September 29, 2026: While Islamic leaders boast that the goal of worldwide Islam is fast approaching, it isn’t. After 1,500 years of triumphs and a growing number of failures, Islam is losing believers at an astonishing rate. Worse, the former Muslims do not declare their departure; they just don’t show up at mosques anymore and ignore all Islamic rituals at home. In public, they appear to be Muslim, but if anyone asks them about their religion, their answers will be evasive and non-committal. Over 1.4 million American Muslims have left. In Germany, over a hundred thousand local Muslims have left the faith in the last decade. In Britain, over 100,00 Muslims have been walking away from Islam each year.  In Iran, most of the Mosques are empty, and there are existing secret congregations of Christians, Buddhists, and Zoroastrians that continue to increase as a final act of defiance against the Islamic dictatorship that has misruled Iran for nearly half a century.

In Muslim-majority nations, this behavior can get you killed. The penalty for leaving Islam is death, but only if there are enough Muslims around to kill the non-believers. There are examples of this everywhere. In America, the number of practicing Muslims shrinks each year even though Muslim organizations like CAIR (Council on American–Islamic Relations) promote social, legal, and political activism among local Muslims. At the same time, CAIR is accused of supporting Islamic terrorists outside America. U.S. Muslims tend to be more American than Muslim. Such is not the case with some teenage sons and a few daughters. Some of these kids have embraced Islamic terrorists but realized their terrorism should be practiced in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia continues to have problems with conservative clerics who preach in favor of Islamic terrorism. The Interior Minister has spoken to the worst offenders, but not all of them were persuaded to shape up or shut up. So the Interior Minister took it up a level and assembled all the senior clerics and told them that they were not doing enough to fight Islamic terrorism. This terrorism is not popular in Saudi Arabia, not since al Qaeda attacks have killed 264 Saudis in the recent past. As far back as the 1980s, opinion surveys in Tunisia, Morocco, and Iraq found a growing number of Muslims identifying as atheists. Throughout the Islamic world, a growing number of mosques are abandoned or left to their imam and a few older followers. For example, in Lebanon, nearly half of all Muslims do not practice Islam at home, even though they occasionally show up at the Mosque.

While the Saudi leadership does not like to dwell on it too much, their country is the place where most al Qaeda recruits come from. The conservative form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia (Wahhabism) forms the basis of al Qaeda ideology (that non-Muslims are scum and everyone must be persuaded or forced to become Muslim). Although the Saudi government expelled most known al Qaeda members in the 1990s (and drove many others underground), there are still many Saudi Islamic conservatives that support Islamic terrorists directly, or indirectly via contributions to Islamic charities. What has been most embarrassing has been the Saudis who continued to be identified as suicide bombers. The U.S. strives to identify the dead bombers in Iraq, and the Saudis help, if only to get the remains returned to their families for proper burial. But then word got out that the sons of some prominent clerics had gotten themselves killed as suicide bombers. The Saudi Interior Minister was quite scathing about that about this when he chewed out the senior clergy.

While the Saudi royal family presides over a kingdom of very conservative Moslems, their consensus is that Islam must change, to reform, if it is to survive. The Saudi royals have their own share of bad apples (corrupt, decadent, or religious fanatics), but the majority see the problems that Islam faces (corruption, bad government, feeble economic and scientific progress) and have backed efforts to change things. This includes seemingly radical efforts, like the Arab Reform Movement, to more mundane ones, like more education and personal freedoms for women.

From the founding of the kingdom 80 years ago, the Saudis have been pushing the Wahhabis to loosen up. There's been a lot of progress, but not enough to prevent the creation of al Qaeda (which got going with a lot of help from Egyptian Islamic radicals). While the royal family pushes for change, many Saudis are content to blame the West for all their problems, and openly or secretly cheer on the Islamic terrorists.