Comment on the Belmont Club: "The Age of Faith"

there have been regular bouts of sectarian killing
Passive voice alert. Just who is killing who here? Is this an effort to cover atrocities by one side with a religious compulsion to engage in violence?

One hundred years ago Islam was a declining faith even in the Levant and the winds of secularism were strong in Constantinople and other places. Over time it is possible that Islam would have receded to a rural backwater cult as irrelevant as the Greco-Roman pantheon became once relegated to the role of a rural (pagan) cult. Then came oil and the Sunni Salafist-Wahabi creed and Shia Twelverism have had a good run based on an infusion of Western capital. That run is now ending. Normality is being restored.