At the start of this third millennium, what is the state of the Muslim world?  Let’s begin by comparing it with the Muslim world nearly 100 years earlier, as viewed by the famous missionary Samuel Zwemer.  In his day almost all Muslims lived under colonial rule.  Their Muslim cultures seemed backward and dormant compared to the vigorous progress of their European rulers.  Zwemer surveyed their identity crisis and felt sure that under the influence of Western governments and Western education, more and more Muslims would leave their outdated religion.  He thought the walls of Islam would soon crumble. 

Well, 100 years later we can see that Zwemer was wrong!  In the century since he made those predictions the Muslim world, far from collapsing, has grown from 12% to 21% of the world’s population.  All Muslim-majority countries are now free from western colonialism.  Indeed Muslims, inspired by the 20th century Islamic revival, have recovered their confidence in their own identity.  Meanwhile the fortress of western civilisation, apparently impregnable in Zwemer’s day, has been so battered by two world wars and ideological doubts that its walls, not Islam’s, seem to be the ones that are crumbling.

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