Where are the indigenous non-Muslim communities in what is today called the “Muslim world”? Where is their presence?

The Christian Copts of Egypt have been reduced from being most of that country’s population before the Muslim conquest in 641 A.D., to only 10% today. Similar reductions in the Christian population have taken place across North Africa, which was once peopled almost entirely by Christians. St. Augustine came from Thagaste, in present-day Algeria; Tertullian, another of the Church Fathers, was born in Carthage, in what is now Tunisia. In both Algeria and Tunisia, Christians once were an overwhelming majority. But Muslims now make up 99% of the population in both countries. Christians across North Africa were either killed, or decided to end their miserable status as dhimmis by converting to Islam.

Today’s “Muslim world”, which used to be non-Muslim before Islamic invasions, conquests and massacres, is now demographically transformed. The indigenous non-Muslim communities there are now either dying minorities or extinct.

Today, the only religion that has freedom in Afghanistan is Islam.

And the same could be said for all 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation: the only religion that enjoys full freedom in those countries is Islam.

Turkey, the site that has been called Anatolia (a Greek word meaning “the east, sunrise, place from where the sun rises”) for millennia, was the seat of the Christian Byzantine Empire. For centuries, Islamic invaders attacked Anatolia; in 1453, Muslim Turks from Central Asia captured Constantinople, now Istanbul. Today, Christians comprise only 0.1 percent of Turkey’s population.

Over five centuries, the Christians in Turkey went from being 99% of the population to 0.1%. Since 1914, the population of Constantinople (Istanbul after 1930) went from fifty percent Christian to less than one percent Christian. That’s the Muslim version of “the Great Replacement.”

Prior to the Islamic invasions, almost all of the entire Middle East and North Africa – countries such as Syria, Algeria, Egypt and Iraq — used to be majority-Christian. Today, indigenous Christians and other minorities — such as Assyrians, Yazidis and Alawites — in almost every majority-Muslim country where they remain, are severely persecuted.

The Muslim riots or other acts of inter-religious violence in much of the Middle East, as well as Pakistan’s terrorism and border disputes with India, can probably best be understood within the historical context of jihad. For centuries, jihadists have violently targeted and persecuted non-Muslims in the region. The West might do well to distinguish between destabilizing forces that create persecution, violence and refugees, and stabilizing forces, such as India that, despite their imperfections, still promote pluralism, religious freedom and security, and function as a home for all who are oppressed.

Right now, India’s stability is threatened by an enemy within — the nearly 200 million Muslims (out of a total population of 1.4 billion) whose loyalty to fellow Muslims in Pakistan, and in the wider Muslim world, is a growing worry for the Hindu-dominated government and, of course, to the Indian military trying to maintain the Line of Control. The Muslims in India are proud to proclaim that Islam is the “fastest-growing religion” in the country; they need only wait, and polyphiloprogenprocreate, to constitute an ever-greater percentage of the population, and history suggests that Muslims need not be a majority to have their way; when they reach 20% of the population, their unity and fanaticism make them formidable foes.

The problem in India is not a result of recent Muslim immigration, but stems from the aftereffects of Muslim conquests, and the subsequent killings, and forced conversions, of millions of Hindus centuries ago. 

Will the Indians imitate the Europeans, who are in a quandary about how to deal with Muslim millions whom they foolishly allowed into their midst, economic migrants, and be hesitant to act against this enemy, for example by shutting down all mosques that preach, and all madrasas that teach, hatred of Infidels, for fear of being labelled “Islamophobic” or, still more idiotically, given the racial similarity of Hindus and Indian Muslims, as “racists”?