Islam is not a belief system that is equivalent or interchangeable with Christianity on any scale that measures the human behavioral properties that the West prizes.
Islam has a lot more in common with Stalinist Communism and Hitler’s Nazis than Christianity.
Islam springs from a tribe of caravan raiders and brigands that sought to anoint its robbery and murder with holy oil, hence the “book” that springs from the forehead of Mohammad to emulate the Jews and their bible. Islam has never really been about anything else. Murder, robbery, extortion, slavery. Islam and its Moslems have been at war with the Judeo-Christian West for 1300 years; it never ends, but ebbs and surges as they sense weakness or strength.
If I were to wager on the outcome of a street fight between true Christians and Arab Moslems, I pick the Christians. As the basis for this, I recommend that you review the performance of the vaunted Arab Legion (or its descendants) against the Israeli Jews in ’48, ’56, ’67, and ’73. But 15 years hence, the children of those thrashed Moslems would be sneaking up on the kids of the Christians who fought the good fight and then forgot them.
Western civilization is certainly not simply the product of Christianity, however. We owe the Greeks and the Romans a great deal. But Christianity softened and humanized Rome, and that softening is the true legacy of the Church.
Think about this: Islam would never have succeeded against Rome. As an enemy, pagan Rome was implacable and unrelenting. If you compare the taking of Spain by the Moors to the campaign of Hannibal you can see the sense of it. Instead of Reconquista and eventual “peace” with Islam, Rome persevered to annihilate Carthage. That was one of the things that the religion that teaches us to “turn the other cheek” took from the European psyche. We no longer can draw on the kind of murderous cultural resolve that fueled the Imperial Roman engine, unless it is drawn from us by extraordinary events.
