I was preparing a post along the lines of the above title, but then I found this, that states it all much better than I could, from
Reymond, Robert L. Contending for the Faith: Lines in the Sand That Strengthen the Church. Fearn, Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2005.:
The Arabic word translated “Islam” is etymologically related to the Hebrew word “shalom,” usually translated “peace.” But “peace” does not mean to most Muslim clerics in the Middle East what it means to the Westerner. To these Muslim clerics “peace” connotes “surrender” or “submission” to Allah, which means for them with respect to the non-Muslim world “placing their foot on their enemy’s neck.”
No Muslim scholar can truthfully deny that Muhammad taught that the faithful should “make war on the unbeliever …, and deal sternly with them” (Sura 66, “Prohibition,” verse 9; see also Sura 8, “Spoils of War,” verses 13–17, and Sura 9 [virtually a declaration of war against unbelievers], “Repentance,” verses 5, 14, 29, 112, 123). Muhammad himself, as he sought to propagate his religion beginning with his move to Yathrib or Medina (this move is called the Hegira) in September, AD 622, waged “holy war” (jihad) in the name of Allah against village after village in Arabia, finally entering his birth city Mecca in AD 630 as a conqueror and cleansing its chief shrine (Kaaba) of the 350 idols worshiped there. In other words, from its beginning Islam was spread by the sword. And the first four caliphs (successors) of Muhammad—Abu Bakr, Umar, Othman, and Ali—also drew the sword and conquered one land after another through Palestine and North Africa all the way to Spain, killing multiplied thousands as they did so and also establishing a tax system (the Dhimma) to subjugate those they did not force to convert.
While Christianity has had its misguided Crusades, its Spanish conquistadors, and has committed other misdeeds in the name of Christ, spreading Christianity by the sword has not been its normal mode of operation and was never its founder’s mode of operation. Yet in the last 100 years Muslim expansion still goes on apace by warfare. The Muslim Ottoman Turks slaughtered a million and a half Armenians in 1915–24 (a fact still ignored by much of the West). Today converts to Christianity are regularly executed in Saudi Arabia and tortured and murdered in Egypt. In the Sudan over two million Christians have been slaughtered and a million Christian children have been sold into slavery, all under the direction of the Islamic General Umar Bashir. In Indonesia Muslims have killed over three hundred thousand East Timorese Catholics since 1975. And Muslims in Palestine, Lebanon, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, etc., danced in the streets with joy while our widows and orphans mourned their dead on September 11, 2001. The late Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran declared:
Every problem in our region can be traced to this single dilemma: the occupation of [modern Palestine] by Jewish infidels or Western imperialists … The everlasting struggle between Ishmael and Isaac … cannot cease until one or the other is utterly vanquished. (Cited by George Grant, The Blood of the Moon, 56)
And the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran stated:
Until the cry “Allah Akbar” resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle. There will be Ji’had … Islam is the religion of militant individuals.… Weapons in our hands are used to realize divine and Islamic aspirations. The more people who die for our cause, the stronger our Ji’had shall become … The governments of the world should know that Islam cannot be defeated. Islam will be victorious in all the countries of the world, and Islam and the teachings of the Koran will prevail all over the world … We have in reality, then, no choice but to destroy those systems of government that are corrupt in themselves and also entail the corruption of others, and to overthrow all treacherous, corrupt, oppressive, and criminal regimes. This is the duty that all Muslims must fulfill, in every one of the Muslim countries first, and then throughout the infidel West, in order to achieve the triumph of our revolution and to garner the blessing of Allah. (Cited from George Grant, The Blood of the Moon, 72)
Nevertheless, in spite of the words of the Koran, Muhammad’s own military actions, Islam’s bloody history, and such declarations as the two just cited, Western political leaders are representing Islam to their people as a religion of peace and affirming that such Muslim clerics as I just cited are “radical Muslims” who have simply “hijacked this great and beautiful religion”! But Muslim authorities know very well that the Koran prescribes jihad as the obligation of every able-bodied male and that Islam from its inception in the seventh century to the present has sanctioned war and conquest as means of advancing Islam. The truth of the matter is that Islam is a religion of war, literally a killer religion. So in spite of what President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and every major news agency asserts, the true nature of Islam is jihad, and the Muslim clerics in the West who say otherwise either do not understand their own faith (they are called “folk Muslims” by Middle Eastern Muslim clerics) or are purposefully attempting to conceal from the gullible Westerner the true nature of Islam.
The West cannot defeat the Muslim world by the sword. Only Reformed churches, using the spiritual tools God has made available to them (see 2 Cor. 10:3–4), can defeat Islam, for the real problem is one of the human heart and only Jesus Christ can change the heart of Muslims.