"I studied the [Holy] Q'uran a great deal.

"I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of M'hamed [صلى الله عليه وسلم‎]."

wrote Alexis de Tocqueville.

"M'hamed [صلى الله عليه وسلم‎] claimed that he received his Words from Heaven, and the [Holy] Q'uran contains not only a collection of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of natural science. The [Christian] Gospel, on the other hand, speaks only of the general relations of men to God and to each other - beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods."

In other words, Islam could never have produced the whole world-trashing apparatus of capitalism. Indeed, those who dream of the new Caliphate imagine it as largely agrarian.

They may well prove de Tocqueville very wrong.