The Prophesy of Hilaire Belloc

AY not Islam rise again?"

"In a sense the question is already answered because Islam has never departed."

"It still commands the fixed loyalty and unquestioning adhesion of all the millions between the Atlantic and the Indus and further afield throughout scattered communities of further Asia. But I ask the question in the sense: 'Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world which will shake the dominion of Europeans -- still nominally Christian -- and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?' The future always comes as a surprise but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be."

"And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing in the future is the return of Islam. Since religion is at the root of all political movements and changes and since we have here a very great religion physically paralysed, but morally intensely alive, we are in the presence of an unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable."