Is the Muslim World’s “Backwardness” Its Strength? Non-Muslim Biohistorian on Islam

[AMusee]

Jim Penman is a famed British-born Australian entrepreneur who also happens to be a PhD in history, his specialization being the emerging field of “biohistory.”

Biohistory is to basically look at macro-history through not politics or economics, as it’s often done in the liberal and the Marxist traditions respectively, but through biology, or in other words, the very being of the peoples themselves.

More specifically, he analyzes history through “epigenetics,” that rising field within biology which says that environmental and behavioral factors have an influence on how our body reads a DNA sequence (even if the genome itself remains unchanged).

In his main book, Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West, released in 2015, Penman himself gives a telling example: An individual who has been neglected in childhood will grow to become an anxious and depressed adult, as the “chained” methyl groups would repress the expression of certain genes, while the same individual, if he had caring parents, would be a confident and relaxed individual as methyl groups would be “detached,” thus allowing the free expression of the genes involved in such emotions.

As he says, genes are switched on or off as a response to external circumstances.

RELATED: The Post Hoc Nature of Evolutionary Explanation

So, epigenetics looks at how brain activity and behavior have been affected by change in environmental conditions. Penman generalizes all of this to talk of civilizations as a whole.

It’s all complex, as the book is full of scientific terminology and research despite being for the general public. And of course it has its critics, who say that he puts too much emphasis on caloric restriction, that the framework is too deterministic, mainly when it comes to genes, and so on.

But even if he touches upon many points, for instance the decline of the West as the title suggests, here we’ll just look at his opinions about Islam.

While reading, keep in mind that what he calls the “C factor” is “civilization,” which includes rationality, self-restraint, and so on, and the “V factor” for “vigor,” which includes patriarchy, war-like culture, etc.

RELATED: The Logical Fallacies of Evolution

To give a practical example, in terms of biology and epigenetics, a society with a too strong C factor would see a drop in general testosterone levels, the modern West having seen a phenomenal decrease there, while a society with a too strong V factor would thus naturally see the opposite.

As per Penman, general testosterone levels themselves are indicators of a society’s virility, self-confidence, hope in the future, place of religion, morals values, and so on. Penman takes an openly conservative position on all these matters. He also happens to be an Evangelical Christian.

Let’s now go into what he says about Islam.

All the following excerpts are taken from pp. 225-230 of Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West.

Gender Segregation​

V-promoters continued to strengthen, as indicated by the growing subjection of women. Repression of women limits their sexual activity, and also makes them chronically anxious, both of which support V. This is first evident in Babylonian times around 2000 BC, when women were expected to cover their bodies and faces and be chaperoned in public. The Assyrians took this further by insisting they stay home most of the time, concealed behind curtains, a custom also adopted by the Persians.
The subjugation of women is not only inhumane but expensive. It takes a lot of effort to seclude women and reduces their contribution to agriculture, industry and the economy in general. But the military success of the Assyrians and Persians was ample reward for the cost involved in segregating their women. In the long term, biological and cultural success is based not on wealth or even happiness but on the number of surviving children and the status they hold. Military prowess, in both offense and defense, is an effective way to achieve such success.
All these trends culminated in the culture associated with Islam, which arose in the harshest and most inhospitable environment of all—the deserts of Arabia.

RELATED: The Perils of “Educating” Our Daughters

Fasting​

According to Islamic tradition Muhammad accepted the Jewish scriptures, recognized Jesus as a prophet, and established Ramadan as a pillar of the new Muslim faith. Non-Muslims would suggest he was influenced by the Lenten fast of Christianity, but gave it a far more rigorous form by forbidding food and drink during daylight hours. Unlike shorter-term and more frequent fasting which would tend to support C, Ramadan has the physiological impact of an occasional famine and is thus a uniquely powerful V-promoter.

