What we call the Islamic world includes those countries with a majority Muslim population. The region extends from Morocco and Mauritania on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in North Africa in the West. It stretches as far as Indonesia on the shores of the pacific in the East. A large part of the billion or so Muslims who live in that area have been exposed to aggression of various forms, oppression, terror and even mass slaughter, simply because of the ‘Muslim’ identity. That is because many Muslims have had to live under the domination of non-Muslim, or even Islam-hating administrations.

When we look at the Islamic world today, at Bosnia Herzegovina, Algeria, Tunisia, Eritrea, Egypt, Afghanistan, Kashmir, East Turkestan, Chechnya, Thailand, the Philippines, Burma and the Sudan, we see there is clearly an attempt to oppress and eliminate the Muslims of the world. Muslims in these areas are faced by enemies who at first sight seem very different. Muslims are the target of the Serbs in Bosnia, Hindus in Kashmir, the Russians in the Caucasus, and by oppressive regimes in countries such as Algeria, Egypt and Morocco. However, all these anti-Islamic movements all operate under the same logic, follow the same strategies and use similar methods, no matter how independent they may appear. One common feature of the powers we are discussing is the way they are all ‘far removed from religion.’

These forces, which deny the existence of Allah, see divine religions (and particularly Islam, the only one which has not been distorted) as enemies of the secular systems they have set up and therefore wage a ruthless campaign against religions and those who believe in them, represent atheistic ideologies. For that reason, it is not the Serbs, Hindus or oppressive regimes who are Muslims’ true enemies, but the atheistic mentality that is currently found in the world. The war being waged against Islam today is nourished by atheism, and its roots stretch far back into the past.

This was not always the situation in the Islamic world. A few centuries ago, the Islamic world was ruled by Muslim empires. At the start of the 1700s three empires ruled almost all the Islamic world: There was the Mogul Empire in India. The Safavi state ruled in Iran and the surrounding area. The third and greatest was the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the Balkan peninsula, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Arabian peninsula and North Africa.

However, these three empires gradually disappeared. The Mogul Empire grew weak, shrank, and was eventually overthrown. Then the whole sub-continent of India fell into the hands of British colonialists. (The region known as Indo-China was colonized by the French). The Safavi state in central Asia came under British and Russian control. The greatest and strongest Muslim empire, the Ottoman, began shrinking by stages in the 19^th century. Ottoman territories in the west fell into the hands of the Russians and Balkan states incited by them. The Middle east, the Arabian peninsula and North Africa were occupied by the British, French and Italians. At the end of World War I, a very large part of the Muslims in the world were now living under the rule of non-Muslim governments.

These administrations were colonialist. In the 1920s, Soviet Russia and Italy joined the ranks of Britain and France, the traditional colonialists. Each of these countries occupied and colonized a part of the Islamic world. They did not hesitate to carry out the most ruthless slaughter and torture of Muslims. Britain and France ‘administered’ Muslims in the Middle east, North Africa and the Far East. Or, to put it more accurately, they used the natural resources of Muslim countries for their own ends. Soviet Russia took over all the Caucasus and central Asia, and enslaved the Muslims in those regions under the tyranny of the communist regime. Italy, which occupied Libya in 1911, set about a bloody invasion of Abyssinia in the 1930s.

One important feature of Britain and France’s Middle East policy was to divide the region up into artificial states appropriate to their own relationships of self-interest. This artificial order in the Middle East was the seed of unending conflict. These two European colonialist powers were forced to abandon the Middle East after World War II. Yet they left behind them a much more ruthless, aggressive and destructive colonialist power behind them: Israel.

As we have briefly summarized, the general picture shows that the Islamic world has been a target for foreign powers since the beginning of the 19^th century. For 200 years, Muslims of the world were occupied and colonized by these powers, and subjected to oppression. The puppet administrations these powers established in the Islamic world were thoroughly oppressive, and still are. Moreover, the foreign powers imposed a number of foreign ideologies on the Islamic world (extreme nationalism, fascism or communism). They incited a number of people with these ideologies and employed them against Muslim societies.

When we analyse the enemies of the Islamic world we find three basic trends:

1. Western Imperialism: The British and French colonialism touched on earlier.

2. Fascism - extreme nationalism: Italian fascism, Israel, or various fascist-type groups provoking civil wars in the Islamic world.

3. Communism: Soviet Russia, Red China, the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge, the Afghan communists and various communist groups in the Middle East.

On close inspection, all three influences are based on ideas that emerged in the 19^th century and developed during the 20^th. Extreme nationalism and the fascism which followed it were ideologies that emerged in the 19^th century and were largely practiced during the 20^th. Communism began with the theory of dialectical materialism put forward by Marx and Engels in the 19^th century, although the first communist regime was not established until 1917, in Russia. Only Western imperialism can be said to go back further, although the philosophical and ideological roots of colonialism, which had been restricted to being an economic phenomenon, again assumed political domination of the world in the 19^th century.

