they discover they’re hooked on drugs, they need the alcohol and all of that and then they’re passed around amongst older men.’[20]

In other words, a relationship forms between a Muslim man and a young girl. Once he has had sex with her [and she is self-evidently no longer chaste] and has control over her by vice or violence, he pimps her out to dozens of Muslim men. Exactly as verse 24:33. Exactly as Sharia permits. This behaviour is therefore ‘halal’ and morally virtuous.

That is the truth of the matter. The mass sexual slavery and enforced prostitution of little girls by gangs of Muslim men and the mass rape of women and girls across Europe by Muslim migrants is founded in the institution of Islam. A virulent, hyper-sexualised supremacist ideology that views non-Muslims as chattel for slavery and sexual abuse.

Until we confront the hideous truth that Islam has a rape problem, and confront it we must, the sexual slavery, enforced prostitution and mass rape of European women and girls will continue.

____________________

[1] Hardy, Jack. “Chilling Moment Afghan Asylum Seekers Drag 15-year-old Girl Into the Bushes Before Raping Her: Pair Jailed Over ‘horrific’ Attack.” Mail Online, December 8, 2025. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15364309/Teenage-asylum-seekers-raped-15-year-old-schoolgirl-park-filmed-dragged-away-footage-horrifying-cause-riot.html.

[2] Hasan, Mehdi (Tom Marshall), “Mehdi Hasan Says Non-Muslims and Atheists Live Like Cattle,” December 19, 2018,

[3] See, for example, the German case of Taha al-J: 3 StR 230/22

[4] Unless you accept Islamic migration as a deliberate attempt to destroy Christian hegemony.

[5] The tafsir of Ibn Kathir for verse 9:49 which is explicit that the prospect of raping European females was permitted in return for jihad.

[6] See, for example, the sentencing remarks in R v Jahanzeb [2025] [3.5; 3.7], https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/R-v-Jahanzeb-and-Niazal.pdf.

[7] McDonald, Dan. 2026. “Migrant Crisis: Iranian Boy, 14, Avoids Jail after Being Convicted of Raping Schoolgirl as Victim’s Family Left ‘Furious.’” GB News. April 25, 2026. https://www.gbnews.com/news/migrant-crisis-iranian-avoids-jail-raping-schoolgirl-victim-family-furious.

[8] Dartford, Katy. 2026. “Asylum Seeker Accused of Filming Brighton Beach Rape Claims: ‘Rape Is Sex’ | LBC.” LBC. April 2, 2026. https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/asylum-seeker-brighton-rape-sex-5HjdXHQ_2.

[9] J.L. Partners and Henry Jackson Society, “British Muslim and General Public Attitudes Polling” 2024, https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/HJS-Deck-200324-Final.pdf.

[10] R v Dogar 27 June 2013, [54]. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/sentencing-remarks-r-v-dogar-others.pdf.

[11] ibid, [53].

[12] See the cases of Lucy Lowe, Charlene Downes and Becky Watson. NB A fourth victim, Laura Wilson was murdered but not a sex related victim of the gangs– it was her sister. The murder of Becky Watson was denied and instead framed as a prank with no official findings otherwise).

[13] See for example, the sentencing remarks in R v Dogar 27 June 2013, [53-54]. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/sentencing-remarks-r-v-dogar-others.pdf.

[14] Ashworth-Hayes, Sam. 2025. “The True Horror of the Rotherham Grooming Scandal.” The Telegraph. January 13, 2025. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/13/grooming-gang-victims-rotherham/.

[15] Alibhai-brown, Yasmin. 2017. “Wives of Men Jailed for Rape Blame the Victims Too.” Mail Online. Daily Mail. September 30, 2017. https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-4936754/Wives-men-jailed-rape-blame-victims-too.html.

[16] Moffett, Rebekah. 2022. “New Grooming Gang Report Avoids Discussing Islamic Connection.” Christian Concern. July 15, 2022. https://christianconcern.com/comment/new-grooming-gang-report-avoids-discussing-islamic-connection/.

[17] Chapman, Adam. 2025. “MAPPED: The 50 Towns and Cities in Britain Rocked by Grooming Gangs Abuse - Is YOUR Area Included?” GB News. January 6, 2025. https://www.gbnews.com/news/uk/starmer-grooming-gangs-uk-areas.

[18] Hardy, Jack. “Chilling Moment Afghan Asylum Seekers Drag 15-year-old Girl Into the Bushes Before Raping Her: Pair Jailed Over ‘horrific’ Attack.” Mail Online, December 8, 2025. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15364309/Teenage-asylum-seekers-raped-15-year-old-schoolgirl-park-filmed-dragged-away-footage-horrifying-cause-riot.html.

[19] Patrick Christy quoting a grooming gang survivor in the sentencing of R v Saddiq and Ors [2024] (citation unavailable and case name approximated).

[20] Trevor Philips. “Why White Victims of Grooming Gangs Is Different, ‘They Covered It Up’.” YouTube. Times Radio, March 5, 2026.

Jonathan Smith is a contributor at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Since the 1970s, the term al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Awakening, emerged and spread across the Middle East. More than a hundred books have been published in Arabic under the title The Islamic Awakening, along with thousands of studies, articles, and television programs devoted to it. The renowned Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi alone has written sixteen books on the Awakening, including:

• The Islamic Awakening Between Adolescence and Maturity

• The Islamic Awakening Between Denial and Extremism

• The Islamic Awakening and the Concerns of the Nation

• The Islamic Awakening Between Legitimate Disagreement and Blameworthy Division

• Toward a Mature Awakening That Renews Religion and Advances the World

• The Islamic Solution as Obligation and Necessity

• The Jurisprudence of Priorities for the Islamic Movement

• Toward an Intellectual Unity for Those Working for Islam (five volumes)

The Awakening, as the Sheikhs of Islam define it, is the renewal of the worldly life of Muslims through the renewal of their religion. This renewal is to be achieved by returning to the roots of Islam in the first three Islamic centuries, by fully emulating what is contained in those centuries, and by following the example of the Prophet of Islam and his companions, those whom they call the Righteous Predecessors (al-Salaf al-Salih). According to the French researcher Stéphane Lacroix in his book The Time of the Awakening, the contemporary Islamic Awakening is a fusion of Wahhabi jurisprudence and Muslim Brotherhood ideology. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahhabis are the two wings of this Awakening. They have interacted and cooperated, and together they have produced an extraordinarily dangerous activist version that combined the activism and comprehensiveness of the Brotherhood with the Salafism of Wahhabism. From this fusion has emerged most, if not all, of the violent Sunni Islamic movements, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, Boko Haram, and others.

The Awakening has many synonyms: the Islamic Vigilance, the Islamic Revival, the Islamic Renewal, the Islamic Resurrection, the Islamic Renaissance, the Islamic Salafism. Its proponents, however, prefer the term Awakening. They hold that this renewal occurs at the head of every Islamic century (every hundred Hijri years). According to Islamic history:

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The Renewer of the First Century was Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz (101 AH).

The Renewer of the Second Century was Imam al-Shafi’i (204 AH).

The Renewer of the Fifth Century was Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (505 AH).

The Renewer of the Seventh Century was Taqi al-Din ibn Daqiq al-’Id (702 AH).

The Renewer of the Fourteenth Century, according to Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Muhammad al-Ghazali, is Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Islamic Awakening was launched from three principal centers: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. Its founding fathers may be identified as the Saudi Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792), the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna (1906–1949), and the Pakistani Abul A’la al-Mawdudi (1903–1979).

On the Shia side, the founding fathers are Khomeini (1902–1989) and Ali Shariati (1933–1977), extending down to their disciples such as Khamenei and Hassan Nasrallah.

The matter then developed from the founding fathers of the Awakening into the stars, symbols, and sheikhs of the Awakening, including, by way of example and not exhaustively:

In Saudi Arabia: Bin Baz; Bin al-Uthaymeen; Abd al-Rahman al-Dosari; Salman al-Awda; Safar al-Hawali; Awad al-Qarni; Hamoud al-Shu’aibi; Abdullah ibn Jibreen; Abdullah ibn Humayd; Saad al-Faqih; Muhammad al-Mas’ari; Juhayman al-Otaibi; Saeed al-Ghamdi; Hamoud al-Tuwaijri and his son Abdullah; Abd al-Wahhab al-Tariri; Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak; al-Taifih; Saud al-Faysan; Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin; Muhammad Aman al-Jami; Mansour al-Nuqaidan; Musa al-Qarni; Mohsen al-Awaji; Muhammad al-Arifi — and of course Bin Laden.

In Egypt: Sayyid Qutb; Muhammad al-Ghazali; Muhammad Mutawalli al-Sha’rawi; Sheikh Kishk; Omar Abdel-Rahman; Ayman al-Zawahiri; Omar al-Tilmisani; Said Ramadan and his son Tariq; Zaynab al-Ghazali; Abd al-Halim Mahmoud; Sayyid Imam; Sayyid Sabiq; Muhammad Qutb; Fahmi Huwaidi; Muhammad Amara; Muhammad Selim al-Awa; Jad al-Haq Ali Jad al-Haq; Muhammad Hassan; Abu Ishaq al-Huwayni; Muhammad Hussein Yaqub; Mustafa al-Adawi; Hazem Shouman; Yasser Burhami.

Pakistan and Afghanistan: Sayyid Ahmad Khan; Abul A’la al-Mawdudi; Muhammad Ilyas; Burhanuddin Rabbani; Abdul Rasul Sayyaf; Gulbuddin Hekmatyar; Mullah Omar.

North Africa: Allal al-Fassi; Rachid al-Ghannouchi; Abbasi Madani; Ali Belhadj; Abd al-Qader al-Idrisi.

Kuwait: Ismail al-Shatti; Muhammad Ahmad al-Rashid; Ahmad al-Qattan; Abdullah al-Nafisi.

Jordan: Kamel al-Sharif; Muhammad Nasir al-Albani; Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi; Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani; Abu Qatada.

Sudan: Hassan al-Turabi; Zayn al-Abidin al-Rikabi; Jaafar Idris.

Lebanon and Iraq: Muhammad al-Sawwaf; Fathi Yakan.

Among the Palestinians: Abdullah Azzam; Ahmed Yassin; Ramadan Abdullah Shallah; Azzam Tamimi — and all the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

A large number of books have appeared that provide the ideological theorization of the Islamic Awakening, of jihad, and of Islamic violence. Among these Islamists, these books are treated with the standing of sacred texts:

• In the Shade of the Qur’an and Milestones by Sayyid Qutb

• Memoirs of the Call and the Caller and the Epistles of Hassan al-Banna

• Kitab al-Tawhid by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab

• Jihad in Islam, Islamic Government, and The Religion of Truth by Abul A’la al-Mawdudi

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• The Jurisprudence of the Sunna (Fiqh al-Sunna) by Sayyid Sabiq

• Loyalty and Disavowal (al-Wala’ wal-Bara’) and Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner by Ayman al-Zawahiri

• The Signs of the Merciful in the Jihad of the Afghans by Abdullah Azzam

• Islamic Law and Say to the Tyrant: No by Omar Abdel-Rahman

• The Neglected Duty (al-Farida al-Gha’iba) by Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj

• The Religion of Abraham (Millat Ibrahim) by Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi

• The Master in the Preparation of the Equipment (al-’Umda fi I’dad al-’Udda) by Sayyid Imam

• Jihad and Ijtihad by Abu Qatada

• The Call to Global Islamic Resistance by Abu Mus’ab al-Suri

• The Management of Savagery by Abu Bakr Naji

• The complete works of Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Muhammad al-Ghazali

• The recorded cassettes of Sheikh Kishk

• al-Sha’rawi’s Tafsir of the Qur’an

• The weekly program Sharia and Life (al-Sharia wal-Hayat) hosted by Yusuf al-Qaradawi on the Al Jazeera channel

The Islamic Awakening has passed through many phases. What concerns me here are two in particular: the phase of international terrorism, which reached its peak on September 11, 2001; and the phase of international Islamism, which is the appearance of vast Islamic networks covering most of the world’s states, especially the Western states, and which seek to apply the values, the culture, and the Sharia of Islam in the Western states specifically. There are hundreds of Islamic organizations and thousands of large mosques across Europe, North America, and Australia, financed by petroleum surpluses and supervised by the Wahhabi and Brotherhood cells in the West. The ultimate goal is the Islamization of the West and the toppling of Western civilization.

To contain and recruit Muslims, the Awakening has adopted short and attractive slogans, such as Islam is the Solution and Islam is in Danger. It has taken the woman’s hijab and the man’s beard as symbols that distinguish its adherents from others.

The Islamic Awakening has identified its enemies, whom it considers the enemies of Islam and of Muslims:

• The West, especially America and Europe.

• Israel and the Jews in general.

• Non-Muslims in the Islamic states, especially Christians.

• The Muslim rulers who do not apply the Islamic Sharia.

• Secularism, modernity, and the manifestations of modern civilization.

But why did the Islamic Awakening appear at this particular time?

