Immersed in current news, we forget that the past is not really “past” in significant ways. Much of the news of the day is not so new at all. In relation to Islam especially, the past is far from over. We are simply watching it emerge from the hibernation it entered after the formal dissolution of the 600- year reign of the Ottoman Empire in 1923.
British writer Hilaire Belloc, writing in the 1930s, put no date on Islam’s re-emergence. But while the West’s attention was elsewhere, he predicted its inevitability:
"Millions of modern people . . . have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past."