RELATED: Why Muslims Shouldn’t Lead A Sedentary Lifestyle

​

 

[AMusee]

Islam… The Ultimate Testosterone-Boosting Religion?​

Psychologically, the Islamic stress on absolute submission to Allah suits a temperament which has high child V and a great deal of stress as a result of severe punishments in childhood. It is thus receptive to powerful authority. The word “Islam” means “submission”, though of course in the sense of submission to God. Taking on such an attitude probably also increases V, given the effect feedback cycle, whereby any behavior resulting from C or V tends to increase C or V. Combined with exceptionally high V from a harsh desert environment, this helped make Islam the ultimate high-V religion. V-promoters are key elements of Christianity and Judaism, but to a lesser extent.
There is far more to the Islamic way of life than fasting and segregating women, of course. Praying five times a day acts to increase C, as does avoiding alcohol. The custom of eating with the right hand, leaving the left for ablutions, is an effective hygiene measure in a culture without modern sanitation. And this is only one of many health measures associated with Islam, such as ritual washing. Then there is the Qur’an itself and the sonorous power of the Arabic language, with an attractive system of ethics including a focus on alms-giving and the equality of believers. Putting all this together created a powerful religious technology which made its followers more aggressive, confident, united and with a higher birth rate than any competing civilization.

RELATED: The Feminization of Modern Men Reaches New Levels

Why Did the World’s Oldest Civilizations Embrace Islam?​

Arabs, Persians, Afghans and the other Muslim ethnic groups of the Middle East and Central Asia are epigenetically primed by centuries of cultural evolution for personal loyalties rather than impersonal institutions. High child V and stress makes them amenable to harsh authority and inclines them to rebel against rulers they perceive as weak. It also makes them rigidly conservative, so that education of women, seen by Westerners as an unalloyed good, is seen by many fundamentalist Muslims (quite correctly) as a threat to their culture and way of life.
(…)
People in the West see the traditional culture of the Muslim Middle East as primitive and “backward,” and there are constant calls for modernization. In fact, as had been seen, Islamic culture is anything but backward. Civilization first arose in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan. It is no coincidence that these lands, with the longest experience of civilization, are now strongly and fervently Muslim. Long experience of civilization has bred a high-S genotype and culture

Islam: The Survival of the Fittest​

Such countries tend to be poor (if we leave out the anomalous effects of oil wealth), since their peoples lack the temperament for industrialization. But wealth at that level is of no benefit in the long-term struggle for survival and success. To paraphrase Christian scripture, what does it benefit a civilization if it gains wealth but loses its strength and vigor? The advantages of Islam can be clearly seen in countries with mixed populations. Lebanon once had a Christian majority but is now 54% Muslim. In Communist Yugoslavia the provinces with Muslim populations grew much faster and received tax revenue from the wealthier Christian states. The population of Kosovo, the spiritual homeland of Christian Serbia, grew from 733,000 in 1948 to over two million in 1994, with the Muslim component surging from 68% to 90%, and lately going even higher.
(…)
This means that on current trends Europe will become an Islamic continent in a century or so. The 1,400-year struggle between Islam and the West is coming to end.

So, as per the opinion of this conservative “biohistorian,” Islam is indeed the “based” religion.

RELATED: Is Human Evolution Compatible with Islam? Refuting Jalajel’s Heresy

https://muslimskeptic.com/2022/03/25/is-the-muslim-worlds-backwardness-its-strength-non-muslim-biohistorian-on-islam/

 

[AMusee]

Good Without God? Do We Need Religion to be “Good People”?​

Do we need religion to be “good people”?

No.

In actuality, we specifically need Islam to be good people.

Yes there are good people of other faiths, no doubt. But I am using the term “good” in a technical sense to characterize a person who fulfills all basic moral obligations or at least feels bad about not fulfilling them.

To suggest that only Muslims are even in a position to fulfill all basic moral obligations and that adherents of other religions are missing out on these obligations violates principles of universalism that have become so widespread among people and Muslims today. It is almost a truism in the minds of people that even those without religion can be morally upright. But is this true?

Those who make this claim focus their argument on a small set of moral truths.

“OF COURSE I don’t need God to know that murder is wrong!”

“OF COURSE I don’t need God to know that rape is wrong!”

“If you only refrain from murder and rape because God told you so, then that shows how truly IMMORAL you are!”

In actuality, this shows how limited these people’s understanding of morality is. Their morality only consists of two line items: don’t kill and don’t rape.

There is usually also the platitude, “I don’t harm anyone. That’s what my morality is based on and it doesn’t require belief in God, much less Islam.”

This, of course, is a cop out because “harm” is so subjective and context-dependent. What one considers harmful varies from time to time, culture to culture, and even from person to person within a single time and culture.

So, even if we all agree that morality is simply about preventing harm, different people will have widely divergent views on harm. Furthermore, it is not easy to “calculate” what causes harm in the first place or what causes the most or least harm in any given situation. And when we look at the way people behave in real life according to their morality, it does not seem like they are acting on the basis of a complex calculation of weighing harms. Mostly it seems people act on the basis of larger societal and cultural norms of acceptable behavior and then interpret whatever is socially unacceptable as “harmful.”