The principal reason is the surplus of petrodollars, which the Wahhabi-Brotherhood alliance deployed to advance its agenda. They found in the fall of the Ottoman Islamic Caliphate in 1924 a cause that would justify reviving the Caliphate once again.

What also helped accelerate the ambition of the Sunni Awakening was the Iranian Revolution of 1979, with Khomeini’s seizure of power and the establishment of a Shia theocratic state governed by the clerics.

Another cause is the Awakening’s own conception that the backwardness and degradation of Muslims is the consequence of their abandonment of the application of Islam, of jihad, and of conquest, and that their abandonment of Islam is what led to Western colonization of their lands. They themselves should have been the ones who conquered the West. Their principal aim in the present is therefore a reverse conquest, the destruction of the West from within, using every instrument that Western civilization makes available to them, including democracy and the freedoms, in order to undermine those very values.

To summarize: the Islamic Awakening is the largest dangerous and destructive global phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century, and it remains so up to the present moment. Beyond having ruined the Middle East, it has terrorized the world with contemporary international terrorism. The greatest losers from the appearance of this Islamic Awakening, however, remain the Christians of the Middle East and of the Western states. They have been subjected to racial discrimination, persecution, forced displacement, the kidnapping of their daughters, and the burning and bombing of their churches, to the point that Christianity has nearly been extinguished entirely from states such as Iraq, Syria, Gaza, and the regions of the Palestinian Authority, and their numbers and their civilizational role have severely declined throughout the whole of the Middle East.

As for Europe, it has come under permanent Islamic danger. There are entire cities that Muslims have taken over and that have become semi-closed, dangerous, and frightening, even to the original people of the country, and that are difficult to enter.

And in America, they are attempting to drag the country toward the same fate as Europe.

Magdi Khalil is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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On January 27, 2026, Egypt’s Court of Cassation issued a ruling that the state then kept confidential for almost three months. The ruling overturned a 2020 Family Court decision that had recognized the marriage of an Egyptian Bahá’í couple who had been married since September 1981, forty-five years. The Egyptian public learned of the ruling in mid-April, when activists noticed that married Bahá’ís renewing their identity cards were being recorded as single.

Article 2 of the Egyptian Constitution establishes Sharia as the principal source of legislation. Article 64 guarantees the freedom of religious rites only for adherents of the three heavenly religions, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Marriage is a religious rite. Bahá’ís are not adherents of a heavenly religion. Their marriages are therefore outside the legal framework that recognizes marriage at all.

A Bahá’í couple cannot register their marriage. Their children’s parentage is legally ambiguous. Pensions and inheritance pass through formal recognition that does not exist. Non-Egyptian spouses of Egyptian Bahá’ís cannot obtain family residency. Egyptian Bahá’í mothers cannot pass their citizenship to children they have with non-Egyptians, a right the state grants to every other Egyptian woman. The Bahá’í citizen is a citizen with the legal status of a stateless person inside his own country.

This ruling is the latest episode in a pattern that has run through the Egyptian state for almost a century. In 1948, the Egyptian Jewish community numbered approximately 80,000 people, descended from communities documented in Alexandria and Cairo since the Hellenistic period. After the founding of Israel, and especially after the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Nasser regime conducted a systematic campaign of dispossession, confiscation of property, revocation of citizenship, mass expulsions framed alternately as voluntary departures and as security measures. After 1967, the residual community was effectively eliminated. By 1970, fewer than a thousand Jews remained. Today, the Egyptian Jewish community of antiquity exists in diaspora.

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The Copts, the descendants of the pre-Islamic Christian population, whose church traces its founding to Saint Mark in the first century, six hundred years before the Arab conquest of 641 CE, were the majority of the Egyptian population at the time of the conquest. They are now estimated at roughly 10 percent. Coptic numerical decline across fourteen centuries has been the product of jizya pressure, social marginalization, intermittent violence, and the steady administrative friction of life as a tolerated minority. The friction has not stopped. Coptic churches have been bombed in Cairo, Alexandria, and Tanta within the last decade. Coptic girls continue to be kidnapped, forcibly converted, and forcibly married to Muslim men in a pattern the community has documented and the state has refused to address.

The Bahá’ís are now in the position the Jews were in before 1948 and the position the Copts have occupied for centuries. The community in Egypt dates to 1863. Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the faith, transited Egypt in August 1868 on his way from Adrianople to ʻAkká, with the ship stopping at Alexandria and Port Said. The first native Egyptian converts were recorded by 1896. In 1900, al-Azhar issued a fatwa declaring Bahá’ís infidels. In 1960, Nasser’s Decree 263 dissolved all Bahá’í institutions. In 1975, the Supreme Constitutional Court upheld the decree. In 2006, the Supreme Administrative Court banned the entry of Bahá’í in the religion field on identity documents. In 2009, the same court allowed a dash (–) in the religion field, the closest the Egyptian state has come to acknowledging that Egyptian Bahá’ís exist. The January 2026 ruling forecloses the last remaining legal pathway for state recognition of Bahá’í marriages.

The Bahá’í case matters beyond the Bahá’í community because it exposes the actual structure of Egyptian religious freedom. A community whose marriages are not recognized cannot pass property to children. A community whose family structure is administratively invisible has trouble registering children in schools and hospitals. The result is reduced fertility and accelerated emigration, with younger Egyptian Bahá’ís leaving for countries where their families will be recognized as families. The Egyptian Bahá’í community was, by mid-twentieth-century estimates, in the tens of thousands. It is now estimated at 2,000 to 7,000.

The world headquarters of the Bahá’í Faith is in Haifa, in the State of Israel. The Shrine of the Báb sits on the slopes of Mount Carmel, surrounded by terraced gardens that draw nearly a million visitors a year. The Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing body of the faith, operates from a building of marble and Corinthian columns overlooking the Mediterranean. The shrine of Bahá’u’lláh himself, the founder of the faith, sits at the Mansion of Bahjí near Acre, where he died in 1892 and where Bahá’ís from around the world come on pilgrimage. The Israeli state protects these sites, funds their preservation, and treats the Bahá’í presence in Haifa as one of the cultural and architectural treasures of the country.

Israeli Bahá’ís marry, raise children, pass property, and worship without administrative interference of any kind. Across the border, in Egypt, the Bahá’í couple of forty-five years cannot register their marriage. In Iran, the country of the faith’s origin, Bahá’ís are imprisoned, executed, and stripped of property under formal state policy. Across the broader Islamic world, the same pattern repeats. The faith that the Islamic world has spent a century-and-a-half persecuting is the faith that the one Jewish state protects, honors, and shelters.

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The West, which criticizes Israel for its alleged sins against minorities, has shown no equivalent interest in the actual condition of religious minorities in the Islamic states that surround Israel. This is a scandal.

Muhamad Saad Khairalla is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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Europe is host to approximately 46 million Muslims in 2025, roughly 6 percent of the continent’s population of 745 million. The figure was 29.6 million in 1990. The Pew Research Center projects it will exceed 58 million by 2030 even on the most conservative assumptions about future migration. France alone contains an estimated 5.7 million Muslims and contributes roughly 30 percent of its births from a population that is 9 to 10 percent of the total. Germany contains 4.95 million, the United Kingdom 4.13 million. By 2050, on Pew’s midpoint scenario, the Muslim share of the population reaches 30.6 percent in Sweden, 19.7 percent in Germany, 18 percent in France, 17.2 percent in the United Kingdom, and 18.2 percent in Belgium.

A substanitial portion of this population has not integrated into European life. In 2019, Europol recorded 119 foiled, failed, and completed Islamic terrorist attacks across 13 EU member states, with 1,004 arrests on terrorism-related charges. In 2023, the figure rose to 120 attacks. In 2024, 58 attacks were recorded across 14 member states. In February 2024, the Islamic State spokesman released an audio recording titled Kill Them Wherever You Find Them (Quran 2:191), calling for attacks against Western civilians worldwide.

These numbers count only attacks Europol categorizes as terrorism. They do not count the parallel street violence that has reshaped European cities across two decades: the Cologne New Year’s Eve sexual assaults of 2015 in which over a thousand women were assaulted by men identified by German police as overwhelmingly North African and Arab; the British grooming-gang cases that the Casey audit of 2025 finally forced into the political record, with perpetrators overwhelmingly identified as British-Pakistani men exploiting non-Muslim girls. The Swedish gun-homicide rate that has become one of the highest in the developed world, driven by criminal networks operating out of Muslim-majority suburbs; the Berlin knife crime statistics; the French no-go zones. None of this appears in the Europol terrorism figures.

This is the scale at which European migration policy has been operating, and these are the populations the policy has been admitting, retaining, and protecting through procedural mechanisms, family reunification, asylum acceptance, citizenship for the second and third generations regardless of integration outcomes, legal protections against deportation even after criminal conviction. While these populations have been admitted, retained, and protected, the European Union Agency for Asylum has been doing the opposite work in parallel. It has been rejecting the populations the European asylum system was created to protect.

The Syrian transitional Jihadist government has presided over the most systematic persecution of Christian, Druze, and Alawite populations in modern Syrian history. In March 2025, security forces and affiliated militias killed approximately 1,400 people, mostly Alawite civilians, in coastal Syria, in what the United Kingdom House of Commons Library now classifies as targeted sectarian violence. In April 2025, militants associated with the government killed 134 people in a Druze suburb of Damascus. In July 2025, sectarian violence in Suwayda province killed roughly 1,000 civilians and militants and displaced 187,000 people. On June 22, 2025, jihadists attacked Mar Elyas Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus during Sunday mass and murdered 25 Christians. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s July 2025 report documented Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-affiliated forces conducting “door-to-door interrogations and select executions” of Alawites in January and February 2025, escalating to “full-blown sectarian massacres” by March.

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Yet the European Union Agency for Asylum’s December 2025 country guidance shifted the operative framework for Syrian asylum claims toward presumed safety for return. Germany and the Netherlands have implemented the new framework in their case law. Recognition rates for Syrian Christian, Alawite, and Druze applicants have collapsed across the bloc even as the documented evidence of persecution has accumulated. The evidentiary burden the European system imposes on Syrian minority applicants is impossible to satisfy. A Christian family from a village in Latakia whose church was burned and whose neighbors were executed in March 2025 cannot produce the documentary record the asylum tribunal demands. The perpetrators are the local authorities. The state media will not report the events.

The 1951 Refugee Convention was written for exactly this case, populations targeted by their own government on the basis of religion, ethnicity, or political opinion, for whom internal relocation is not possible because the persecution is state-affiliated or state-tolerated. It is now refusing protection to the populations the principle was written for, while continuing to admit and protect the populations whose ideological orientation produces the security crisis the new vetting architecture is supposedly designed to address.

The corrective requires Europe to make a distinction. A Syrian Christian family from Hassakeh whose church was burned in 2025 is not ideologically hostile to liberal democratic Europe. They are fleeing an Islamic-supremacist regime. The value-set of liberal democratic Europe is what they are trying to reach. The persecuted minorities of the Islamic world, Christians, Yazidis, Druze, Alawites, Ahmadis, Bahá’ís, Mandaeans, have been, on the documented record across two decades, the most successful integrators into European life and the most loyal new citizens of the countries that admitted them. They have been admitted in pitifully small numbers. The populations that have been admitted in mass numbers, across the same period, have produced the violence that plagues the continent year after year.

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Admit the persecuted minorities of the Islamic world. Reject populations whose documented ideological orientation is incompatible with European civilization. Deport those whose presence in Europe was secured through asylum fraud or whose conduct after admission has demonstrated permanent incompatibility with the legal and civic order of the receiving society. The wrong people are inside Europe. The right people are being turned away at its borders. The migration policy of the continent should not continue to admit those who hate Europe and reject those who would have died for the chance to live inside it.

Sally Obeid is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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On 25 March, Pakistan’s Federal Constitutional Court validated the Islamic marriage of a 13-year-old Christian girl, Maria Shahbaz, from Lahore (the capital of Punjab province). Maria’s father had filed a petition in court which stated that his daughter was abducted by a 30-year-old Muslim man in July 2025 and forcibly converted to Islam. Nevertheless, the court sided with Maria’s abusers.

Alongside Christian political and human rights groups, Catholic bishops organized protest gatherings to voice their concerns over the verdict, reported OSV News. On 10 April, during a protest rally in southern Punjab, Bishop Yousaf Sohan of Multan condemned the forced conversion and marriage of minor girls from minority communities and called for “justice for Maria.”

Maria is not the only victim. Nearly 1,000 non-Muslim girls and young women fall victim each year to abductions and forced conversions in Pakistan. These girls are victims of forced and sham marriages. They endure physical, sexual and emotional abuse which is used to coerce them into converting to Islam and renouncing their Hindu or Christian faith.

This endemic of severe abuse has recently been confirmed by the UN as well. An 22 April report by the United Nations Human Rights Office noted that women and girls belonging to minority communities in Pakistan continue to face abduction and forced conversion to Islam through marriage. Girls and women from the Hindu and Christian communities were the most affected by the practice last year, according to the UN experts. The report also blamed the Pakistan government for failing to tackle the menace.

