Christianity in the Middle East and Islam

Prospects for a continued Christian presence in the Middle East are currently bleak (cf., The Impossible Future of Christians in the Middle East, The Atlantic, 5/23/19).

"We have just seen what was the main cause of Islam's extraordinarily rapid spread; a complicated and fatigued society, and one burdened with the institution of slavery; one, moreover, in which millions of peasants in Egypt, Syria and all the East, crushed with usury and heavy taxation, were offered immediate relief by the new creed, or rather, the new heresy....It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past" (Hillaire Belloc, The Great Heresies, 1936, pp. 46 - 51).