Recently on a state visit to Malaysia, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made some big claims for Islam:

Islam will soon be the domineering force in the world, placing first in the number of its followers among all other religions. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed this confidence here at the end of his state visit to Malaysia.

Following a meeting with Sultan Jamalullail I, the supreme head of the federation of nine states where Islam was proclaimed the state religion, he pontificated: “The world will be in the hands of Islam over the next few years.”

According to the president, history "convincingly shows the force of the Islamic religion, aimed not at quashing other peoples, but at serving peace and quietude."

Peace and quietude? Whatever Islam’s role in current events is, the history of Islam is the history of conquest, the history of “quashing other peoples.” That is why Moroccans and Iraqis both speak a dialect of a language originating in the Arabian Peninsula. There’s nothing historically outstanding about this—Christians had their brutal empires too—but calling for a return for this caliphate-style model is atavistic and unrealistic.

This tribalism of Islamic nations is just incompatible with globalized modernity. The future of nation-states and international interactions will not revolve around shared theology—or shared ethnicity, language, or culture for that matter. Japan and the U.S. could diplomatically not be any closer and yet could not have more contrasting religious, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural profiles. Participation in the international order should be based on shared values that transfer between peoples. It is not Islam or any other identity that links nations, it is values such as human rights, democracy, free markets, and respect for pluralism that allow disparate nations to cohere in a civilized global order.