Writing about Fr. Samir's book on Islam sent me back to Belloc's The Great Heresies for another look at his view of Islam, in the chapter called "The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed." I have to say right off that I don't think "heresy" is a good description for Islam, which seems to me a term only rightly applied to something that appears within a religion. Islam seems less a variant of Christianity or Judaism than a new religion based on both. Of course Belloc uses the antique and erroneous terms "Mohammedanism" and "Mohammedan" instead of "Islam" and "Muslim" And as always there's a sort of bluster and some sweeping historical conclusions that I suspect are not quite sound enough to justify the confidence with which they're pronounced.
But with all that said, the core of the essay seems perceptive, shrewd, and strikingly prescient. Writing in the late 1930s, Belloc foresaw a serious possibility that Islam would rise from a condition of near-total civilizational collapse and defeat and challenge the West again. He bases this on Islam's continuing spiritual vitality, and contrasts it with the decay of Christianity in Europe.
In Islam there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine—or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of Arabia, Egypt and North Africa.
The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed:—but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.
There is nothing in the Mohammedan civilization itself which is hostile to the development of scientific knowledge or of mechanical aptitude. I have seen some good artillery work in the hands of Mohammedan students of that arm; I have seen some of the best driving and maintenance of mechanical road transport conducted by Mohammedans. There is nothing inherent to Mohammedanism to make it incapable of modern science and modern war. Indeed the matter is not worth discussing. It should be self-evident to anyone who has seen the Mohammedan culture at work. That culture happens to have fallen back in material applications; there is no reason whatever why it should not learn its new lesson and become our equal in all those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over it—whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it.
As I write this, of course, a very orthodox and militant Islamic nation, a nation in which Christianity is allowed to exist only precariously at best, is in possession of atomic weapons, and another is making steady progress toward the same goal. Belloc would not have been surprised. Or perhaps he would have been more surprised by the existence of atomic weapons than by Islam's acquisition of them.
The entire chapter can be found online at EWTN, though in a not especially readable format. In fact the whole book is there, but it's one long page(!).
Light On Dark Water 
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