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The UN report further noted:

“In 2025, about 75 percent of the women and girls affected by forced conversion through marriage were Hindu and 25 percent Christian. Almost 80 percent of incidents occurred in Sindh province. Adolescent girls between 14 and 18 are particularly targeted and some girls are even younger. Women and girls facing poverty and marginalization face heightened risks, often being exposed to physical and sexual abuse and exploitation, social stigma and severe trauma.

“’These women and girls endure a continuous sense of terror, face coercion and are deprived of their freedom of religion or belief and autonomy under patriarchal and political pressures. This must stop,’ the experts said.

“The scale and persistence of these grave human rights violations point to systemic discrimination against non-Muslim women and girls who are forced or compelled to convert to Islam in order to marry Muslim men.”

According to 2025 UNICEF data, Pakistan has the sixth highest number of child brides globally: an estimated 19 million girls are married before the age of 18. Nearly half become pregnant before their 18th birthday, posing serious health risks for both the mother and child. Only 13 percent of married girls finish secondary school, compared to 44 percent of their unmarried peers. This limits their future opportunities and independence.

However, Pakistan does not have a law specifically addressing forced conversions, human rights activist Peter Jacob of the Center for Justice, Lahore, told Sapan News. Under Section 498-B of the Pakistan Penal Code, a convict can be sentenced up to 10 years in prison for forced marriages. However, this law is not applied to conversion cases, Jacob noted.

Jacob said that a major contributor to this issue stems from the fact that marriage certificates in conversion cases are swiftly issued. In some cases, courts do not take into account official documents (the parents’ marriage certificate or the National Database and Registration Authority documents) which prove that the girl is under 18. Instead, they accept the instant marriage certificate, he added.

Speaking to Sapan News, Veengas J, editor of The Rise News, Pakistan, said that when families file abduction cases and girls are recovered, the courts often deny access to their parents. However, the alleged abductors are permitted to meet the girls. Thus, the manipulation of the abused girls continues. Veengas added that even the police often initially refuse to register FIRs (First Information Reports), and when they do, girls are not consistently returned to their families.

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Reports from the country indicate a continued trend of abductions, forced conversions, and forced marriages targeting non-Muslims.

On 21 April 2026, the Voice of Pakistan Minority (VOPM) reported that a 9th-grade Hindu girl named Pooja, daughter of Ramsun Thakur, was abducted in Sindh province. The VOPM said that Pooja was forced to convert to Islam, renamed “Dua Fatima,” and married to a man named Imran Ali.

In a separate development, Sidra Bibi, a 15-year-old Christian girl in Pakistan’s Punjab Province, was abducted on 27 March at gunpoint, forcibly converted to Islam and married to the kidnapper, according to a report from the Christian Daily International. Her father, Afzal Javed Masih, said that police in Pakistan declined to recover the girl.

This widespread abuse has long been condemned by many international rights organizations. ADF International, for instance, has since 2019 supported a total of 52 cases in Pakistan — including 14 Christian minor girls freed from the horrors of sexual slavery and forced conversion.

According to ADF International, in Pakistan,

“Forced religious conversion is often used as a loophole to shield abductors from prosecution. Once a girl is coerced into converting to Islam, her abductor can falsely claim the marriage was lawful — even if she’s still a child.

“Pakistan has signed international treaties meant to protect human rights. Despite these legal protections on paper, the justice system often fails these girls.

“Courts are often reluctant to intervene, allegedly due to pressure from Islamist groups, and families are discouraged from reporting these crimes.

And even when cases are reported, legal loopholes and inconsistent enforcement leave these girls unprotected and their abductors unpunished.”

In their 22 April statement, the UN experts reiterated their call on Pakistan to intensify efforts to eradicate forced conversions, to raise the minimum age for marriage to 18 in all provinces and territories, to criminalize forced religious conversion as a distinct offence and to enforce applicable laws pertaining to human trafficking and sexual violence.

The experts echoed the recommendations of several UN Treaty Bodies, urging a prompt investigation into all allegations impartially and effectively. They called for all perpetrators to be brought to justice.

“We are deeply concerned that law enforcement authorities often dismiss complaints lodged by victims’ families, fail to investigate or prosecute forced conversions in a timely manner, or neglect to properly assess the age of victims,” the experts said.

Many human rights organizations have previously called on Pakistan to combat and eliminate abductions, forced conversions and forced marriages of non-Muslim children and women, but the government of Pakistan has not taken required steps to help end the problem, which has created thousands of victims throughout the decades. The question is: In addition to issuing reports or press releases, what will the UN do to urge Pakistan to help protect the victims? Imposing targeted, comprehensive economic sanctions on the abductors, as well as the police authorities, individuals within court systems and government officials who enable the abusers could be an effective start.

Uzay Bulut is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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In Berlin, in May 1934, one hundred and thirty-nine delegates from the Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches of Germany gathered at the city of Barmen and signed a document. The document, drafted by the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, ran to six articles. The articles did not mention Adolf Hitler by name. But every Christian in Germany who read the Barmen Declaration in May 1934 understood that the document was a public, ecclesial, theological repudiation of the regime that had taken power the previous year and of the church faction, the Deutsche Christen, the German Christians, that had supported the regime. Karl Barth mailed the document personally to Adolf Hitler

The signers paid for what they had done. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 and hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, two weeks before American forces liberated the camp. Martin Niemöller spent eight years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Bernhard Lichtenberg, the Catholic provost of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin who had aligned with the Confessing Church and prayed publicly for Jews each evening from the cathedral pulpit, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and died in transit to Dachau in November 1943.

The Confessing Church did not save Germany or prevented the camps, it was a minority within German Christianity, denounced by the majority of German pastors. What it did was speak. It did the thing the German majority church had refused to do and paid the cost the majority church refused to pay, and the majority church, in the long evening after 1945, had to live with the knowledge of what its silence had purchased.

Fence-sitting is not an absence of position, it is a position. It is the position the strong side wants the weak side to take, and the side that has captured the institutions of American cultural authority over the last sixty years has wanted, more than anything, the American church to take exactly that position. American Christianity now offers the culture almost nothing the culture has not already approved.

The German Christians of 1934 were ordinary pastors and ordinary churchgoers who had decided that the institutional survival of the German church mattered more than the prophetic content of the Christian message. They argued that opposing the regime would cost the church its remaining ability to do good in German society. They were not wrong about the cost. They were wrong about the math. The institutional church they were protecting did not survive. It was complicit in the crimes of the regime that was protecting it, and after the war it spent two generations doing penance for what it had failed to say when saying mattered. The American church is making the same calculation the German Christians made. It is going to discover, as the German Christians discovered, that the institutional survival it bought with its silence was a kind of death that had not yet announced itself.

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The prophet Isaiah was not writing to pagans when he warned, Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness. He was writing to the covenant people, who had decided it was easier to stop calling things what they were than to bear the cost of accurate speech. The prophet Ezekiel, in chapter 22, recorded a divine indictment of the people of God: I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one. The gap is left empty by the people who should have stood in it. Judgment fell on Jerusalem because righteous men were silent.

The Christ of the Gospels was not a fence-sitter, the Jesus the Gospels describe walked into the temple and overturned the tables of the moneychangers, He called the Pharisees a brood of vipers in public, before crowds, with full understanding that the men he was insulting were watching for an opportunity to kill him. He called Herod, the political ruler of Galilee, that fox. When Pilate asserted authority over him, Jesus told the Roman governor to his face that he would have no power at all except that it had been given to him from above. These are not the words of a man committed to staying out of the public square. These are the words of a man who walked directly into it, knowing what it would cost him, and who paid the cost without flinching.

Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus that Christians are to expose the works of darkness, the Greek verb is elenchō, which means to refute, to convict, to bring into the open. It is the verb of a prosecutor in court. When Peter and John were brought before the Sanhedrin and ordered to stop preaching in the name of Jesus, they answered: We must obey God rather than human beings. They did not form a committee. They did not commission a study. They stood.

The Christian tradition’s great moments of public witness have, without exception, been moments of refusal to stay on the fence. William Wilberforce was converted to evangelical Christianity in 1785 at the age of twenty-six, while serving as a Member of the British Parliament. His conversion produced an eighteen-year campaign, conducted against the unanimous opposition of the British political and economic establishment, to abolish the slave trade. He introduced the first abolition bill in 1791. It failed. He introduced it again the next year. It failed. The Slave Trade Act finally passed in 1807. The Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, three days before he died. Wilberforce was attacked in the press across his entire career, denounced as a betrayer of British economic interests, he did not care. He could not accept what his society was doing with the bodies of African human beings.

The civil rights movement Martin Luther King Jr. led was a movement of preachers. The mass meetings that sustained it were held in Black churches. The vocabulary of the speeches that defined the movement was the vocabulary of Amos and Isaiah and the Hebrew prophets, deployed by a Christian preacher who understood that the gospel had political implications and that those implications had to be preached in public. King paid the cost. He was jailed nineteen times. His home was bombed. He was stabbed in 1958 by a deranged assailant. He was finally murdered on a Memphis motel balcony on April 4, 1968. He was thirty-nine years old. He had spent fourteen years on the public stage and he had never, for a single day of those fourteen years, sat on the fence.

The false prophets of Jeremiah’s day were paid to tell the people what the people wanted to hear, which was that the situation was under control, that the cultural patterns the people had grown comfortable with would continue unchanged into the future. The situation was not under control. Jerusalem fell to Babylon and the people went into exile, and the false prophets who had assured them everything would be fine went with them, into an exile their cowardice had helped to produce.

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If the church stays on the fence while these lies are told, the church will watch the end of Western civilization from inside its own sanctuaries. Islam conquers the public square. That is what it has done in every civilization it has entered, from seventh-century Damascus to twenty-first-century London, and it is what it will do in America if the institutions that should be defending the foundations of the West continue to behave as though their job is to be polite. The polite church will not be allowed to remain polite under Islamic political authority. It will be made to convert, to pay the jizya, or to disappear.

The American church is busy with the couples’ night programs, the Wednesday small groups, the staff retreats, the building campaigns, and the budget meetings to keep the lights on in the converted shopping centers that many large American congregations now occupy. The pastor is busy preparing his sermon series on personal growth. The elder board is busy reviewing the audiovisual contract. The church is busy, while the central story of Western civilization is being rewritten by those who have been waiting fourteen centuries for the Christian West to fail.

Abd Alfadi is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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A new poll commissioned by Policy Exchange and conducted by JL Partners between April 16 and 27, 2026, surveyed 1,006 British Muslims in the parts of England where Muslim populations are concentrated, Greater London, the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and parts of Lancashire, South Yorkshire, and Merseyside. The findings are not ambiguous, and they are not the work of a fringe outlet. Policy Exchange is the most influential center-right think tank in Britain. JL Partners is a member of the British Polling Council. The results confirm what every previous serious poll of British Muslims has shown: no other community in the United Kingdom comes close to matching the levels of antisemitism, sympathy for terrorist organizations, hostility to liberal democratic norms, and divided loyalty seen within Britain’s Muslim population.

Twenty-five percent of British Muslims polled hold a favorable view of Hamas, an organization that on October 7, 2023, slaughtered, raped, and kidnapped Israeli civilians in the worst single attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Sixteen percent hold a favorable view of the Islamic State, the organization that carried out genocide against the Yazidis, enslaved Christian women, and beheaded captives on camera for global broadcast. Fifteen percent hold a favorable view of al-Qaeda, the organization that flew passenger aircraft into the World Trade Center. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Tehran regime’s instrument of regional terrorism and the body responsible for arming the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Hamas, holds a net positive favorability among British Muslim respondents. These are not narrow majorities expressing reservations. These are minorities ranging from one in seven to one in four expressing approval of organizations the British government has formally designated as terrorist.

On the relationship between Islam and the laws of the country in which they live, the numbers are sharper. Sixty-three percent of British Muslims polled want the burning of the Quran made a criminal offense. Fifty-two percent want depictions of Muhammad criminalized. Twenty-four percent, nearly one in four, believe violence is a legitimate response to either. Hundreds of thousands of British Muslims, maybe even millions, hold the view that a fellow citizen who burns a book or draws a cartoon may be killed for it.

On Jews and Israel, forty-five percent of British Muslims polled believe Jews wield excessive influence over the British media. Thirty-nine percent believe the same about Parliament, more than twice the rate found in the general public. Twenty-one percent admit unfavorable feelings toward Jews directly, compared with eleven percent nationally. These are the standard antisemitic conspiracy theories, Jews controlling the media, Jews controlling the government, held at rates that would be disqualifying for any other constituency in British public life and that the political class has, for thirty years, decided to overlook for this one.

When asked which identity comes first, sixty-three percent of British Muslim respondents answered Islamic. Twelve percent answered British. The remainder gave mixed or hedged responses. The country has admitted, settled, and granted citizenship to a population of roughly four million people, and a majority of them, when asked the most basic question of political loyalty, name a religious community above the country whose passport they hold.

