and Napoleon; and Stalin, who murdered millions of Muslims in the Caucasus; and the fascist Mussolini, who sought to build his civilization atop the corpses of the Muslims of North Africa; along with countless others whose acts of terror and monstrous, inhuman crimes make the very skin shudder. Truly, we belong to Allah and to Him we shall return.

In our own age we find that Western civilization—rooted in racism and a politics that merely claims democracy and freedom—has subjected humankind to every variety of torment: oppression, domination, tyranny, and aggression. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not far from our minds; that catastrophe, which robbed people of sleep and reopened old wounds, weighs not only on those who tasted its calamity and witnessed its flames, but on all the inhabitants of the earth to this very day. The same is true of what Western civilization perpetrated in Vietnam, what it enabled in Palestine at the hands of the usurping Jews, what it did in Afghanistan, and what it is doing now in Iraq—looting its wealth and stripping