In many places, the "House of Islam" has become the home of war, terror, economic stagnation and dictatorship. In his pioneering analysis of this desolate situation, the renowned social scientist Ruud Koopmans opposes hard facts against Islam-critical sweeping judgements and a fashionable self-criticism of the West. He shows how fundamentalism is strangling Islam worldwide, and asks for ways leading out of this dead end.

More and more Muslims flee from dictatorship and deprivation of freedom, terror and war, poverty and unemployment to the West bringing the problems of the Islamic world with them. Ruud Koopmans shows for the first time on a broad empirical basis comparing systematicalyf Muslim and non-Muslim countries and migrant groups, how the Islamic world and the Muslims in the West on the other are falling further and further behind.  

He describes how Islam has been increasingly dominated for about forty years by fundamentalist currents restricting the rights of women, homosexuals and other minorities and fighting secular education thus isolating Muslims from modern world.

At the end of his illuminating book, Koopmans shows, that the hope of many Muslims for peace, justice and prosperity can only be fulfilled by a consistent repression of Islamism.