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These figures are not new. They are consistent with a polling record that goes back more than a decade.

The 2016 ICM survey commissioned by Channel 4, conducted face-to-face with over a thousand British Muslims, found that twenty-three percent supported the introduction of Sharia law in Britain, thirty-nine percent agreed that wives should always obey their husbands, and thirty-five percent believed Jewish people had too much power in Britain. The Henry Jackson Society poll conducted by JL Partners in February and March 2024 found that forty-six percent of British Muslims agreed Jews have too much power over British government policy, while only one in four accepted that Hamas committed murder and rape on October 7. The Pew Research Forum has tracked British Muslim attitudes for years and shown the same pattern, substantial minorities holding views directly hostile to the liberal democratic order, with younger British Muslims more radical than their parents rather than less. British Social Attitudes data shows the same. The findings are not the result of one outlier survey, one biased question, or one partisan researcher. They are the consistent finding of every serious polling operation that has examined the question, across more than a decade, with different methodologies, different sponsors, and different commissioning purposes.

The contrast with every other major community in Britain is the analytical move that matters most.

Practicing Christians remain the largest religious bloc in Britain. They are more socially conservative than secular Britons on questions of family and faith. Their views on terrorism, blasphemy violence, and antisemitism are dramatically milder than those recorded among Muslims. Christian sympathy for Hamas, the Islamic State, or al-Qaeda is statistically negligible. Christian belief that Jews wield excessive power over British institutions runs at a small fraction of the Muslim figure.

The Hindu and Sikh communities of Britain offer an even sharper contrast. Both are smaller than the Muslim community, but both have grown rapidly through immigration in recent decades, meaning the comparison cannot be dismissed as a function of length of settlement. British Hindus and Sikhs rank among the most economically successful and socially integrated minorities in the country. Polling consistently shows low antisemitism, near-zero sympathy for Islamic extremism, strong identification with British civic norms, and warm favorability ratings toward Jews and toward the West. Hindus and Sikhs face violence from Muslim communities with depressing regularity in parts of Britain, at school gates, on city streets, in their own places of worship, and the British political class has noticed this even less than it has noticed the antisemitism.

Across antisemitism, terrorism sympathy, blasphemy violence, divided loyalty, and rejection of basic British political norms, the British Muslim population stands apart. Not by a small margin. By an enormous one. And the gap is not closing with time, contact, or generation. The polls show younger British Muslims are more hostile to Britain than their parents.

Islamic terrorism has been the dominant security threat in Britain for a generation. The overwhelming majority of terror plots disrupted by MI5, the overwhelming majority of arrests under the Terrorism Act, the overwhelming majority of Prevent referrals, all derive from the British Muslim community. Parallel social structures have emerged in cities and towns across the country, with Sharia councils operating outside the British legal system, with grooming networks that targeted thousands of British girls across two decades while authorities looked the other way for fear of “community tensions,” with street-level enforcement of Islamic norms in neighborhoods where ordinary British citizens no longer feel safe. Since October 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents in Britain have surged to levels not seen in the modern history of the country, and the British Jewish community now reports openly that ordinary public life, wearing a kippah, sending children to a Jewish school, walking past a mosque on a Friday, has become very risky.

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The 2021 census recorded just under four million Muslims in the United Kingdom, six percent of the total population, up from 4.8 percent a decade earlier. The Pew Research Forum’s mid-range projection has the Muslim share of the British population reaching 17.2 percent by 2050 under continued high-migration assumptions. The Muslim population is younger than the general population, with a higher fertility rate, and is concentrated in specific urban areas where the local share is already much higher than the national average.

The standard response of the British political class to data of this kind has been to suppress it. The 2016 ICM survey was attacked by every Muslim advocacy organization in Britain and dismissed by significant portions of the political class. The 2024 Henry Jackson Society poll was attacked along the same lines. The 2026 Policy Exchange poll will be attacked along the same lines. The strategy is consistent. The numbers are the problem; therefore the numbers must be denied, the methodology must be impugned, the researchers must be smeared, and the topic must be redirected toward “Islamophobia”, a term constructed precisely to make the discussion of the polling impossible. The strategy has failed because the polls keep coming, and they keep finding the same thing. Britain is now living with the cumulative cost of three decades of refusing to discuss what its own data has been telling it.

A serious response to the findings requires three things. First, an honest public conversation, conducted in plain English, about what the polling actually shows and what it implies. Second, a re-examination of the immigration policy that has produced the demographic outcome the polling describes, including a pause on high-volume immigration from regions whose source populations consistently produce these numbers when polled in Britain. Third, the dismantling of the parallel legal, educational, and social structures that have allowed the unintegrated portion of the Muslim community to consolidate its separation from the rest of British life.

Khaled Hassan is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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Japan followed a different but equally destructive path. The state fused emperor worship with militant nationalism, demanding absolute loyalty and sacrifice. The cult of the divine emperor justified imperial conquest across Asia, while the Bushidō ethic was weaponized to sanctify death in battle. Surrender was taught to be dishonorable; death for the emperor was glorified as the highest virtue. This fanaticism gave rise to the infamous kamikaze pilots, young men ordered to crash their planes into American ships, and suicidal banzai charges that wasted thousands of lives in hopeless assaults.

What made these regimes so dangerous was the fact that millions embraced them as if they were divine missions. In Germany, Hitler was not merely a political leader; he was exalted as the Führer, the embodiment of the nation’s destiny. His words carried the weight of scripture and were endlessly preached through rallies, broadcasts, and propaganda that blurred the line between politics and liturgy. The Nazi Party created rituals, torchlight parades, salutes, mass rallies at Nuremberg, that functioned like sacred ceremonies, binding the people into a cult of blood and soil. Children were indoctrinated from the earliest age in the Hitler Youth, taught that to die for the Reich was the highest honor.

Japan mirrored this same religious intensity in its own form. The emperor was not a politician but a living god, the divine descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. His commands were treated as sacred edicts, and loyalty to him was loyalty to heaven itself. Both systems were, in essence, political religions.

When the Allies finally broke the military power of Germany and Japan, they did more than conquer armies and topple governments, they humiliated the gods themselves. In Germany, Hitler’s suicide in a Berlin bunker shattered the illusion of the Führer as an invincible prophet. The Reich he had promised would last a thousand years lay in ashes after barely twelve. Concentration camps were liberated, and the sacred mission of the Aryan race collapsed into the undeniable reality of gas chambers and mass graves. The god of Nazism had failed, and the religion of racial destiny was exposed as a cult of death.

In Japan, the defeat was even more dramatic. The emperor was forced by the Americans to renounce his divinity publicly.2 The god of the Japanese people became just a man. Hiroshima and Nagasaki obliterated not only two cities but also the myth of divine protection and invincibility. The Bushidō-fueled dream of imperial destiny ended in surrender, and the same soldiers who had once sworn to die for the emperor now watched him bow to the will of foreign occupiers. The sacred aura that had justified conquest, martyrdom, and mass sacrifice was stripped away in an instant.

Within a single generation after their defeat, both Germany and Japan rose from devastation to become stable, prosperous democracies. In Germany, the rubble of the Third Reich gave way to the Wirtschaftswunder, the “economic miracle.” Factories opened, industries modernized, and within decades, West Germany had become one of the leading economies of the world. At the same time, democratic institutions took root: multiparty elections, a strong rule of law, and checks on state power. The same nation that had once waged total war on Europe was now a reliable partner in peace and a cornerstone of the Western alliance.

Japan underwent a parallel transformation. Under American occupation, its feudal-style militarism was dismantled, and a new constitution enshrined parliamentary democracy, civil rights, and limits on state power. Far from returning to conquest, Japan poured its energy into technological advancement, trade, and education. By the 1960s and 1970s, Japan had become an economic powerhouse, exporting innovation and culture around the globe.

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When America invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, it did so with the confidence of a nation that had already proven it could remake shattered societies. The memory of Germany and Japan loomed large in the minds of policymakers. Twice in the 20th century, the United States had not only defeated violent totalitarian regimes but had rebuilt those nations into thriving, democratic allies. Germany and Japan had gone from enemies bent on global domination to pillars of the free world. South Korea, too, had emerged from the chaos of war into prosperity and democracy. Washington assumed Iraq and Afghanistan could follow the same trajectory.

These countries, like Germany and Japan, were ruled by brutal regimes that had terrorized their people and threatened global security. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a police state marked by mass graves, chemical attacks, expansion, and a cult of personality. Afghanistan under the Taliban was a medieval theocracy that harbored terrorists and crushed women under rigid oppression. To American leaders, the situation looked familiar: remove the dictators, topple the regime, and then introduce democratic institutions, free markets, and constitutional limits. With sufficient aid and oversight, the people, freed from tyranny, would naturally embrace liberty and prosperity.

But the American project in Iraq and Afghanistan collapsed into catastrophe. Trillions of dollars were spent, thousands of American lives were lost, and yet the results were the opposite of what Washington envisioned. In Iraq, the fall of Saddam Hussein unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Shia militias, empowered by newfound dominance, sought revenge and control under the guidance of clerics. Sunnis, stripped of the power they had held for decades, turned to insurgency, eventually fueling Al-Qaeda in Iraq and later the rise of ISIS, the most brutal jihadist movement of the 21st century.

Afghanistan followed an equally devastating trajectory. When U.S. troops withdrew in 2021, the entire system the U.S. built collapsed in mere days. The Taliban returned to Kabul without resistance, reclaiming the very power they had lost twenty years earlier. Instead of producing stable allies, the interventions left behind shattered states and emboldened enemies. In Iraq, America unintentionally created the conditions for Iran’s expansion and ISIS’s rise. In Afghanistan, it fought the longest war in American history only to see the country fall back into the hands of the very regime it had overthrown.

Why did America succeed in Japan and Germany but fail in Iraq and Afghanistan?

The ideologies that dragged Germany and Japan into destruction were powerful, but they were ultimately state-driven constructs, manufactured, amplified, and enforced to unify the nation around a central figure. Both systems functioned like religions, but religions bound to mortal men. Their rituals, their scriptures, their claims to truth, all orbited around a single earthly center. And when those figures fell, the ideologies fell with them. Once the central pillars were broken, the systems they upheld collapsed, leaving a vacuum that could be filled by a new order. This was why democratic institutions and market reforms could take root so quickly: the old gods were dead, and the people were freed from their spell.

But Iraq and Afghanistan were not ruled by a passing ideology or the charisma of a single ruler. Neither Saddam Hussein nor the Taliban was the true god of those societies. The god of Iraq and Afghanistan was Allah, transcendent, untouchable, and eternal. When Saddam swung from the gallows, the faith that ordered life in Iraq remained intact. When the Taliban were driven from Kabul, the theological soil that sustained them was not uprooted. Unlike Hitler or Hirohito, Allah could not be killed, dethroned, or humiliated. This god was the absolute sovereign in the Muslim imagination. And His sovereignty stood in direct contradiction to everything America hoped to impose.

The Globalization of Christian Ethics

Whether in Germany and Japan or in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States sought to export the very system that had yielded liberty, prosperity, and stability at home, a system built on democratic institutions, free markets, and constitutional limits. The logic seemed straightforward: if this system had birthed the American order, why should it not be universally applicable, capable of rebuilding other shattered nations? This is not to sanitize America’s self-interest or its ambition to secure allies; such motives are part of human nature. Yet what critics denounced as “American imperialism” was, in reality, the engine that turned devastated nations into stable, prosperous allies.

But what America was exporting was never merely a political arrangement. It was an ethical system. The institutions, parliaments, constitutions, markets, were only the outer shell. At their core was a moral framework shaped by centuries of Christian thought: a vision of law, labor, and liberty ordered toward human flourishing. What America carried abroad was not just governance; it was a way of understanding man, power, and society. Christianity had always been concerned with life, and life abundant. Its moral law was ordered toward the good of man: “I came so that you may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

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Over centuries, this theological conviction was translated into concrete institutions. Augustine’s vision of the two cities, Aquinas’s doctrine of natural law, Locke’s contract theory, and the Protestant work ethic all became building blocks of Western civilization. Power was limited because man was sinful. Labor was dignified because man was made in God’s image. Property and covenant were respected because stewardship was a moral duty. Even the state itself was justified only insofar as it served justice and human flourishing. Church and state were separated in accordance with Christ’s command: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). This separation was not an act of secular rebellion but the natural fulfillment of Christian teaching.

Over time, these Christian ethics became cloaked in secular, humanistic language. As Western civilization matured, Christian ethics were recast in universal terms that transcended explicit theology. The Enlightenment’s language of “natural rights” and “social contracts” was, in truth, the secularized continuation of the Christian vision. Over time, this moral framework was globalized and woven into international charters and institutions. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, enshrines principles that make little sense apart from the Judeo-Christian inheritance: the inherent dignity of the individual, the sanctity of life, and the moral obligation of rulers to serve justice. Nations aspiring to join the modern world could not escape adopting this moral grammar born of Christianity. Whether in constitutions, treaties, or global organizations, the ethical DNA of Christianity, repackaged in secular humanist language, became the assumed foundation of what it meant to be “civilized.”