These are the standard objections raised against what’s known as the “harm principle” in Western ethics.

But Islamic ethics is far richer, far more nuanced, and, yes, far superior to the vague, speculative musings of liberal deployments of the harm principle (which is, again, just a cover for transient cultural sensibilities anyway).

Central to Islamic ethics are the concepts of adab and khuluq, i.e., manners and character. As the Prophet ﷺ said, “The best amongst you are those who have the best manners and character.” Allah also praised the Prophet ﷺ as having “khuluq adhim.”

When we look at the content of Islamic ethics, adab, and khuluq, we find a great deal that is not intuitive as far as Western liberal cultural sensibilities are concerned. Here are some of the more prominent examples:

1. Great emphasis for respecting and taking care of one’s parents.

2. The moral imperative of helping one’s neighbors.

3. The moral significance of visiting the sick.

4. The premium placed on supporting orphans and the poor.

5. The moral necessity of maintaining family ties.

Sure, you will find some impoverished semblance of these values in other religions and non-Islamic cultures. But in Islam, these are not niceties. They are duties. You are not considered a morally exemplary person for doing the above. Rather, you are merely doing your basic moral duties and if you fail in this, then you are morally culpable. It’s a big difference.

But there are further imperatives:

1. Can one be a moral person if one is racked with jealousy?

2. Can one be of sound moral integrity if one habitually backbites?

3. Can one be considered ethical in any sense if one fails to have good assumptions of people?

4. Can one be of high moral character if one spreads hearsay without verifying the truth of the matter?

5. Can one be characterized as morally upright if one partakes in usurious business transactions?

The answer to all these questions is a hard no: If a person has these qualities and does not feel guilt and shame and attempts to rectify himself, then he cannot be considered a moral person. So how could it be possible for someone who doesn’t even know that these moral imperatives exist to abide by them? Obviously they couldn’t. You don’t see atheists, for example, emphasizing things like backbiting or jealousy or respecting one’s parents. Ethics is all about “Rape!” and “Murder!” for them.

In truth, the above 10 points are a very small sliver of all the moral imperatives of Islam. For example, all these points concern moral duties to other people. What about moral duties towards one’s Creator? Certainly there are moral imperatives there as well, which by themselves would mean that those who reject God are ipso facto morally deficient. But for the sake of argument, we can limit ourselves to moral duties with respect to other people and, still, the atheist and those who consign themselves to a liberal secular morality are to be found grossly lacking in their understanding of what morality even entails.

Some might argue that there really isn’t a moral imperative to, for example, respect one’s parents, etc. The response to this takes us deep into the subject of meta-ethics. How do we determine what is or is not moral in the first place?

Well, we can start from a completely skeptical position about all moral duties. This would make us nihilists. If we can ask, why is it a moral imperative to respect one’s parents, we can also ask why is it a moral imperative to not harm others? The atheist and secularist do not have a compelling or even consistent response to this. Simply look at the state of moral philosophy in the halls of Western academia. There is no consensus on even the most basic questions. Everything is constantly in dispute. The confusion is tangible.

As far as we’re concerned, atheists and secularists are not even in the running.

Theists, however, fair far better. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish theologies each provide an overarching theory of God, the universe, and humanity. It is in context of these broader theories that moral imperatives are grounded and find meaning. These theories can then be evaluated and compared. Which one is most consistent? Which one is most compelling?

When we look at Christian and Jewish ethics, they have undergone significant changes especially in the last 100 or even 50 years. For example, many Christian and Jewish denominations now find no moral qualms with same sex behavior. Their theological and ethical considerations of family relations and the family institution have also significantly shifted in order to mirror and accommodate the dominant social forces of modern secularism, liberalism, and capitalism. What justifies these shifts? Is it a belief in progress, namely that ethics must progress as civilization progresses?

Well what does civilizational progress even mean? And what does it mean for ethics to “progress” such that what was once considered a moral abomination 100 years ago is morally permissible or even laudatory now? These are questions that most Christian and Jewish denominations do not have answers for. They too have fallen victim to the pressures of modern cultural hegemony. Islam, in contrast, has resisted these pressures. This is often why, for example, Islam is considered morally “backwards” and retrograde, but Islam is only “retrograde” if the last 10 or 20 years of Western culture are considered the measuring stick by which to grade religions. By that measure, all of humanity prior to, say, the year 2000 or 2010 were in the dark abyss of moral purgatory. This is a baldly arrogant perspective on world history and a thoroughly uncompelling narrative. Islam safely avoids the entire dilemma, where most Christians and Jews are embroiled in its plain implications.

