Is Islam Collapsing?

 

Is Islam Collapsing?

Shrikant G. Talageri

  

Koenraad Elst reportedly put up a tweet today (13 November 2025) pointing to a youtube video which claims Islam is collapsing:

https://x.com/ElstKoenraad/status/1988805905178325333

“If you hadn’t noticed:”

8:37 AM · Nov 13, 2025

He gives the reference of the following youtube video, uploaded “2 days ago” titled “7 Facts About ISLAMS Collapse That Seem Fake (But are 100% Real)”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkYRO4KLLsU&t=3s

 

The video claims Islam is collapsing on the seven following grounds:

1. “The Party in Mecca’s Backyard” [i.e. raves and discos, social media obsessions (tictoc, whatsapp, youtube, etc.), binge-watching Netflix, etc., increasingly westernized and luxurious culture and lifestyle, individualism and modernism].

2. “Mass Apostasy in the Muslim World” [youth abandoning religion, developing doubts, becoming ex-Muslims or identifying as non-religious, etc.].

3. “The Brain Drain Crisis” [educated youth moving to west, escaping the restrictions and compulsions of Islamic laws].

4. “The Drug Epidemic No-one Talks About” [huge percentages of youth in Arab countries taking to drugs like Captagon pills].

5. “The Vanishing Clergy and crisis of faith” [clergy shortages, reducing numbers in mosque congregations].

6. “Water crisis is collapsing Civilization” [temperatures rising to unprecedented degrees, water shortages and crises].

7. “Internal Divisions, Sectarian and Ethnic Conflicts”.

I will not doubt that all this exists. And no doubt it may be causing dents in Islamic fervor. But anyone who sees all these as signs of a collapsing Islam is sadly suffering from self-delusion, myopic vision, lack of proportion, and a seemingly hazy knowledge of both world history and the contemporary world situation.

 

It must be noted that the video talks only about an “Islamic world” consisting basically of a region that it repeatedly shows on maps, covering the West Asian “Arab” core areas extending to Egypt in the west and Iran in the east. It sometimes also mentions some African countries. But, in one place, the video very specifically notes that a completely backward trend is taking place in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It seems to ignore what is happening in Bangladesh and India, and in all western countries where Muslims from this same West Asia have spread in the past few decades and are now multiplying in numbers and in intensity and pugnacity of religious fervor.  

Further, when it talks about increasing modernization, westernization and liberalization in its West Asian core “Islamic area”, it ignores the fact that places like Egypt (under Nasser), Iran (under the Reza Shahs), and Turkey (under Kemal Atatürk) had seemed to have achieved extreme and seemingly irreversible extents of modernization, westernization and liberalization decades ago: all internet and social media sites overflow with “then and now” photos showing the state of women, costumes, etc. in these places in the nineteen-sixties contrasting with the hyper-medieval scenes in at least Iran and Egypt today – the same is the case in India where burgas and Islamic beards are now increasingly ubiquitous, even among the youngest and most modern, westernized, educated and techno-savvy sections of Muslims, in sharp and glaring contrast to scenes in earlier post-1947 times. Turkey may not look Islamized to that extent now but a comparison of Atatürk’s Turkey then with Erdoğans’s Turkey now in matters of Islamism needs no comment about the direction that is being taken.

Europe (at least northern and western parts) is clearly and inexorably heading towards an Islamic, or at least Muslim, future. This is noteworthy in itself, but another point to be noted from this is that while Christianity is certainly “collapsing” in its former European headquarters, we cannot conclude that Christianity itself is “collapsing”: it is spreading like wildfire in other parts of the world. Why look elsewhere: Tamilnadu, Andhra, Arunachal Pradesh, and large rural, tribal and mofussil parts of other states in India (not to mention Nepal and South Korea) are rapidly getting evangelized into becoming fundamentalist Christian strongholds: one can imagine the picture 50 years hence. So what is claimed to be happening in Muslim West Asia is hardly an indication of what is happening in the Muslim world as a whole.

And those who claim westernization, modernization and education (or migration to western democratic countries) leads to a diminishment of Muslim religious fanaticism must only look at the profile of terrorists all over the world: whether in the case of “9/11” or of the blast in Delhi a few days ago. Or look at prominent Muslims like Zohran Mamdani in New York. Or look at the hordes of militant “refugees” in Europe. Or look at the scene in Dhaka University that I had shown in a recent article:

https://x.com/HinduVoice_in/status/1965688287131304129

 

Point 4 above is funny: the idea that drug addiction can lead to de-Islamization. The word “assassin” is derived from the word “Hashishim”, an early Islamic sect who used to take cannabis before setting out to kill infidels and apostates. In fact, youths addicted to drugs can be very convenient tools and weapons in the hands of more sober fanatics and fundamentalists to achieve their aims – to make them commit acts which more sober youths would be less ready to carry out.