Postwar nation-building did not require mass conversion to Christianity in order to yield similar outcomes. What mattered was whether a society’s theological soil was compatible with Christian ethics. In Germany, that soil was already present. For centuries, Christian thought had shaped German life, and even under the darkness of Nazism, voices like Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminded the nation of its true foundation. His resistance to Hitler and his theology of costly discipleship embodied a Christian ethic that could not be extinguished. When Hitler fell, Germany did not need to invent a new moral order; it returned to one it had long known. Repentance from Nazism meant rediscovering its Christian inheritance, which allowed democracy, human rights, and rule of law to take root quickly and endure.

Japan, though not historically Christian, possessed cultural and ethical traditions that did not resist Western institutions. The collapse of State Shintō and the emperor cult created a vacuum into which democratic ideals could enter. Japan was able to adapt to constitutional democracy and free markets without a theological clash. While Christianity remained a minority faith, the society proved compatible enough with Judeo-Christian principles of law, rights, and civic order for the system to flourish.

Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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The Christian and Amazigh activist, Slimane Bouhafs, is a target of Algeria’s repressive system that uses blasphemy laws to silence Christians and critics of Islam. On 6 March 2026, Algerian authorities for the second time arbitrarily prevented Bouhafs from leaving the country. According to the news website Tamurt, Bouhafs wanted to travel to find some peace and “escape the pressure, daily harassment, and surveillance of the security forces.”

This was the latest rights violation that Bouhafs has experienced in his country for his Christian faith and political views.

A former Muslim who converted to Christianity in 1997, and the former Chairman of the St. Augustine Coordination of Christians in Algeria, Bouhafs has lost his civil rights due to his religious conversion and his defense of minority rights and freedom of religion.

In a 2026 report titled “the Oppression of Christians in Algeria,” the European Center for Law and Justice (ECLJ) details Bouhafs’ case:

“In 2016, Bouhafs was arrested for simple Facebook posts considered as an “attack on Islam and its Prophet.” Specifically, it was stated that he “shared four altered Quranic verses, offensive images of the Prophet, as well as articles denigrating the Islamic religion.”

Following proceedings (which were marred by irregularities), he was sentenced to three years imprisonment. His fragile health in detention and the conditions of his imprisonment prompted international mobilization, leading to his early release in July 2018 following a partial presidential pardon.

Fearing further prosecution, he left Algeria and took refuge in Tunisia, where he was granted refugee status in 2020 by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Despite this international protection, in August 2021 he was abducted in Tunis and returned to Algeria. He was then tortured and placed in pre-trial detention for “membership in a terrorist organization” and “undermining national territorial integrity.”

He was sentenced again to three years in prison. Since September 2024, having served his sentence and being officially a free citizen, his situation has remained very difficult.

In February 2025, he issued an appeal for help:

“I have become stateless, in my own country of Algeria. I have no identity documents. I am deprived of all my rights. The Algerian authorities refuse to issue me documents proving my identity. Even my retirement pension has been withdrawn. I am issuing a distress call to all international bodies and to all people of goodwill to come to my aid.”

Christians effectively have no freedom of expression in Algeria, notes ECLJ. Christians or ex-Muslims in the country face arrests for various offences such as the mere expression of Christian faith, the publication of a prayer, evangelization speech, or statements criticizing or mocking Islam or its prophet:

“Any expression of Christian faith may be regarded as an attempt to “undermine the faith of a Muslim” or as an offence against the precepts of Islam and may result in prosecution. Judicial repercussions and arrests mainly affect evangelicals, whose more visible practices are more likely to attract the authorities’ attention. Catholics, however, are not spared, despite their choice to practice their religion with great discretion.”

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An Algerian convert to Catholicism told ECLJ:

“I was working with Mother Teresa’s sisters in Algiers, and one day I was summoned by the police and questioned for several hours because I was accused of proselytism. They had an entire file on me, with photos of me at church and with the children I was caring for.”

According to the 2026 report by Open Doors, more than 50 Algerian Christians have been prosecuted in recent years, with some receiving suspended prison sentences and fines for reasons related to Christian practice: “unauthorized worship,” “organizing a place of worship without a permit,” distribution of religious materials,” or “proselytism.”

According to the organization the Voice of the Martyrs, at least 64 Algerian Christians are awaiting trial for activities related to their faith.

Article 144 bis 2 of the Penal Code, introduced by a law promulgated on 26 June 2001, punishes “anyone who offends the Prophet and the messengers of God or denigrates the dogma or precepts of Islam.” This offence is punishable by 3 to 5 years’ imprisonment and a fine. It may be committed by any means: “in writing, drawing, statement, electronic means or any other medium.”

Meanwhile, all Protestant churches have been shut down by the Algerian government. The ECLJ notes that the 2006 Ordinance 06-03 and the 2012 Law on Associations impose a strict authorization regime for the exercise of non-Muslim worship. The result is that it is difficult to open places of worship or register religious associations.

Since 2006, 58 Protestant churches have been forced to cease their activities and have been closed by the authorities. Protestants are now deprived of freedom of worship in Algeria. They are compelled to gather in private homes, outdoors, or online.

But even then, they cannot freely worship. Pastors and members of evangelical churches risk prosecution when they gather. During a police raid in April 2025, following a religious service held on Good Friday, ten Christians were detained for nine hours. They were interrogated, photographed, and their phones were confiscated.

A high-profile case demonstrating the pressures faced by Algerian Christians is of Pastor Youssef Ourahmane, the Vice-President of the Protestant Church of Algeria. The pastor organized a spiritual retreat at a site containing a chapel that had been closed by the authorities. For this, he was accused of “holding an unauthorized religious service” in a “building not permitted for that purpose.” On 2 May 2024, the Tizi Ouzou Court of Appeal upheld his conviction, sentencing him to one year’s imprisonment, six months suspended, and a fine of 100,000 dinars.

Similarly, Pastor and bookseller Rachid Seighir, along with his assistant Nouh Hamimi, were sentenced on appeal on 6 June 2021 to one year’s suspended imprisonment and a fine of 200,000 dinars for distributing Christian books in their bookshop.

The ECLJ gives brief historical background information regarding the Christian roots of Algeria. From the second century onwards, North Africa became one of the major intellectual centers of Christianity and was predominantly Christian. In 680, Islamic armies invaded the territory of present-day Algeria under the leadership of Uqba, a companion of Muhammad. The subsequent Arab conquest of the Maghreb was followed by a process of Arabization, which took centuries to take hold. For a considerable period, significant Christian communities persisted throughout the Maghreb, particularly in Kabylia, which was resistant to Islamization. It was not until the 13th century, under the Almohads, who tightened Islamic religious norms, that Christianity almost completely disappeared.

Christianity returned to Algeria in 1830 with the arrival of French settlers and missionaries. A significant Christian minority from Europe subsequently formed in the cities, where churches, schools, and hospitals were built. The Catholic Church thus became an official and influential institution.

Algeria’s declaration of independence in 1962 and the exodus of the Pieds-Noirs (people of European descent born in Algeria during French rule of 1830–1962) as well as the vast majority of Algerians who had converted to Catholicism led to the near disappearance of this Christian presence, which still numbered close to one million Christians in 1950.

The Catholic Church was then reduced to a church tolerated by the Algerian State, with no missionary role. It was allowed to continue to exist, but its status became highly regulated. In 2022, Caritas, the charitable arm of the Catholic Church which served the entire population of Algeria, was closed by the authorities.

According to figures from Open Doors, the current population of Christians in Algeria is approximately 156,000. This is a huge decrease from the nearly one million Christians in 1950.

In Algeria, the choice for citizens is often described as “the mosque or the court.” And all this is happening in a formerly majority-Christian country.

The Western churches and governments should take this history as a lesson as to what might be awaiting them if the current tide of Islamization is not stopped in the West. They should also take concrete action to help Bouhafs, Ourahmane, and other Christians persecuted in Algeria.

Uzay Bulut is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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The Ottoman state and its heir, modern Turkey, committed a series of massacres against Christian minorities so vast and so systematic that the death toll between three to six million people, more than half of them Christian. What began in the spring of 1915 with the arrest and execution of more than 350 Armenian community leaders and intellectuals, a deliberate decapitation of the people’s civic and cultural backbone, became the first methodically organized genocide in the modern era: mass killing, death marches, the rape of women, the abduction of children, and the destruction of entire communities stretching back centuries.

But Ottoman crimes against Christians did not begin in 1915. They stretched back generations.

A Long History of Ottoman Massacres Against Christians

The fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453, opened with three days of sanctioned pillage, killing, rape, and enslavement. What followed across the next four and a half centuries was a recurring pattern of organized violence against the empire’s Christian minorities, Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians, and Syriacs, whose cumulative death toll represents one of the largest sustained campaigns of communal destruction in the pre-modern and modern world combined.

Among the documented massacres:

The Constantinople massacre of 1821–1830, carried out against the Greek population during the Greek uprising. Tens of thousands were killed, churches burned, property seized. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch Gregory V was hanged in full vestments on Easter morning 1821, by order of Sultan Mahmud II.

The Badr Khan massacres of 1847 against the Assyrians, in which approximately ten thousand people were killed.

The Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, ordered by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, known as the Red Sultan for the scale of his killing, in which approximately 300,000 Christians were killed by irregular cavalry units known as the Hamidiye.

The first Armenian massacre of 1909, in which approximately 30,000 Armenians were killed in the Adana region.

The Seyfo massacres, meaning “sword” in Syriac, against the Assyrian and Syriac populations, which claimed approximately 500,000 lives between 1914 and 1922.

The Armenian Genocide of 1915–1922, which killed approximately 1.5 million Armenians.

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The Greek genocide of 1914–1923, which killed between 350,000 and 600,000 Greeks depending on the source consulted.

The names associated with these crimes, Sultan Abdul Hamid, Said Halim Pasha, Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, Cemal Pasha, Midhat Pasha, belong in the same catalogue of history’s perpetrators as those of the twentieth century’s other architects of mass death.

The ultimate achievement of this campaign was demographic: a Christian population in Anatolia estimated at between 2.5 and 3 million people was effectively eliminated. Those who survived were those who converted to Islam. The land was emptied of its ancient Christian communities and has remained so ever since.

The Evidence: Irrefutable and Extensive

The Armenian Genocide is among the most thoroughly documented atrocities in history. The evidence comes from multiple independent streams, none of which can be attributed to Armenian partisanship alone.

First: Approximately 400,000 survivors carried detailed first-hand accounts that they transmitted to their children and grandchildren, ensuring that the history remained a living rather than merely archival record.

Second: Diplomatic dispatches from the ambassadors of the United States, Great Britain, Russia, France, and Austria, nations with no common interest in fabricating such accounts, describe the killings in real time. These documents are preserved in the national archives of those countries and in their major museums.

Third: In 1916 the British government published what became known as the Blue Book, a compilation of eyewitness accounts and diplomatic evidence of the genocide, with an introduction written by the historian Arnold Toynbee, who concluded that the plan had no purpose other than the extermination of the Christian populations living inside the Ottoman state.

Fourth: Ambassador Morgenthau compiled his contemporary diaries into Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story and wrote a separate volume called Murder of a Nation, in which he stated:

“In the spring of 1914 the Turks drew up their plan for exterminating the Armenian people, and criticized their predecessors for failing to rid themselves of the Christian peoples or guide them to Islam… The Turkish rulers gave orders to destroy an entire race… The history of humanity has never before seen such horrifying events.”

Fifth: The German researcher Hilmar Kaiser² identified 350 documents issued by the Turkish government between 1915 and 1916 confirming orders for the extermination of Armenians.

Sixth: The Turkish historian Taner Akçam³, who fled Turkey and continued his research in exile, established that the decision to exterminate the Armenians was taken on October 31, 1914, just 31 days after the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War, and that the chief Islamic religious authority of the time issued a fatwa declaring the Armenians to be infidels and traitors, and that killing them was jihad, a religious obligation on every Muslim.

Seventh: The Turkish journalist and historian Murat Bardakci⁴ obtained Talaat Pasha’s personal documents from his widow Hayriye in 1982 and published them in 2008 in The Remaining Documents of Talaat Pasha. Talaat himself wrote, with evident pride, that he had accomplished in a matter of months what Sultan Abdul Hamid had failed to accomplish in thirty years.

Eighth: In 1997, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) formally recognized the Armenian events as the first genocide of the twentieth century. In 2007 the same body recognized the Assyrian, Syriac, and Aegean Greek massacres as genocide as well.

Ninth: Under Sultan Abdul Hamid, architect of the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, the Grand Vizier Said Halim Pasha declared publicly that the Armenian question could only be resolved by the complete elimination of the Armenians from existence. The Ottoman government went further, announcing severe penalties for any Muslim or non-Muslim who provided sanctuary to Armenian victims.