We can also evaluate the overarching theories of Christianity and Judaism. Providing full critiques is beyond the scope of this short post, but areas of pressure can be put on the Trinity, of course. As for Judaism, their theology historically borrowed a great deal from Islamic kalam discourse in the 12th century (Maimonides being the most prominent example of a Jewish theologian actively engaging in the debates and theological discourse of Islamic Spain).

The only objections people these days raise about Islam are that the Quran and Sunna sanction practices that people with Western liberal cultural sensibilities find problematic. This is pretty weak. Many of the things that people today find objectionable about Islamic law and ethics were considered completely acceptable and unproblematic simply 10, 20, or 100 years ago. But again, the vague, inconsistent notion of “moral progress” is incessantly invoked to handle this obvious critique. Without substantiating what “moral progress” amounts to and explaining how moral truths concerning human nature can be conditional on time, these objections cannot be taken seriously.

In the end, Muslims have the most compelling overarching theory. And those of sound intellect can also investigate the specifics of Islamic morality, including imperatives such as the 10 listed above, to see how beautiful and profound Islamic normativity actually is. Muslims, meanwhile, enjoy the sweet fruits of abiding by the deen in this life as well as the life to come bi idhnillah. Non-Muslims are always welcome to accept Islam and experience all this for themselves. And if they are not interested, we simply say, lakum dinukum waliya din.

 

[AMusee]

 

[Sheikh Google]

How old are you @AMusee if you don't mind me asking? Just curious you don't have to be specific but just an age range will kinda explain a lot of ya posts and the articles/youtube channels you like to promote.

 

[OGx3]

Do people who denanounce the west and promote this harsh lifestyle actually ever move back to their backwards countries and so called benefits? Guessing it’s a no just like taliban and Saudi elite send their kids, boys and girls to the west to be educated and live a good life.

 

[Muslim?]

This is something I have always expected about Islam, though only felt it. It's an interesting book. But I think modernity as well as embracing more equal measures toward women and all those testosterone reducing C vactors would win in today's world. It's hard to see v vactors beating a bullet, something whose initial discovery undeniably requires strong c vactors. That said, it was a fascinating read. Thanks for sharing.

PS: still of the opinion modernity wins out in today's world.

 

[Sheikh Google]

Do people who denanounce the west and promote this harsh lifestyle actually ever move back to their backwards countries and so called benefits? Guessing it’s a no just like taliban and Saudi elite send their kids, boys and girls to the west to be educated and live a good life.

That's the salaf fantasy. Condemn the west and yet be protected under its banner. Yet would never want to live under the conditions proposed by themselves in their so called "perfect sharia" utopia. Then again what is perfect sharia? any time it fails and the house its built on gets burnt down, you just start it up again and blame the previous occupants didn't conduct the "real sharia". Funny isn't it...

 

[tyrannicalmanager]

That's the salaf fantasy. Condemn the west and yet be protected under its banner. Yet would never want to live under the conditions proposed by themselves in their so called "perfect sharia" utopia. Then again what is perfect sharia? any time it fails and the house its built on gets burnt down, you just start it up again and blame the previous occupants didn't conduct the "real sharia". Funny isn't it...

I like how you can't name a single country that failed because of sharia law.
most of the stable countries in the middle east practice Sharia law.

 

[lilmoon]

Essentially this man links religion to our own biological nature and says that our religion is good in an objective perspective because of testosterone levels in Muslims, and also because our "retrograde" behaviour is actually beneficial to society? And also why is he acting like Muslim women have no free will and are imprisoned in their homes, but other than that he's shared some pretty valid points.

 

[TekNiKo]

That's the salaf fantasy. Condemn the west and yet be protected under its banner. Yet would never want to live under the conditions proposed by themselves in their so called "perfect sharia" utopia. Then again what is perfect sharia? any time it fails and the house its built on gets burnt down, you just start it up again and blame the previous occupants didn't conduct the "real sharia". Funny isn't it...

Their is no “islamic state” ever, in history after the 4 caliphs died it turned into a secular Monarchy

Heck Caliph Yazid was drinking on the job only few decades after death of Ali.