This shows that the enemy of the Islamic world is not one particular state or civilization (the West, for instance), but ‘ideologies’ which turned these states or civilizations into bloody tyrants. These ideologies dominated much of the world in the 19^th century, and everywhere they did come to rule was exposed to brutality and oppression. The forces that occupied, divided, plundered, enslaved and slaughtered the Islamic world were these ideologies.

Looking at these three basic ideologies, we can see that that the growing atheism in the West lies behind them all. Each emerged as the Western world turned away from belief in Allah and religion in favor of a materialist view of the world.

One very important fact that confirms this diagnosis is that each of three ideologies is based on Darwin’s theory of evolution, portrayed as the ‘scientific basis of atheism’ and which for the first time allowed atheist and anti-religious philosophies to be put forward as ‘objective truth.’

Darwinism formed the so-called scientific basis for colonialism. That was because Darwin had located the human races on different stages of his imaginary evolutionary process. He considered the European white man the most advanced race, and portrayed Asian and African tribes as more or less at the same level as apes. Furthermore, he suggested that all mankind was in constant conflict and a struggle for survival, and that it was a ‘law of nature’ that the West should win the struggle and enslave everyone else.

Darwin arrived at this interesting conclusion by the concept of ‘the struggle for survival.’ This claimed that the weak were eliminated during the struggle, while strong and well-fitted individuals were selected and survived. He furthermore maintained that this struggle was necessary for universal development, in other words that the elimination of some human races could be considered a process that would enable man to develop.

This unscientific nonsense, known as ‘Social Darwinism,’ was widely accepted in the primitive scientific conditions of the time, and came to be a source of justification for European imperialism. In short, Darwinism is the ‘scientific’ basis of imperialism. (For further details, see "The Disasters Darwinism Brought to Humanity" by Harun Yahya, Attique Publishing)

Social Darwinism is no less the source of racism, extreme nationalism and fascism. Those 19^th century theoreticians accepted as giving rise to fascism (Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinrich von Treitschke, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel for instance) were all strongly influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution and the concept of the struggle for survival in particular. The Italian dictator Mussolini, who established the first fascist regime, was an out and out Darwinist who attracted great attention with his articles praising Darwin in his youth. The writings of Hitler and other Nazi figures clearly show that they were inspired by Social Darwinism. (For further details, see "Fascism: The Bloody Ideology of Darwinism," by Harun Yahya).

Darwinism is also the basis of communism. This was clearly stated by Marx and Engels, the two founders of communism. They were both confirmed atheists, and realized that communism need religious beliefs to be eliminated and that theory of evolution served that end.

Dictators such as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao, who made their own comments on communism, both stated their ideological connections to Darwinism and put it into practice. The theory of evolution came to be the foundation of educational and even agricultural policies in communist regimes, and all communist movements found the ideological basis they were seeking in Darwinism.

In the eyes of communist ideology, which was influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, society was ‘a herd of animals.’ Man was a soulless, spiritless thing somewhere between an animal and a machine. The logic of ‘There are a lot of them, it does not matter if we lose one’ rules. Those who do not work or are crippled are exiled from the herd and left to die. They are seen as sickly and harmful. There are no feelings of compassion, forgiveness or trust. Since they believe that people cease to exist after death, they cling savagely to life. Since they see everybody as an enemy and a rival in the struggle for survival, they see all movements as being opposed to them, and hate them.

It is natural that communist ideology, which creates societies with no human or spiritual values, far removed from pleasing morality, should be inimical to religion. Features such as morality, love, affection, compassion, sacrifice, cooperation and forgiveness that religion brings with it have no place in the model that communism aims to achieve.

In short, it is evident that the three ideologies hostile to the Islamic world have come from the same source, the atheist culture that took over the Western world in the 19^th century.

This once again shows how important the war of ideas against atheism is. Atheism is not merely a force which tries to destroy peoples’ faith and to ruin their hereafter. At the same time, it aims to ruin the whole world and turn it into a place of chaos and conflict. Muslims are identified as the main target in this environment.

For that reason, the war of ideas against atheism is both a great service to faith and a ‘moral war’ that will answer the discord that currently holds sway in the world. The fact that there are many Muslims being oppressed all over the world by atheist systems reminds us once again just how important that struggle is. Every ideological victory over atheism (and its foundations such as its philosophy, ideology and so-called scientific theories such as Darwinism) will also be a moral victory of great help and importance to oppressed Muslims all over the world.