Tenth: Elie Wiesel⁵, the American Jewish novelist, Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Laureate, wrote a public letter recognizing the Armenian Genocide, signed by 53 other Nobel Prize recipients.

Finally: From the Allied declaration of May 28, 1915, the first use of the phrase “crimes against humanity” in international law, issued specifically in response to the Armenian massacres, to the United Nations War Crimes Commission of 1948, to the UN Human Rights Commission, to the Vatican and the World Council of Churches, to the United States Congress and dozens of other national parliaments, to hundreds of specialist historians: all have affirmed that what happened to the Armenians was a deliberate, premeditated genocide against a nation and a people.

And it was the Armenian Genocide that gave the world the word “genocide” itself. The Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin⁶, who would lose 49 members of his own family in the Holocaust, became interested in mass atrocity law as a young law student in the 1920s after learning of the Ottoman destruction of the Armenians. He stated explicitly in a 1949 CBS television interview:

“I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times, to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action.”

He coined the word “genocide” in 1944 by combining the Greek genos (people, race) with the Latin cide (killing), and his tireless lobbying produced the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. The Armenian Genocide did not merely precede the Holocaust, it inspired the legal framework through which the Holocaust would eventually be named and prosecuted.

How the Armenian Genocide Paved the Way for the Holocaust

The relationship between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust is not merely sequential, one atrocity followed by another in the general moral deterioration of the twentieth century. It is structural: the Armenian Genocide created the conditions, the precedents, the conceptual frameworks, and the institutional lessons that made the Holocaust possible.

The most cited evidence for this connection is a statement attributed to Hitler on August 22, 1939, one week before the German invasion of Poland. Addressing his commanders at Obersalzberg, Hitler authorized the physical destruction of men, women, and children of Polish ethnicity in pursuit of Lebensraum, living space, and concluded with the question:

“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

The deeper connection is the one documented by the historian Stefan Ihrig⁷ in his 2016 study Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Harvard University Press), the most comprehensive scholarly examination of the relationship between the two genocides. Ihrig demonstrates that Germany’s decades-long habituation to excusing and then openly justifying Ottoman violence against Armenians created a cultural and ideological environment in which genocide could be conceived as a legitimate solution to an ethnic problem. From the 1890s onward, Germany, a close Ottoman ally, became accustomed to defending massacres of Armenians as a foreign policy necessity.

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After the First World War, German nationalists participated in what Ihrig calls “the great genocide debate” of 1921–1923, in which they first denied and then openly justified the extermination. The Nazis absorbed this justificatory tradition: in their reading of history, the Armenian Genocide had produced the astonishing rise of Kemalist Turkey, proof that the destruction of an inconvenient ethnic group could be accomplished, survived, and even rewarded by history.

The conceptual parallel between the Ottoman “solution” to the Armenian question and the Nazi Final Solution to the Jewish question is not metaphorical. Said Halim Pasha had stated explicitly that the Armenian question could only be resolved by the complete elimination of the Armenians. This is the same logic, translated almost verbatim, that Hitler applied to the Jews. The Ottoman policy of creating a homogeneous Anatolian Islamic space⁸ by eliminating its Christian populations, a Sason without Armenians, as the original formula went, applied to territory after territory, was the direct structural antecedent of Hitler’s Lebensraum doctrine.

The Turanist ethnic nationalism that drove Ottoman genocide policy, the ideology of a unified Turkic racial identity superseding all other identities within Ottoman territory, was the direct ideological ancestor of the Aryan racial nationalism that drove Nazi policy. Hitler drew from this well explicitly. The Nazis studied the Ottoman experiment with attention.

The impunity that the Ottoman perpetrators enjoyed after 1918 was perhaps the most consequential lesson of all. A Turkish military tribunal convicted Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and several others in absentia for their roles in the genocide. But the convictions produced no punishment. The perpetrators fled, lived in exile, and Turkey reconstituted itself as a republic with no systematic international consequences. The lesson available to any future planner of mass murder was clear: it can be done; the world will not remember; there will be no lasting punishment.

That answer, the answer of impunity, was the enabling condition of Auschwitz.

Islamic Nazism: The Third Thread

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, met with Hitler in November 1941 and provided active support for the Nazi extermination program, recruiting Muslim volunteers in the Balkans for the Waffen-SS, working to block the emigration of European Jews to Palestine, and collaborating with the Nazi leadership. Benjamin Netanyahu cited al-Husseini’s role at the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, and while historians continue to debate the precise degree of his operational influence on the Final Solution’s timing, his documented collaboration and enthusiasm for the program are not in question.

This represents the convergence of two distinct but structurally related traditions: the Ottoman-Islamic tradition of eliminating Christian minorities in the name of religious and ethnic consolidation, and the Nazi tradition of eliminating Jews in the name of racial purification. Different foundations. The same target. The same method. The same willingness to pursue annihilation as a political solution.

The theological dimension cannot be separated from this history. The hadith recorded in Sahih Muslim (hadith 2922), in which the Prophet describes a time when Muslims will kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees, which will call out to their pursuers, is canonical within the tradition, its authenticity not seriously disputed, and its content has been incorporated into the Hamas charter, recited at Hamas rallies, and invoked as theological justification for the October 7 massacres. The Ottoman state eliminated its Christian millions. Hitler eliminated six million Jews. The theological program preserved in Islamic eschatology identifies the killing of all Jews as a divine promise to be fulfilled before the Day of Judgment.

The Ottomans had their Final Solution to the Christian question. Hitler had his Final Solution to the Jewish question. The theological tradition carries its own Final Solution to the Jewish question, one that predates both and outlasts them.

Sources

• Morgenthau, Henry Sr. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1918.

• Morgenthau, Henry Sr. Murder of a Nation. New York: Armenian General Benevolent Union of America, 1974.

• Toynbee, Arnold J., and James Bryce. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16 (The Blue Book). London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1916.

• Kaiser, Hilmar. The Extermination of Armenians in the Diyarbekir Region. Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2014.

• Akçam, Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006.

• Akçam, Taner. The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

• Bardakci, Murat. Talat Pasha’nin Evrak-i Metrukesi (The Remaining Documents of Talaat Pasha). Istanbul: Everest Yayinlari, 2008.

• Ihrig, Stefan. Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

• Ihrig, Stefan. Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

• Bardakjian, Kevork B. Hitler and the Armenian Genocide. Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Institute, 1985.

• Lemkin, Raphael. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944.

• Lemkin, Raphael. CBS Television interview with Quincy Howe, 1949. Transcript cited in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia, “Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin.”

• International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). Resolution on the Armenian Genocide, 1997. Resolution on Assyrian, Syriac, and Greek Genocides, 2007.

• Sahih Muslim, hadith 2922. In Sahih Muslim, compiled by Imam Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj (817–875 CE). Standard Arabic edition with English translation by Abdul Hamid Siddiqui.

• United Nations. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, December 9, 1948. UN Doc. A/RES/3/260.

• Allied Powers Declaration of May 28, 1915, regarding Ottoman massacres of Armenians. Reproduced in Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide. Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995.

• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Coining a Word and Championing a Cause: The Story of Raphael Lemkin.” encyclopedia.ushmm.org.

• Wiesel, Elie, et al. Open letter recognizing the Armenian Genocide, signed by 53 Nobel Laureates. Available through the Armenian National Institute, Washington, DC.

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  Magdi Khalil is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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Part of this confusion stems from genuine ignorance of Islam’s textual, legislative, and historical architecture. But the end result is always the same: a muddled public consciousness, incapable of perceiving the direct relationship between a founding text and the behavior it produces when that text is taken seriously as a total and indivisible commitment.

If a Muslim commits fully to what the Quran commands, what the hadith transmits, and what the Sira establishes as normative, that commitment does not remain confined to private belief or personal worship. It transforms, by its own internal logic, into a comprehensive vision of life: of the relationship with the other, of the shape of society, of the nature of authority, of the logic of governance. From that point, speaking of Islamism as something separate from Islam becomes a form of terminological evasion that conceals rather than clarifies the original question.

A Muslim who takes the founding texts with complete seriousness, who regards them as binding in thought, behavior, and social organization, is, by his intellectual structure, an Islamist in the fullest sense of the word, regardless of whether he belongs to a political organization, carries a party banner, or operates within an organized movement. Islamism, properly understood, is not organizational affiliation. It is the logical consequence of literal commitment to the text when that text is understood as a comprehensive project for life, governance, and society.

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The claim that Islam is one thing and Islamism another is therefore not interpretation. It is mitigation, an attempt to produce a cosmetic image of the religion detached from its original reference material. And this in turn suppresses public understanding, distorts intellectual debate, and grants wide operating space to forces that benefit from the ambiguity to expand their presence and influence across societies that have been deliberately kept confused about what they are dealing with.

The problem is not merely terminological. It is political, cultural, and security-related in its consequences, because building public policy on the assumption that a genuine rupture exists between Islam and Islamism consistently produces an incomplete reading of reality, and a delayed recognition of the nature of the motivations driving individuals and groups when they anchor themselves in religious reference points that consider themselves bound by the text rather than by modern reinterpretation.

Any serious discussion of Islamism cannot therefore begin with organizations alone. It must begin with the founding texts themselves, and with the specific way those texts produce a worldview, assign a position to the Muslim within it, and assign a position to the non-Muslim as well.

The Parent and the Obedient Child

If the Islamic religion is an overbearing, authoritarian, dictatorial head of household, one who controls the breath of his sons and daughters and issues an unending stream of commands and instructions, then Islamism is the dutiful, devoted daughter who executes everything the father says and wants with maximum fidelity.

Islam, not as a separate category labeled Islamism but as an expression of the text’s own political logic, is built, at its textual core, on the concepts of takfir (declaring non-Muslims infidels), jihad, Islamization, the supremacy of Sharia, and an ultimate teleological vision: the subjugation of the human domain under a single system concluding in the idea of the Islamic Caliphate.

Jihad occupies a central position in the doctrinal and legislative architecture of Islam, not as a jurisprudential footnote or an incidental concept, but as a value that recurs throughout the Quran, the hadith, and the Sira, bound to reward, divine selection, elevated spiritual rank, and the differentiation between believers according to their degree of commitment. Across the centuries, jihad has remained one of the most consistently present concepts in the shaping of traditional Islamic consciousness, whether understood as a religious obligation, a path to salvation, or the means of protecting and expanding the faith. This explains its dense presence in both the founding texts and in the historical experience of Islamic civilization.

Surah At-Tawbah, 9:29, perhaps the most politically consequential verse in the Quran:

“Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture — until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.”

The command is not metaphorical. It is not contextual in the way that modern apologists insist. It is a standing legislative directive governing the relationship between the Islamic political community and non-Muslim populations, a directive that has shaped Islamic jurisprudence and Islamic statecraft for fourteen centuries.

Surah Al-Anfal, 8:15 establishes the battlefield imperative without qualification:

“O you who have believed, when you meet those who disbelieve advancing for battle, do not turn to them your backs in retreat.”

Surah Al-Anfal, 8:60 extends this to a permanent posture of civilizational readiness:

“And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allah and your enemy.”

Surah An-Nisa, 4:74 and Surah Al-Fath, 48:29 complete the picture. The latter is worth quoting in full for the directness of its political theology:

“Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah; and those with him are forceful against the disbelievers, merciful among themselves.”

Forceful against the disbelievers. Merciful among themselves. This is not a description of a spiritual community. It is the founding charter of a political civilization with a specific and explicit attitude toward outsiders.

The hadith literature is equally unambiguous. Three examples, all from the most authoritative collections:

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The Prophet is recorded in Ahmad, with a version in Bukhari, as saying:

“I was sent with the sword just before the Hour so that Allah alone would be worshipped with no partner. My provision was placed under the shadow of my spear, and humiliation and submission are placed on those who oppose my command. Whoever imitates a people is one of them.”

From Sahih Bukhari, hadith number 25, and confirmed in Sahih Muslim:

“I have been commanded to fight the people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, establish prayer, and pay zakat. If they do that, they protect their blood and wealth from me except by the right of Islam, and their reckoning is with Allah.”

From Sahih Bukhari, hadith number 2818, confirmed in Sahih Muslim:

“Know that Paradise is under the shadows of swords.”

The Cognitive Crime

The separation of Islam from Islamism does not merely appear analytically imprecise. It appears as what it is: a complete cognitive crime, one that carries the unmistakable odor of an agenda directed against the capacity of Western civilization to understand and defend itself.

The Islamist is not a distortion of Islam. She is its faithful daughter, attentive to the father day and night, devoted to the realization of his vision. The distinction that Western liberals, political scientists, and policymakers have invested decades in maintaining is not a distinction that survives contact with the primary sources. It is a distinction maintained precisely because the primary sources make it untenable, and because acknowledging that it is untenable requires conclusions that the current intellectual establishment is not prepared to draw.

