Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email. It is no secret that, with the return of Islam to the world stage over the last half-century, relations between Muslims and the West, or what used to be known as Christendom, have undergone sweeping changes. Nor is there any mystery to the large historical and demographic forces impelling those changes.
The key event occurred when Muslim countries that for centuries had lain under the sway of European empires Christian empires, as Muslims regarded them gained their political independence and embarked upon a long-delayed, wrenching, and still far from accomplished encounter with modernity. Partly as a consequence of this development, the once-numerous Christian minorities in some Muslim countries, especially those in the Middle East, entered upon a rapid and frequently violent decline.
Concomitantly, significant numbers of Muslims began to settle in the West and no less rapidly to grow there, to the point where, in France today, they probably amount to 10 percent of the overall population, with smaller but important representations in Germany, England, and the United States. It is the last development in particular that has aroused widespread concern and comment, particularly with the rise of militant anti-Western Islam around the world and the increasing radicalization of elements in Western Muslim communities.
Much more rarely is it couched, even by churchmen, in terms of religion, let alone in terms of a clash of religions. To the contrary, the mood of the churches in Europe, both Catholic and Protestant, has long been inclined to an indulgent ecumenicism.
Thus, to hear many official Christian spokesmen tell it, there is no problem here at all. First, they point out, Islam is a sister-monotheism, grounded, like Christianity and Judaism, in a divine revelation. Finally, Islam, along with Christianity and Judaism, claims a common descent from the biblical patriarch Abraham.
