The Islamization of the Western world is being carried out and supported by a force without precedent in modern history. We tend to focus on individual bloody incidents, while failing to notice that, in the meantime, the character of institutions is gradually changing, and laws are changing with them. The West is discarding its fundamental civilizational principles and replacing them with Islamic ones. What is taking place is not merely a replacement of populations, but also a replacement of systems of customs and norms—that is, a change of civilization.
Is it possible to stop this? We do not know. In every country of the Western civilizational sphere, these changes are proceeding at a different pace and are shaped by local circumstances. But there is no country that has remained unaffected.
We can, however, observe that there have been a few moments in history when such overwhelming superiority existed, and we can examine what helped to overcome it.
A superficial and false explanation holds that the reason for those victories was that Europeans believed in their principles and in their God. They were willing to fight, kill, and die. It is certainly true that European faith was present in most of the great victories. But European faith was also present in the great defeats. More precisely, it was present in every great defeat. There is no reason to suppose that those who won battles had a stronger faith than those who were killed in other battles. There is no reason to suppose that those who successfully defended their countries were better Christians than those whose countries were conquered.
What else, then, might have played a role? At every historical moment when the peoples of the West reversed the overwhelming superiority of Islam, the West was undergoing fundamental modernization. This involved modernization of thought, ways of life, and technology. The Frankish Empire that stopped the Arabs in the eighth century was in every respect different from the earlier kingdoms, which were still essentially part of the ancient world. The Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) likewise underwent fundamental modernization in the middle of the eighth century and likewise began defeating the Arabs, eventually contributing to the fall of the Umayyad Caliphate and two centuries of relative peace. The same could be said of the First Crusade—the first encounter between the Islamic world and the Europe of the High Middle Ages. Or of the creation of the Spanish conquest state, an entirely new model of society, which was able to wage a successful Reconquista. Or of the emergence of modern seafaring, which broke Ottoman naval power with remarkable ease.
The most striking turning point, however, came with the crisis of the seventeenth century, when it seemed essentially only a matter of time before the Ottoman Empire recovered and occupied a depopulated and impoverished Europe. Yet Europe was already moving toward the modern world, and this was reflected in its technological and organizational superiority. After the Ottoman defeat at Vienna, the Muslim world never again achieved a major victory. Then came the Enlightenment, science, the Industrial Revolution, and the modern age. My colleague Jiří Hejlek argues—and I fully agree with him—that this was su|