The genuine humanization of Islam as a civilizational project, if such a thing is possible, will not come from finding softer interpretations of existing texts. It will come only from the collective acknowledgment that the Quran contains material that is dangerous to human civilization in every place it operates, and that any honest path forward must reckon with that material directly, which means not reinterpreting it but confronting the question of what to do with it. That is a conversation that has not yet begun in earnest. The evidence presented here is an argument that it cannot be postponed much longer.

Mohamed Saad Khiralla is a fellow at the Idelogical Defense Institute.

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Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

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When a photograph emerged of an Israeli soldier striking a statue of Jesus Christ in southern Lebanon, the reaction was immediate and global. Heads of state condemned it. The BBC headlined it. Social media amplified it to tens of millions of views within hours. Israel’s Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, and President each issued personal condemnations within a day. The IDF launched an investigation, located the soldier, and offered to restore the statue.

The outrage was loud, coordinated, and entirely selective.

Consider who was loudest among the outraged. Many were from Lebanon itself, a country where Hezbollah, a movement that explicitly subordinates Christian political rights to an Iranian theocratic vision, operates as a state within a state, controls territory, and has spent decades ensuring that the Christian population’s political weight is structurally diminished. The concern for Christian symbols there did not extend to Christian power, Christian safety, or Christian futures.

And the hypocrisy within Lebanon does not stop at Hezbollah’s political conduct. Four months before the IDF soldier’s photograph circled the globe, a group linked to an Islamic organization in Lebanon deliberately destroyed a statue of Christ on a cross in the Dora area of Beirut, near Saint Joseph Hospital. The motive was not military necessity, not the confusion of combat, not the action of a soldier in a war zone. The motive was theological: the group objected to the playing of Christmas hymns and carols nearby. The act was premeditated, ideological, and carried out in a civilian neighborhood in peacetime. The Lebanese state issued no condemnation. No prime minister was stunned and saddened. No foreign minister apologized to every Christian whose feelings were hurt. No investigation was announced. No offer to restore the statue was made. Video footage of the destroyed statue exists. The global media, which four months later would devote its front pages to the IDF soldier’s photograph, made a different editorial choice about the Dora incident. It chose silence, so complete that the event left almost no searchable trace online.

The same statue. The same act. A different perpetrator. An entirely different world.

Others expressed outrage from across the Arab world, from societies where churches require government permission to be built, where repairing a roof can trigger a mob, where converting from Islam to Christianity is a criminal act punishable by imprisonment, and in some jurisdictions by death. The statue of Jesus moved them. The living Christians did not.

In Europe, commentators who have consistently explained away, contextualized, or simply ignored the systematic vandalism of churches, the beheading of Christian statues, and the physical assault of priests — incidents numbering in the thousands annually, with radical Islam identified as the primary motivating ideology in documented cases — discovered overnight a passionate commitment to the integrity of Christian religious symbols.

This is not outrage at desecration. This is outrage deployed as a weapon, and the target is not the soldier. The target is Israel.

The distinction matters because genuine outrage would be consistent. It would have a memory. It would register the burning of Coptic homes in Egypt while residents were still inside, triggered by the rumor that Christians intended to build a church. It would notice that in Germany alone, one third of nearly one hundred arson attacks on churches in a single year occurred within a pattern that watchdog organizations identified as primarily Islamist in motivation, while the country’s Bishops’ Conference declared that all taboos had been broken. It would acknowledge that across the Middle East and North Africa, the Christian population has collapsed from nearly thirteen percent of the region at the start of the twentieth century to barely four percent today, not because of Israeli soldiers, but because of a sustained, theologically grounded campaign of legal discrimination, social pressure, and periodic violence that has never generated a comparable global headline.

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Genuine outrage has no political loyalty. What we witnessed was something else entirely.

The Theology the Outrage Ignores

The moral demand embedded in the global reaction to the IDF soldier’s photograph can be stated simply: he should have respected a religious symbol that was not his own. This sounds reasonable until you ask what, precisely, that respect would have required, and of whom.

The soldier is Jewish. Judaism is not merely a tradition that happens to be uncomfortable with religious imagery. The rejection of idolatry is its most foundational theological commitment, the axis around which its entire relationship with God is organized. It is not a cultural preference or a historical quirk. It is the Second Commandment, the prohibition that defined Jewish identity through centuries of living among Greeks, Romans, Persians, and Babylonians, each of whom surrounded Jews with the images, statues, and symbols of foreign gods. Jewish distinctiveness was maintained precisely by refusing to treat those objects as sacred. The question of what a Jew owes to someone else’s religious statue is not new, and the answer that Jewish theology gives is not reverence.

But here the argument goes further than Judaism, because the theology of images has never been a settled question within Christianity itself. It has been one of the deepest and most consequential fault lines in Christian history, one that produced not merely academic disagreement but revolution, war, and the physical destruction of religious art across an entire continent.

The Protestant Reformation was, among other things, an iconoclasm. Calvin did not merely discourage religious images; he identified them as a corruption of worship at its root, a concession to human weakness that inevitably displaced the living God with a man-made substitute. The Heidelberg Catechism, one of the foundational documents of the Reformed tradition, describes images in worship plainly as dumb idols. Zwingli had the statues removed from Zurich’s churches by legal order. The Beeldenstorm of 1566, the statue storm, swept through the Low Countries as Reformed believers, acting on their reading of the Second Commandment, destroyed Catholic images across Flanders and the Netherlands. In England, royal injunctions under Edward VI ordered the removal of all images from churches. In Scotland, John Knox’s followers stripped the great cathedral of St Andrews of its imagery entirely.

These were not acts of barbarism. They were acts of theological conviction, performed by Christians, on Christian religious objects, in Christian countries, based on a sincere and carefully argued reading of Scripture. The Reformers were accused of sacrilege by the Catholic establishment. They responded that the sacrilege was the idolatry they were destroying.

This history matters because the outrage over the IDF soldier’s photograph rests on an assumption that is neither universal nor religiously neutral: the assumption that a statue of Jesus is sacred in a way that places an obligation of reverence on everyone who encounters it. That is a Catholic and Orthodox theological position. It is not a Jewish position. It is not a Reformed or Evangelical Christian position. It is not a Muslim position. It is not, in fact, the position of the majority of the world’s monotheists.

When the global media and political class demand that a Jewish soldier show reverence to a statue of Jesus, they are not making a universal appeal to human decency. They are imposing one specific theology, post-Tridentine Catholic sacramentalism, on people whose own faiths explicitly and conscientiously reject it, while calling that imposition respect for religion.

There is a further irony that the outrage machine entirely missed. For a Reformed Christian, the greater theological offense in this episode is not the broken statue; it is the demand that the statue be treated as sacred. That demand is not a defense of Christianity. It is a defense of idolatry, dressed in the language of religious sensitivity. The Second Commandment does not mourn dumb idols. It forbids making them in the first place. A Reformed Christian reading this story in its proper theological light does not react with outrage. He says Hallelujah, and thanks the soldier.

The irony runs deeper still. Islam, the faith of the overwhelming majority of those who have destroyed Christian symbols across the Middle East and Europe with almost no comparable media outrage, shares with Judaism and Reformed Christianity an uncompromising rejection of religious imagery. The theological logic that led an Islamist group to destroy a statue of Christ in Beirut in December 2025, objecting to its very existence as an object of veneration, is structurally identical to the logic of the Beeldenstorm. The difference is not the theology. The difference is who is holding the hammer, and what political purposes the outrage over it can be made to serve.

Genuine religious respect does not demand that a Jew venerate what his faith calls idolatry. It does not demand that a Reformed Christian treat as sacred what his confessional standards call a dumb idol. It does not even, properly understood, demand that a Muslim suppress his theological conviction that no image should exist. What it demands, what any honest principle of mutual respect demands, is that none of these convictions be enacted through the destruction of what others hold sacred in their own space.

That is the actual standard. It is a standard of conduct, not of theology. And it is a standard that can be applied consistently, to every soldier, every mob, every Islamist group in Beirut, every act of church vandalism across Europe. The question is why it is only ever applied in one direction.

The Inversion

There is a map of Christian life in the Middle East that the global media does not show. It is not a complicated map. It has one country where Christian minorities hold full civil and political rights, where Christian communities are growing rather than shrinking, where a Christian Arab can serve in parliament, in the judiciary, in the military, and where no law governs what faith a person may leave or enter. That country is Israel.

Lebanon appears at first glance to be a second exception. Its constitution reserves the presidency for a Maronite Christian, distributes parliamentary seats along confessional lines, and formally recognizes Christians as co-founders of the state rather than a tolerated minority. This arrangement was possible because Lebanon’s Christians were numerous enough and historically rooted enough to negotiate it. But Lebanon today is not an exception to the pattern; it is the pattern in motion. Hezbollah, operating as a state within a state with Iranian backing, exercises effective veto power over Lebanese sovereignty regardless of what the constitution prescribes. Shia displacement into traditionally Christian areas, accelerated by successive wars, is redrawing the demographic map. The economic collapse is driving Christian emigration at rates that are changing the country’s composition faster than any census can capture. The constitutional protections that exist on paper are only as durable as the demographic and political balance that produced them, and that balance is shifting.

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Lebanon is therefore not a counterexample. It is a forecast. It shows what happens not if Christians become a minority in a Muslim-majority political environment, but when. And “when” has a consistent answer across every country, across every century, across every region where the process has completed itself: Christians become lesser citizens. The legal frameworks change, the timeframes differ, the degree of violence varies, but the destination has no exceptions in the historical record. The Copts of Egypt, the Christians of Iraq, the Assyrians of Syria, the Armenian survivors of Turkey: none of them were promised anything different from what Lebanon’s Christians were promised. The promise, in every case, was kept until it no longer needed to be.

Every other country on the map tells a story that has already reached its conclusion.

In Egypt, the largest Christian community in the Middle East, the Copts, who are not a minority that arrived but the original population of the land, present centuries before the Arab Islamic conquest of the seventh century, live under a legal framework that treats their faith as inferior by design. Building a church requires government permission that is routinely denied. Repairing a church roof can trigger a mob. Converting from Islam to Christianity is effectively criminalized. Christian women, particularly young women without male protection, face systematic risk of abduction and forced conversion. When Islamist crowds burn Christian homes in Upper Egypt, as they did in the village of al-Fawakhir in April 2024, with residents still inside, while police stood and watched, the story receives a fraction of the coverage devoted to one Israeli soldier with a sledgehammer. The Coptic word for Egyptian is the same word for Christian. These are not a minority. They are the people from whom the country was taken, and they are being slowly erased from it.

In Iraq, Christians numbered 1.2 million in 2011. By 2024 they numbered 120,000. That is not emigration. That is elimination, carried out through ISIS persecution, legal discrimination, and a security environment in which Christian existence became untenable. In Syria, the Christian population fell from 1.5 million to 300,000 over the same period. In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, Christians formed the majority of the population until the late 1980s. Today they are less than ten percent, displaced not by Israel but by the steady pressure of an Islamist political culture that made Christian life increasingly impossible. Across the region as a whole, Christians were nearly thirteen percent of the population at the start of the twentieth century. They are barely four percent today.

This is the largest ongoing displacement of a Christian population in the world. It is happening in the region where Christianity was born. It is being carried out almost entirely by Muslim-majority states and movements. And it generates no global headlines, no statements from heads of state, no viral photographs, no demands for accountability.

Meanwhile in Europe, the same pattern plays out at a smaller scale but with the same editorial silence. In 2024 alone, watchdog organizations documented over two thousand anti-Christian hate crimes across the continent. Arson attacks on churches nearly doubled from the previous year, with Germany accounting for one third of them, prompting the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference to declare that all taboos had been broken. In France, Islamist vandals entered Notre-Dame-du-Travail in Paris and drove a knife into the throat of a statue of the Virgin Mary, writing “Submit yourselves to Allah, infidels” across the church walls. In the German town of Dülmen, a local newspaper reported that not a single day passed without an attack on a Christian statue. In December 2025, in Beirut, an Islamist group destroyed a statue of Christ near Saint Joseph Hospital because they objected to the sound of Christmas carols being played nearby. Video footage of the destroyed statue exists. The global media that would four months later devote its front pages to the IDF soldier’s photograph made a different editorial choice about the Beirut statue. It chose silence.

The question this raises is not subtle. If the principle at stake is the protection of Christian symbols and the dignity of Christian communities, then the Middle East and Europe are producing thousands of violations of that principle every year, carried out by identifiable actors, documented by watchdog organizations, and in some cases captured on video. None of it produces the reaction that one Israeli soldier’s photograph produced in twenty-four hours.

The principle, therefore, is not the protection of Christian symbols. Something else is operating. What is operating is a hierarchy of acceptable victims and acceptable perpetrators, one in which Muslim actors are structurally exempt from the outrage that is freely applied to Israel, regardless of the scale, frequency, or ideological intentionality of the acts involved. Under this hierarchy, two thousand anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe in a single year are a sociological phenomenon requiring sensitive contextualization. One Israeli soldier with a sledgehammer is a moral emergency requiring statements from heads of state.