They wont teach you this in madrassa though

 

[Sheikh Google]

Their is no “islamic state” ever, in history after the 4 caliphs died it turned into a secular Monarchy

Heck Caliph Yazid was drinking on the job only few decades after death of Ali.

They wont teach you this in madrassa though

Agreed. Game of thrones ain't got shit on the Machiavellian ways of Islamic conquests/history. It's human nature and has happened everytime in history when power is concentrated. That's why when people shout for Sharia it makes no sense as the way it has been implemented has changed millions of times from day one.

 

[TekNiKo]

Agreed. Game of thrones ain't got shit on the Machiavellian ways of Islamic conquests/history. It's human nature and has happened everytime in history when power is concentrated. That's why when people shout for Sharia it makes no sense as the way it has been implemented has changed millions of times from day one.

I wish I was taught this as a young 18 year old Salafi, I remember gargling at the mouth about implementing shariah and Islamic Utopian State.

It was when I learned a bit of Arabic and dived deep into history did I realize it well went to shit post Sahabah. There was only one Caliph that remotely resembled them and that was Omar ibn abdi aziz.

My biggest shock was how the Abbasid Caliphate promoted a guy named Abu Nawas who was infamous for his homoerotic poems of little boys and khamriyyah(wine poetry)

He is still celebrated today and has a street named after him in Baghdad

Modern day Salafis would have had a heart attack and declared kufr.

 

[AMusee]

Is Islam’s Growth Only Due to Fertility? The Case of Rwanda and the Philippines​

We regularly read in the mainstream media that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world. In 2015 Pew Research predicted that if current trends continue, then around 2070 Islam may surpass Christianity and become the world’s largest religion.

However many critics of Islam parrot the following line:

Islam is only the fastest-growing religion because Muslims have more babies than the rest of us.

This isn’t exactly something to be ashamed of though. If Islam pushes Muslims to be more prolific demographically it’s just the proof that, even from their own secular standards of neo-Darwinism and evolutionary psychology, Islam is the superior religion. It also highlights the fact that it’s not as if all other religions are growing solely through conversions. For instance, Hinduism only grows through Hindu fertility.

RELATED: Is the Muslim World’s “Backwardness” Its Strength? Non-Muslim Biohistorian on Islam

But we’ll see how conversions do in fact play a role in the worldwide rise and growth of Islam, and we’ll be looking at two specific cases in two different continents: Rwanda in Africa and The Philippines in Asia.

The Rise of Islam is a Prophecy​

The Qur’an is a miraculous book, and among its miraculous features is its prophecies.

Among such prophecies, we find in the Qur’an (24:55):

Allāh has promised those who have believed among you and done righteous deeds that He will surely grant them succession [to authority] upon the earth just as He granted it to those before them and that He will surely establish for them [therein] their religion which He has preferred for them and that He will surely substitute for them, after their fear, security, [for] they worship Me, not associating anything with Me. But whoever disbelieves after that – then those are the defiantly disobedient.

This was fulfilled when, not too long after the passing away of the Prophet ﷺ, Muslims originating from “backwards Arabia” conquered the major centers of the old “civilized world,” and they did so with such great pace and strength that it continues to amaze even the most secular of historians.

Mufti Muhammad Shafi’ (may Allah have mercy on him) was an influential scholar from Pakistan who authored more than 100 books. He wrote in his commentary of the Qur’an, Ma’ariful Qur’an (volume 6, pp. 451-452):

Allah had made three promises to the Holy Prophet ﷺ, that his Ummah will be made His vicegerent on earth and will rule over it, and His favorite religion Islam will be made victorious, and Muslims will be given so much power and grandeur that they will have no fear of any one. Allah fulfilled His promise by conferring conquest over Makkah, Khaibar, Bahrain, and the whole of Yemen and the entire peninsula of Arabia even during the lifetime of the Holy Prophet ﷺ. Also he received jizyah (capitation tax) from the Zoroastrians of Hajar and some Syrian territories. The kings and rulers of Rome, Egypt, Iskandria, Oman and Ethiopia sent gifts to the Holy Prophet ﷺ, and gave him honour and respect. Then during his caliphate Sayyidna Abu Bakr crushed all the menacing uprisings. He also sent out Islamic armies to Persia, Syria and Egypt, Busra and Damascus also fell to Islamic State during this time.