And Islam will "collapse" when Saudi Arabia goes dry? What was Saudi Arabia when, within a century or two, it converted half of Asia and half of Africa to Islam, destroying so many ancient civilizations in the process?

Basically people who seriously discuss issues like education, modernization, westernization, etc. as in any way beings reducers of Islamic fervor and fanaticism show a very deep lack of understanding of the most basic and fundamental tenet of religions like Islam (and, though in modern times to a lesser extent, fundamentalist Christianity). Islam does have very strong and fundamental ideas of what constitutes un-Islamic or wrong behavior (many of them making no sense to non-Muslims, like strictures against music, etc., but also others which may seem more generally moralistic). But all these other matters and concepts, whatever they are, get zero value when weighed against adherence to the fundamental hate-all-other-religions-and-religionists tenet which is the central tenet of Islam to the extent of being the only tenet of Islam. If you accept the kalma, and accept sole belief in Islam and its prophet as the only tenet (and all other religions and gods and their adherents in consequence, as false and fit only to be hated and destroyed in this world and fit for unending hell-fires in the afterlife) it does not matter what other Islam-prohibited sins or acts you commit. Nothing else that you do can really be an obstacle to being a True Muslim as long as you stick to this one tenet.

See this rather unbelievable video:

https://x.com/pakistan_untold/status/1967769932185354359 

Unbelievable, isn’t it?

But, while this above may be an extreme case which any Muslim with a drop of decency in him would find difficult to digest (and the people in the video may simply be particularly low specimens of humanity), see what the Islamic Hadith text Sahih Muslim ibn al Hajjaj 6620-6622 says:

“6620: Abu Sirma reported that when the time of the death of Abu Ayyub Ansari drew near, he said:

I used to conceal from you a thing which I heard from Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) and I heard Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) as saying: Had you not committed sins, Allah would have brought into existence a creation that would have committed sin (and Allah) would have forgiven them.

6621: Abu Ayyub Ansari reported that Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) said:

If you were not to commit sins, Allah would have swept you out of existence and would have replaced you by another people who have committed sin, and then asked forgiveness from Allah, and He would have granted them pardon.

6622: Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) having said:

By Him in Whose Hand is my life, if you were not to commit sin, Allah would sweep you out of existence and He would replace (you by) those people who would commit sin and seek forgiveness from Allah, and He would have pardoned them.”

 

Islam does prohibit various things and consider them as sins. But, as this Hadith makes clear, it not only gives any Muslim (i.e. any Muslim steadfastly believing in the one basic tenet of Islam mentioned earlier) full freedom to commit those sins and then get cleansed of the sin merely by asking forgiveness from Allah, but Allah actually gets angry if Muslims were to stop committing sins (and thereby stop putting themselves into a position where they have to beg pardon from Allah and graciously be granted that pardon) – so angry that he would sweep the entire Muslim people “ out of existence” and replace them by “another people who have committed sin, and then asked forgiveness from Allah, and He would have granted them pardon”!

 

Some ten or so years ago, an office colleague of a cousin of mine, a fervent Muslim (and, let me add, a very decent person as a person), for some reason, took it into his head that he would convince me about the truth of Islam, and he started meeting me and preaching this truth – he was a staunch fan of Zakir Naik. When, among other things, I told him about this Hadith he refused to believe me, and told me that I must have read some wrong source or translation. He took me to an office of Zakir Naik’s organization in the Bhendi Bazar area (Zakir Naik’s organization was not yet banned in India at the time, and he was then still going strong), where he told me we would get the correct text and translation.

The book (of Sahih Muslim ibn al Hajjaj) that he pulled out from the shelf and opened out to numbers 6620-6622 said exactly the same thing given above. He appeared a little disconcerted, but insisted that the Hadith did not say that Muslims must commit sins. I read out the exact words, and gently pointed out that it specifically said that if Muslims did not commit sins, Allah would be so angry that he would sweep the entire Muslim people “out of existence” and replace them by “another people who have committed sin, and then asked forgiveness from Allah, and He would have granted them pardon”. After a few moments thought, he took the book into a glass cabin where a senior disciple of Zakir Naik was sitting, and asked him about the Hadith. The disciple seemed equally unable to explain it. So then he came out and told me that I must attend a public hall meeting presided over by Zakir Naik himself, and put this question directly to him. Needless to say, I declined the proposal.

The point is: in the light of this, can any genuine non-Muslim analyst of Islam seriously claim that the tenets of Islam are so restrictive and oppressive that male Muslims would inevitably want to exit post-haste from the religion to the extent that Islam actually “collapses”?

No-one can predict the future, but all indications show that Islam (by all accounts the fastest growing religion in the world), far from being on the way to  “collapsing”, is, like it or not, going to be the dominant world religion of the future, and definitely the dominant religion in India.