Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. - Sir Winston Churchill, 1899
I am not Catholic but I read Hilaire Belloc on Islam and it is crystallizing: In The Great Heresies (1938), Belloc argues that, although, "That Mohammedan culture happens to have fallen back in material applications; there is no reason whatever why it should not learn its new lesson and become our equal in all those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over it—whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it." "During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Mohammedan world fell under a kind of palsy...At last by the end of the nineteenth century, more than nine-tenths of the Mohammedan population of the world...had fallen under the government of nominally Christian nations, especially of England and France." "On this account our generation came to think of Islam as something naturally subject to ourselves. We no longer regarded it as a rival to our own culture, we thought of its religion as a sort of fossilized thing about which we need not trouble." "That was almost certainly a mistake. We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. Perhaps if we lose our faith it will rise." ------ Chilling words from the past.