To understand how this trend developed and where it’s going, it’s important to understand how history, culture, and economics have converged to make this conflict essentially inevitable.

Perhaps no one has done a better job of understanding Radical Islam than Princeton Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis. As Lewis explains, today’s Radical Islamic movement is deeply rooted in the history and philosophy of Islam. To understand the current mindset of today’s "Islamic fundamentalists," it’s first necessary to consider the enormous pride these true believers take in their civilizations’ early achievements:

• For centuries, Islam represented the greatest military power on earth. Its armies simultaneously invaded Europe, Africa, India, and China.


• It was the world's leading economic power, trading in Asia, Europe, and Africa.


• By the 14th century, it had achieved the highest level so far in human history in the arts and sciences of civilization. It inherited the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of Greece, and of Persia, and it added to them new and important innovations from outside, such as the use and manufacture of paper from China and decimal positional numbering from India.


• Scholars and scientists in the Islamic world added immensely important contributions through their own observations, experiments, and ideas. In most of the arts and sciences of civilization, medieval Europe learned from the Islamic world.

However, as the value of innovation and adaptation increased, the Islamic world remained too rigid to make the necessary changes. The rigid, immutable understanding of the world held by Muslims was unable to support any significant degree of creative destruction. This left them trapped culturally and technologically in the 14th century, or earlier.

But Lewis also notes that even before the Renaissance, the West had begun to progress rapidly. It eventually dominated the Islamic world militarily, economically, and culturally. By the 20th century, the world of Islam had become economically poor, militarily weak, and technologically ignorant compared to the West.

Today, the Islamic world is falling further and further behind the West. And as Lewis asserts, the situation may be even worse than it seems, because many Muslim states rely on enormous oil revenues....