This hierarchy does not emerge from a principled commitment to religious freedom. It emerges from a political framework in which Israel functions as the permanent aggressor and Muslims function as the permanent victim, and in which any evidence that complicates this arrangement is quietly shelved, like a video of a destroyed statue in Beirut that left almost no trace online.

The Christians of Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon did not build this framework. They are its casualties twice over: first from the persecution it refuses to name, and then from the silence it maintains about that persecution in order to keep the framework intact.

The Standard That Applies to One

Outrage is only a moral instrument when it is consistent. Applied selectively, it is not outrage at all. It is politics wearing the costume of conscience.

What the global reaction to the IDF soldier’s photograph demonstrated is not that the world cares about Christian symbols. The world has had ample opportunity to demonstrate that care. It has had two thousand anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe in a single year. It has had a statue of Christ destroyed in Beirut because someone nearby was playing Christmas carols. It has had churches burned in Egypt while police watched from the street. It has had an entire ancient Christian civilization in Iraq reduced in thirteen years from over a million souls to barely a hundred thousand. In none of these cases did the world’s editors, politicians, and commentators find the urgency they discovered within twenty-four hours of one photograph from southern Lebanon.

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The standard being applied is not a religious standard. It is not a humanitarian standard. It is a political standard with a single criterion: does this incident serve the narrative that Israel is the primary threat to peace, dignity, and civilized conduct in the Middle East? If yes, the outrage is immediate, global, and coordinated. If no, the silence is equally immediate, equally global, and equally coordinated.

This framework requires the suspension of several inconvenient realities simultaneously. It requires ignoring that Israel is the only state in the Middle East where Christian minorities hold full legal equality. It requires ignoring that the communities loudest in their outrage belong to a religious and political tradition that has reduced the Christian population of the broader region from nearly thirteen percent to barely four percent over the course of a century, through a combination of law, pressure, and violence that continues today without interruption. It requires pretending that the theological demand for reverence toward religious statues is a universal human obligation, rather than the position of one specific strand of one specific religion, a position that Judaism, Reformed Christianity, and Islam each reject on the basis of the same commandment.

It requires, above all, ignoring Lebanon’s Dora neighborhood in December 2025, where a statue of Christ was destroyed not in a war zone, not in the heat of combat, not by a soldier who will face a criminal investigation, but in peacetime, in a civilian area, by people whose motive was that they found the sound of Christmas music offensive. That story has almost no footprint online. The video exists. The choice not to amplify it was made deliberately, by the same editorial institutions that made the opposite choice four months later.

The Christians of the Middle East deserve better than to be used as instruments in a political argument that has never once been about them. Their churches have been burned, their daughters taken, their communities legislated into second-class existence, their ancient presence on the land of Christianity’s own birth reduced to a demographic footnote. They have been erased from Iraq, hollowed out in Syria, slowly squeezed out of Lebanon, and held in legal subjugation in Egypt for fourteen centuries with barely a pause. None of this produced the reaction that one photograph produced in one day.

If the broken statue in southern Lebanon is an outrage, then consistency demands that we name everything else as an outrage too. The burned homes in al-Fawakhir. The knife in the throat of the Virgin Mary in Paris. The Christmas carols silenced in Beirut. The churches that required a president’s signature to repair their roofs. The women whose identity cards were altered without their consent to show them as Muslim. The communities that have been waiting for a century for the world to notice that they are disappearing.

Consistency, however, is precisely what this outrage cannot afford. Because the moment you apply the standard evenly, the narrative collapses. And the narrative, not the Christians, is what is being protected.

Salam Almasri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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A Theocracy Meets Reality

In a previous analysis, we argued that the West has fundamentally misread the Islamic Republic for nearly half a century—projecting secular assumptions onto a system that is theological by design and constitutional structure. Western governments negotiated with Tehran as though it were a hostile but pragmatic state with negotiable grievances. It never was. Its constitution is a theological operating manual. Its foreign policy is eschatology in action. Its military is, by its own founding document, a transnational revolutionary force tasked with extending divine sovereignty across the earth.

That misreading has now collided with a moment of historical consequence.

The Trump administration struck Iran’s three principal nuclear sites—Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan—in June 2025 under Operation Epic Fury. The strikes entombed nearly a thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium deep underground. A ceasefire followed. Negotiations are now underway, and President Trump has stated that Iran has agreed to surrender that buried material—what he calls “nuclear dust”—with American and Iranian personnel working together to excavate it.

Read that again slowly.

American special operations forces. Inside Iran. Coordinating with Iranian counterparts. Physically removing the material that represented the regime’s ultimate guarantee of survival.

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If this happens, it is not merely a diplomatic agreement. It is a civilizational rupture—one that exposes, more starkly than any analysis could, the central question now hanging over the entire region: can the ideological core of the Islamic Republic actually permit this? And if it cannot, what comes next?

What the Constitution Will Not Allow

To understand why the negotiations keep breaking down—why commitments are made and reversed, why the Strait of Hormuz opens and closes, why a deal that seems close keeps collapsing—you have to understand what the Islamic Republic was built to be.

Article 5 of the Iranian constitution codified the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih—the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist. The Supreme Leader ruled not as a political executive but as the Vicar of the Hidden Imam: the divinely authorized regent governing on behalf of the Mahdi, exercising delegated divine sovereignty. Article 11 declared all Muslims a single nation—making Iran not a state defined by geography but the headquarters of a global Islamic mission. Articles 152 through 154 codified the export of revolution as constitutional duty. The IRGC’s founding mandate charged it explicitly with extending divine sovereignty across the earth.

This is not background. This is the operating system.

A government deriving legitimacy from electoral mandate can lose an election and reform. A government deriving legitimacy from divine mandate cannot negotiate it away without ceasing to be itself. Permanent confrontation with the United States—the “Great Satan”—was never a policy position. It was a theological commitment woven into the system’s constitutional identity. The revolution did not merely oppose American power. It defined itself against it.

To invite American forces onto Iranian soil to remove the nuclear program is not, within this framework, a strategic concession. It is an act of apostasy—the negation of everything the revolution claimed to be.

This is why the negotiations keep failing. Not because the diplomats are incompetent. Because the ideology cannot survive what the agreement requires.

Two Systems, One Breaking Point

The regime Khamenei built over forty years was never one thing. It was two things uneasily cohabiting inside the same institutions. The first is the theological system—the Mahdist revolutionary vision in which confrontation with the enemies of Islam is eschatologically required, martyrdom is honorable, and no material calculation overrides the divine timeline. The second is the institutional system—the IRGC’s military and economic empire, the intelligence services, the judiciary, the machinery of a deeply embedded security state.

Khamenei held these two systems together. With his death, the tension between them is now fully exposed.

The institutional layer—the pragmatists who understand that the economy is failing and that time is measured in months, not years—wants to deal. They are the ones at the table. But they do not control the system they represent. The IRGC’s ideological core answers to a different logic entirely. Not statecraft. Doctrine. A conviction that divine victory is assured regardless of material reality—and that any leader who surrenders the revolution’s identity for economic relief has betrayed something far larger than a negotiation.

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A deal is reached. The ideological core reverses it. This is not confusion. This is two systems inside one state in open conflict—and the one animated by theology refusing to yield to the one animated by economics.

The “nuclear dust” proposal makes this fracture undeniable. The institutional pragmatists may be willing to allow American forces in to excavate the buried uranium. The IRGC ideologues—who regard that uranium as the material expression of divine mandate—cannot be. The same institution. Irreconcilable positions. No Khamenei to hold the contradiction together.

The Trump Paradox

Here is what makes this moment historically remarkable—and what most analysis misses entirely.

Donald Trump is, by temperament and stated conviction, a dealmaker. He does not want war with Iran. He has said so repeatedly and demonstrated it in action. Before the twelve-day war, he sought negotiation. He offered terms. He asked for peaceful surrender. When that failed and strikes became unavoidable, he limited their scope and immediately returned to the table. After the ceasefire, he sought negotiation again. He is seeking it now. The same offer, made repeatedly: come to terms, open the Strait, surrender the nuclear program, and we will deal.

The pattern has repeated itself at every turn—not because of Trump’s choices, but because of theirs.

And this is the paradox that history may record as this era’s defining irony: a president who has tried harder than most to avoid regime change may be forced, by the logic of the ideology he is facing, to deliver it. Not as preference. As consequence.

Because the only deal Trump can actually get—the one that holds, the one where the Strait stays open, the one where American and Iranian personnel genuinely stand together in the rubble of Fordow—requires the removal of the very force that keeps reversing every agreement. The IRGC’s ideological core will not sign. It will not hold. It will reverse, delay, and escalate, because its theology demands it and its institutional power enables it.

The deal requires the regime change. The regime change is the deal.

To get the surrender he wants, Trump may have to deliver the death blow he has sought to avoid — not to Iran, but to Khamenei-ism as an institutionalized force. The removal of the theological-ideological layer embedded in the IRGC is not a byproduct of resolution. It is the precondition for it. Without it, nothing fundamentally changes. The same actors remain. The same doctrine remains. The same mechanisms of reversal remain. And the world returns, inevitably, to the same cycle.

This is not a diplomatic problem. It is a theological one. And it has only one resolution.

The People Waiting Beneath the System

There is a force that Western analysis consistently underweights: the Iranian people themselves.

The Islamic Republic never achieved genuine popular consent. What it achieved was compliance—enforced by the morality police, the judiciary, mass surveillance, and the memory of what happened to those who resisted. The Mahsa Amini protests were not a political eruption. They were a civilizational declaration: we do not consent, we never consented, and we reject the system imposed on us. The women who removed their hijabs in the streets were not making a fashion statement. They were making history.

This population understands something the outside world is only beginning to grasp: that a genuine opening with the United States would do more than relieve sanctions. It would crack the ideological architecture that has governed every dimension of their lives for forty-seven years. And they understand that the IRGC understands this too.

A war can be framed theologically—as the confrontation the Mahdi’s return requires. But American boots on Iranian soil, working alongside Iranians to dismantle the nuclear program—that cannot be framed this way. It is the visual refutation of everything the revolution promised. The ideological core fears that image more than it fears the bombs.

The flip-flop is not a negotiating tactic. It is the theological system choosing potential war over certain irrelevance.

What Falls With the Regime—and What Can Fill the Void

The stakes extend far beyond Iran’s borders, and this is where the analysis must be fully honest.

The Islamic Republic has never been merely a state. It has been the proof of concept—the living demonstration that political Islam could seize state power, resist the world’s dominant superpower for decades, and sustain a revolutionary order in deliberate defiance of liberal modernity. For Islamist movements worldwide, from the Muslim Brotherhood to movements reshaping Turkey, Qatar, and sub-Saharan Africa, Tehran functioned as the anchor of ideological confidence. This influence reached Western universities and political institutions—the regime’s revolutionary theology wrapped in Marxist vocabulary, its theological ambitions expressed through the language of decolonization and resistance, made legible to audiences who could not see the eschatology beneath the terminology.

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If the Islamic Republic falls—not merely weakens, but falls—the proof of concept fails. The ideological confidence that sustained movements from Tehran to Toronto weakens at its source. The network loses its center. The narrative that positioned political Islam as the tide of history loses its most powerful exhibit.

But here is what that moment also creates: a void.

For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic offered an answer—however violent, however false—to the deepest human questions about meaning, order, justice, and transcendence. When that answer collapses, the questions do not disappear. They remain. And they demand a response.

This is the opportunity—and the responsibility—that the Judeo-Christian tradition now faces. Not to impose. Not to replace one ideological project with another. But to offer, into a space that is about to open, what it has always claimed to possess: a vision of human dignity, ordered liberty, and transcendent meaning that does not require the subjugation of women, the export of violence, or the machinery of theocratic enforcement to sustain itself.

The fall of the Islamic Republic is not only the end of something. It is the opening of something. The question is whether the civilization that has the answer is prepared to offer it.

The Judgment Already Underway

“He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings.” (Daniel 2:21)

A system that claimed divine authority is being measured against the reality it produced—forty-seven years of repression, exported violence, and a population that has quietly, at great cost, largely stopped believing. The eschatology it weaponized has turned against it. The confrontation it framed as redemptive revealed its limits. The promise did not materialize.

What is unfolding in the negotiating rooms, in the streets of Tehran, in the question of whether American and Iranian personnel will stand together in the rubble of Fordow—this is not merely a political crisis. It is the possible end of the most consequential experiment in modern political Islam as a governing system. Not theorized. Decided. In history. In real time. Now.

The question for policymakers, for church leaders, for all who bear responsibility for understanding this moment: do they see it clearly?

Not a rogue state to be managed. Not a negotiating partner to be appeased.

The end of an ideological era. And the beginning of whatever, by the grace of history and the courage of a long-silenced people, the wisdom of those who govern, and the readiness of a civilization that knows what it believes—comes next.

Ali Siadatan is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

This article is a companion to “The Islamic Republic: A Theocracy Misread by the West” published by the Ideological Defense Institute on February 24, 2026.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI