Islam on Path of C of E?

Could Islamic terrorism be an indicator that, as a religion, Islam is following the Church of England down the path to temporal obscurity? Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of the Englishman Anthony Daniels, M.D., makes this argument in the current issue of City Journal. As a medical doctor he's worked with many poor Moslems in London, so he writes from considerable experience. Whether he's right or not I don't claim to know, but his concluding paragraph is characteristically blunt:

"Islam in the modern world is weak and brittle, not strong: that accounts for its so frequent shrillness. The Shah will, sooner or later, triumph over the Ayatollah in Iran, because human nature decrees it, though meanwhile millions of lives will have been ruined and impoverished. The Iranian refugees who have flooded into the West are fleeing Islam, not seeking to extend its dominion, as I know from speaking to many in my city. To be sure, fundamentalist Islam will be very dangerous for some time to come, and all of us, after all, live only in the short term; but ultimately the fate of the Church of England awaits it. Its melancholy, withdrawing roar may well (unlike that of the Church of England) be not just long but bloody, but withdraw it will. The fanatics and the bombers do not represent a resurgence of unreformed, fundamentalist Islam, but its death rattle."

This issue of City Journal also contains excellent essays by Steven Malanga, Victor Davis Hanson, and Kay Hymowitz, among others.