Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you accept atrocities, and commit them.
Isolated incidents
Islam is ravaging hearts and minds across the world, and thanks to the far-sighted migration policies of Western governments, the West now gets its share. Taken one at a time, the damage looks like local news: a public flogging here, a blasphemy lynching there, a child bride somewhere else, a van driven into a Pride march in Berlin. Follow only the news from your own corner of the world, and things may not look so bad yet.
Delirium Islamicum exists to connect the dots. Seen from above, the picture is clear: year after year, Islam is by far the doctrine in whose name the most harm is done on Earth. In 2025, the four deadliest terrorist groups on the planet, the Islamic State, two branches of al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, caused 70% of all terrorism deaths, according to the Global Terrorism Index. And terrorism is only the part that makes the news.
Sacred, they say
The Quran and the authentic hadiths, sold as sacred by a whole industry of preachers, do not merely tolerate the worst. They organize it. Slavery is regulated, never abolished: Saudi Arabia only did that in 1962, Mauritania in 1981. Sex with slaves and war captives is allowed, even when their husbands are alive: married women are off limits, "except those your right hands possess" (4:24; Sahih Muslim 1456). Today we call it rape.
The Prophet, an "excellent example" for believers (33:21), married Aisha when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was nine (Sahih al-Bukhari 5133, in a chapter titled "Giving one's young children in marriage"). In 2025, when Pakistan's parliament raised the minimum age of marriage to 18 in the capital, the state's own Council of Islamic Ideology declared the bill un-Islamic.
A husband may beat a disobedient wife (4:34), and if she refuses him her bed, the angels curse her until morning (Sahih al-Bukhari 3237). Her testimony is worth half a man's (2:282), her inheritance half her brother's (4:11), and her mind is "deficient", the Prophet explains (Sahih al-Bukhari 304). Misogyny is not a deviation from the texts: it is in the user manual.
Unbelievers are "the worst of creatures" (98:6), polytheists are "impure" (9:28), and Jews and Christians must be fought until they pay tribute, humbled (9:29). "Bad" Muslims fare no better: the hypocrites will be in the lowest depths of the Fire (4:145). There, each time the skins of the damned burn through, Allah gives them new ones, so they keep tasting the punishment (4:56). Eternal, and renewable.
Plunder has its own chapter, The Spoils of War, and its own tax: one fifth for Allah, His Messenger, his relatives and the poor (8:41). As for conflicts between human beings, Allah has the solution: "Fighting is prescribed for you, though you dislike it." You may dislike something that is good for you, He adds (2:216).
Conquest, then the caliphate
What makes Sunni Islam by far the most dangerous doctrine on the planet is not its prayers. It is its program. Allah sent His Messenger with "the religion of truth", to make it prevail over all religions (9:33). The Messenger was ordered to fight people until they testify that there is no god but Allah (Sahih al-Bukhari 25). The ultimate goal: a caliphate, worldwide if possible. The Islamic State proclaimed one in 2014. In Hamburg in 2024, more than a thousand demonstrators marched with signs reading "Caliphate is the solution". Germany banned the organizers the following year.
Two kinds of dictator
Islam is also a formidable lever of power for leaders with totalitarian tastes, and only the most authoritarian regimes manage to contain its own thirst for power. André Malraux saw it coming. In a note dated June 3, 1956, he predicted "various forms of Muslim dictatorship" across the Arab world, and warned that Tunisia's Bourguiba would keep power only by becoming "a kind of dictator". In 1975, Bourguiba was proclaimed president for life. Seventy years on, the Arab world mostly offers two models: the dictator who rules in the name of Islam, and the dictator who jails the Islamists to keep his job. Some manage both.
Reformation postponed
Three more things explain why Islam, especially in its Sunni version, is so dangerous, and so hard to reform.
Fear, from the cradle. A great many Muslims are indoctrinated from early childhood, and the fear of hell is instilled very early. Millions of children learn the Quran by heart in Arabic, a language most of them do not speak. Understanding is optional. Fear is not.
God's own words, word for word. Christians accept that men wrote their Gospels, however inspired. Mainstream Islam holds the Quran to be the eternal, literal word of God, in spite of historians and common sense. No believer can therefore step back from its most catastrophic verses without becoming, in effect, an apostate. In 1995, an Egyptian court declared the scholar Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd an apostate for reading the Quran in its historical context, and annulled his marriage. He said he was still a Muslim. The court knew better. Threatened with death, he fled to the Netherlands. The texts, after all, are clear about apostates.
"Whoever disbelieves in Allah after having believed, except one who is forced while his heart remains firm in faith, but whoever opens his breast to disbelief: upon them is wrath from Allah, and theirs is a terrible punishment."— According to Allah himself, Quran 16:106
Muhammad expands the concept:
"The blood of a Muslim who testifies that there is no god but Allah and that I am His Messenger may be shed in only three cases: a life for a life, the married adulterer, and the one who abandons his religion and leaves the community."— According to Muhammad himself, Sahih al-Bukhari 6878
When Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law and fourth caliph, burned apostates alive, the Prophet's cousin Ibn Abbas objected on a point of procedure: fire is Allah's punishment. He would simply have killed them, as the Prophet ordered.
"Whoever changes his religion, kill him."— According to Muhammad himself, Sahih al-Bukhari 6922 and Sunan an-Nasa'i 4059
Today, in nine countries from Saudi Arabia to the Maldives, leaving Islam can still be punished by death, according to Humanists International.
A very good deal for men. Islam is, among other things, a religion designed to give men a comfortable life and authority over women, whom Allah and His Messenger treat as second-class human beings. "Men are in charge of women," the Quran states (4:34). Trading sharia for the laws of a secular republic costs a man his privileges. It costs a woman only her chains. Do not expect the patriarchs to lead the reform.
Tolerance, within limits
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance."— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945
A tolerant society that will not defend itself against the intolerant, Popper warned, will not survive them. If preaching Islam is allowed, criticizing it must be too. Promoting it is called dawah. Criticizing it is called Islamophobia. Call this site propaganda if you like: theirs promises paradise and threatens hellfire, ours only offers sources.
We do not target believers: along with apostates, women and minorities, they are the doctrine's first victims. Our targets are the texts, the clerics who enforce them, the regimes that exploit them and the fanatics who carry them out.
One last piece of advice: be careful which ideas you let into your head. Some can change you for the worse. Especially those that claim to come from heaven.