British historian Hugh Kennedy wrote a book on the subject called The Great Arab Conquests. He begins the book by quoting a Christian monk who witnessed the triumph of Islam first-hand and whose amazement at the Islamic conquests is still shared:

In the 680s a monk called John Bar Penkaye was working on a summary of world history in his remote monastery by the swift-flowing River Tigris, in the mountains of what is now south-east Turkey. When he came to write about the history of his own times, he fell to musing about the Arab conquest of the Middle East, still within living memory. As he contemplated these dramatic events he was puzzled: ‘How’, he asked, ‘could naked men, riding without armour or shield, have been able to win… and bring low the proud spirit of the Persians?’ He was further struck that ‘only a short period passed before the entire world was handed over to the Arabs; they subdued all fortified cities, taking control from sea to sea, and from east to west – Egypt, and from Crete to Cappadocia, from Yemen to the Gates of Alan [in the Caucasus], Armenians, Syrians, Persians, Byzantines and Egyptians and all the areas in between: “their hand was upon everyone” as the prophet says’.
For John Bar Penkaye, pious monk that he was, the answer was clear: this was God’s will. Nothing else could account for this wholly extraordinary revolution in the affairs of men.

If the Prophet ﷺ was “insincere,” and if he was the “author” of the Qur’an as many insincere Orientalists and Christians missionaries allege, he wouldn’t have had such a great amount of certainty in these prophecies. No “average Arab” could have predicted such radical changes in world geopolitics.

It would be a more easily-believable claim for someone to say today, in 2022, that North Korea will dominate the entire world by destroying the US and China!

The Rise of Islam in Rwanda​

We’ve all heard of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when the minority Tutsis (and moderate Hutus) were subjected to extreme violence because of socioeconomic tensions socially-engineered by the Belgian colonialists – just like elsewhere in the colonial world where Europeans played races against each other in order to maintain power, without caring at all about the ethnic antagonisms they’d brewed and left behind.

What’s less known is that many Rwandans embraced Islam in droves because of what they perceived to be Christian passivity (and often complicity) during the genocide.

The Washington Post reported in 2002:

Since the genocide, Rwandans have converted to Islam in huge numbers. Muslims now make up 14 percent of the 8.2 million people here in Africa’s most Catholic nation, twice as many as before the killings began.
Many converts say they chose Islam because of the role that some Catholic and Protestant leaders played in the genocide. Human rights groups have documented several incidents in which Christian clerics allowed Tutsis to seek refuge in churches, then surrendered them to Hutu death squads, as well as instances of Hutu priests and ministers encouraging their congregations to kill Tutsis. Today some churches serve as memorials to the many people slaughtered among their pews.
Four clergymen are facing genocide charges at the U.N.-created International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and last year in Belgium, the former colonial power, two Rwandan nuns were convicted of murder for their roles in the massacre of 7,000 Tutsis who sought protection at a Benedictine convent.
In contrast, many Muslim leaders and families are being honored for protecting and hiding those who were fleeing.

TRT reported in 2019:

Since the advent of European colonialism in the country in 1884, Roman Catholicism has been the dominant religion in Rwanda.
But in the last 25 years, Islam has become an alternative for thousands of Rwandans who lost their faith in Christianity during the genocide.
Muslims made up one percent of the population before the genocide. Although no census has been conducted, today “12 percent to 15 percent of the total population is Muslim”, according to Salim Habimana, a former Mufti of the country.

We could present numerous other reports too, but what’s evident is that in just a few decades, the number of Muslims rose not only in absolute numbers but in overall percentage too. What is even more impressive is that that this percentage went from 1-5% before the genocide to 10-15% of the country’s population now. This means that the percentage of Muslims has doubled or tripled in such a brief period of time!

This is something truly extraordinary considering that Muslims didn’t have the state apparatus, education propaganda, etc., that the European colonialists did when they promoted Christianity. Then there’s also the fact that all of this is happening at a time when Islam is constantly being demonized by the global liberal media.

​

 

[AMusee]

The Rise of Islam in the Philippines​

While the Protestants can still gleefully point out conversions taking place in Sub-Saharan Africa (throwing money at poor Africans brings in a lot of converts), Catholics have not been so successful. Not only are Catholic missionary activities in the modern world more or less a failure, but they’re even losing against Protestants in their own backyards (such as in Brazil).

So The Philippines, an archipelago in Southeast Asia, gives them a ray of hope. Especially when contrasted with how Catholicism is dying in its old strongholds such as France. The Philippines is a nation with a population of over a 100 million where 80% identify as Catholics.

