Cardinal Robert Sarah, the 80-year-old former prefect of the Roman Catholic Church’s Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, has issued a sobering warning for people in Europe and North America. In doing so, he may have put himself in dutch with his boss.
Pope Leo said it back in Dec. 2025: Christians and Muslims should be “working together” on “dialogue and friendship between Muslims and Christians.” He called upon Christians to be “less afraid” of Islam, and said that Christians and Muslims should be “living together” in “friendship” in Europe. He added: “Perhaps we should be a little less fearful and look for ways to promote authentic dialogue and respect. I know that, in practice, this has not always been the case. I know that fears persist in Europe.”
At the bottom of those fears, the pope intimated, was an ugly xenophobia, “often fueled by people opposed to immigration who seek to exclude those who come from another country, another religion, or another ethnic background.” He said all this as he was returning from a visit to Lebanon, and he invoked that country as an indication of the amity that he said was possible: “I think that one of the great lessons that Lebanon can offer the world is to show a country where Islam and Christianity are present and respected, and where it is possible to live together, to be friends.”
In sharp contrast to these irenic hopes, Cardinal Sarah recently stated: “Wake up. Islam is a danger. If Christians don’t start caring about our faith, Islam will take over the West. They’ll impose their laws and culture. They’ll grow massively in number. And we will decline.”
Could Sarah conceivably be correct?
Unfortunately, it is quite easy to find evidence that he is. In March, a popular Muslim speaker and teacher in Britain, Ustadh Muhammad Tim Humble, declared that Islam “has been sent to dominate, to wipe out, to take out every other religion.”
That coincided with what a Muslim speaker told a large crowd in New York City at a rally in February: “Oh, don’t scare them, brothers! Relax! They’re over here on purpose to be like, ‘Oh my God!’ Who’s seen those videos where they’re like, ‘Oh my God, the Muslims are taking over New York City!’ Seen those? You seen those? Let them know that we are taking over New York City! Takbir!” The crowd responded with a hearty “Allahu akbar.”
Taking over New York City? That’s what he said. It recalled a video that surfaced back in Dec. 2025, in which a young Somali Muslim in the U.S. holds a large photo of President Donald Trump and says: “My biggest fear in life is that this man may never witness our full takeover. Yes, he may never wi— witness that. He already witnessed our partial takeover, our little success, in America…. So. He’s old and sick, I know, he may not witness our full takeover. But I promise you that his sons will witness.”
Surely Islam doesn’t actually teach that the Muslims will take over infidel lands, right? That’s just “extremism,” right? Well, no. The Qur’an says: “Fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah.” (8:39) If Muslims were only commanded to fight “until persecution is no more,” that would be purely defensive warfare. But the command to fight “until religion is all for Allah” means that someone could be minding his own business and not bothering anyone, but if his religion is not “all for Allah,” some true believer could decide that he must be fought.
There is, unfortunately, much more. The Qur’an also tells believers three times to “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89, 4:91), and in another verse, makes clear the object of this directive: “Kill the idolaters wherever you find them.” (9:5) In the Qur’anic view, pretty much everyone who is not a Muslim is an idolater, so this amounts to a general declaration of war against virtually every non-Muslim.
The Qur’an also tells Muslims to fight against “the people of the book,” that is, primarily Jews and Christians, until they pay the jizya, a special tax, and “feel themselves subdued” (9:29), that is, submit to the hegemony of Islamic law and accept second-class status.
Majid Khadduri, an internationally renowned Iraqi scholar of Islamic law, explains that “the Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world. … The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state.”
In a similar vein, in his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, an assistant professor on the faculty of Sharia and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad, quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “The primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad.” Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once stated this idea a bit more crudely: “Have no doubt … Allah willing, Islam will conquer what? It will conquer all the mountain tops of the world.”
Could Cardinal Sarah be right? Will anyone heed his words?
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