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I may have to admit you folks are right. Two billion out of a world population of seven billion are Muslim, but truly almost all are irrelevant because they are controlled by authoritarian governments that followed violent roads to power. There does not seem to be much left of a spiritual faith component after 900 plus years.

About 1100 AD Hassan bin Sabah, who inherited the Assassin’s Guild, enlightened Islamist societies to terrorism as foundational statecraft for political prosperity. Philosophical and religious lawyers retained their lives, and obtained support for and from dictators by backwards engineering the Koran into useful totalitarian heterodoxies. Concurrently, foundational thought including Jews, Christians and Muslims as ‘People of the Book” became hazardous. Concurrently, men of Saladin’s character and his Sufism stressing individual relationship with God thatexalted individuals in society became marginalized. Concurrently, extraordinary Arab achievements in mathematics, philosophy, science, and medicine submerged within authoritarian and feral societies. Omar Khayyam, Ibn al-Haytham, and Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Sina had no successors for uncompromising, independent thought. Such simultaneous extinctions do provide compelling evidence of a pervasive contagion subverting the Middle East.

Now all we see is bloody electioneering among aspiring Islamic totalitarians causing them to grasp and retain their power by crafting superior alliances of human cunning and animal brutality. Once acquired these skills easily replicate through generations for managing philosophies from Democracy to Communism. The natural result in our present time establishes “The Democratic (or) Islamic Peoples Republic of Whatever”.

I often think the world was a better place to live in when it was owned by basically nine countries and any differences were settled by offensives through the Ardennes forest.