CHAPTER EIGHT
ISLAM CHALLENGES THE WORLD
Islam challenges the world! To modern ears these words sound strange indeed, and hopelessly unreal. We are familiar with such headlines as "Communism challenges the world"; "The menace of Fascism"; and "Naziism a threat to world peace." But somehow the phrase "Islam challenges the world" seems out of date, and it leaves us cold. At most it reminds us of things we read in our histories about the Crusades, and pre-war Turkish atrocities visited upon the helpless Armenians—things which belong mostly to a dim and distant past and have no challenge in them for the modern world.
But wait a moment. It must not be forgotten that the things we have been considering about Islam in the previous pages of this book are a part of this very real world in which we are now living. The two hundred and fifty million Moslems who live mostly in Europe, Africa and Asia, forming a huge bloc of humanity in the heat belt of the world, are a very large and important part of this great human family of ours. Their history has been strangely and intimately, and often tragically, interwoven with that of Christian nations. For ten centuries, from the seventh
