Belief

Beliefs of human beings take place in 4 dimensions:
1. the material dimension
2. the emotional dimension
3. the intellectual dimension
4. the spiritual dimension
When these four dimensions merge, a human being becomes a powerful force. When a whole community has these four dimensions merge, then we have a new world order.
This did not happen in the time of Jesus of Nazareth. Had the Jews accepted the teachings and the leadership of Jesus as the Messiah then the Jews with the Jesus-ethic would have conquered the Romans emotionally, intellectually and spiritually long before the Roman Emperor Constantine became a Jesus-follower of his own accord three centuries later bringing the material power of the Roman Empire in tow.
And then?
In the 7th Century CE a man named Mohammad the Trustworthy (Al-Amin) began preaching a new belief system to the Pagan Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula. He was persecuted relentlessly and ex-communicated by his people, the pagan citizens of the Arabian city state of Mecca. He believed he had been called upon to deliver the Message (the Quran) from the nameless God Al-Lah (The God) of Arabian folklore. His belief gave him three qualities to an exceptional degree not given to any ordinary human being:
1. tenacity
2. fortitude
3. strength (in his physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual confrontations)
His preaching was, in essence, similar to that of any other Biblical Prophet in that he emphasized ethics and ethical behavior. As he gained adherents and a base of operations, he then embarked into changing the traditions, the culture and the ethics of his people from that of pagans with NO belief in an hereafter to that of a people with:
1. Belief in the hereafter,
2. Belief in a Divine accounting of human action on this earth, and
3. In Divine intervention, whenever and however, Al Lah (God) decides according to His Will.
The believer surrenders his own will to that of the One God and in so doing he becomes a Muslim, the one who surrenders his will; and his religion is then Islam, the religion of those who have surrendered their will to God.
And then?
And that gave rise to 1000 years of Muslim civilizations that ruled the known world from the 7th Century to the 15th Century and then huge parts of the world up to the 20th Century.
So, you see, it all has to do with belief in the end.