But I’ve got some news for the Catholics: many Filipinos are embracing Islam.

There’s even a name for them: “Balik-Islam,” which means “returnees to Islam,” as Islam reached The Philippines before Christianity did, and many of these converts to Islam say that their ancestors were Muslims who were forcefully converted into Christianity by the European colonialists (the Spanish in particular).

Luis Lacar writes in one of the few articles that exist regarding this phenomenon:

Balik-Islam are individuals who have made a ‘paradigm shift in their ordered view of life from one perspective to another’. The ‘paradigm shift’ is from Christianity to Islam. Recent available data on the number of Bali-Islam in the Philippines indicate that it is a rapidly growing phenomenon. While they may be denominated as converts to Islam, without exception, none of them wants to be called a convert. They insist on being designated as Balik-Islam (‘returnees’ to Islam) rather than converts.

In note 4 of his article he mentions that the number of Muslim converts as of the year 1995 is 98,500. In note 5 he mentions that many of these converts “were former ordained preachers or lay ministers in their respective Churches.”

But the numbers must have risen since 1995, especially as Lacar himself termed it “a rapidly growing phenomenon.” In a 2020 thesis about Balik-Islam submitted to Temple University, we read on p. 5:

Lacar, Angeles, and Borer et al. explore various aspects of an Islamic movement in the Philippines that have spanned several decades and reportedly grown in numbers that range from 200,000 to two million.

And Islam didn’t spread there by the sword. The Muslims of The Philippines, who make around 5-10% of the population, are a besieged minority that fought the central government for many decades through insurgences.

Although the situation somehow calmed in 2019, when president Duterte ratified a law allowing the Bangsamoro autonomous region in the Muslim-majority Mindanao island group, the point here is that the Muslims of the country don’t have the political authority nor the financial means to potentially convert millions into Islam.

Other Cases​

We can provide many other cases too.

Take the Igbos in Nigeria for example.

Nigera is divided roughly through the following ethnoreligious lines: the Hausas and Fulanis in the north are 99% Muslims; the Yorubas in the south-west are roughly 50% Muslims and 50% Christians; and the Igbos in the south-east are predominantly Christians.

In fact, Igbos are known to be the “staunch” Christians of Nigeria.

But this may be changing.

In a 2020-book, The Conversion of Igbo Christians to Islam, published by Langham Publishing (with a Christian editor), the author’s shock is quite explicit within the very first pages:

After having served as a missionary in various parts of Muslim West Africa and Sudan, in a bid to see Christ ardently worshiped among Muslims there, I returned home in 2012 and learned that my own people, the Igbo, were converting to Islam. This realization was heartrending and overwhelming. I wept day and night for my people, read some online Muslim da’wees’ conversations sharing how Christians in the Nigerian universities were converting to Islam in large numbers. This knowledge further wrenched my heart and sparked an interest to investigate the reasons why the Igbo were converting to Islam.
In recent years, conversion to Islam has significantly increased in areas formerly hostile to Islam. For instance, good numbers of Americans are converting to Islam, South Korean Christians are converting to Islam, and native-born British as well. This phenomenon is also being observed in Igboland, the Christian heartland of Nigeria, where a growing number of mosques, Islamic schools/institutions, and Igbo converts to Islam can be observed. Though most people have argued that the Igbo are converting to Islam primarily for the economic motif, which may have been accurate in the past, closer examinations shows that this is no longer the case. According to this current research, the Igbo are nowadays primarily converting to Islam for the intellectual motif.

We could also present the case of India, where Mawlana Kaleem Siddiqui was jailed a few months ago by the BJP government because of a “conversion racket.” The Indian police accepts that he converted 500,000 people to Islam, but accuses him of doing it with outside “funding” (mainly from the vilified Gulf) and claiming that he is encouraging “terrorism.”

That’s the Da’wah of a single man, so we can only imagine how many Indians have actually converted and embraced Islam…

Anyway, our point was to show that if Islam really does grow through “higher fertility rates,” it also grows due to conversions, and the examples we have provided from different continents show how Islam grows even when the Muslims are an oppressed minority.

So again, what sword?

Many would argue that, in this day and age, the religion which is really being spread by the sword and brutal domination is liberalism.

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https://muslimskeptic.com/2022/07/06/islam-growth-fertility-rwanda-philippines/