The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (20 page)

But for centuries now, the Middle East, North Africa, and Persia (Iran) have been regarded as the heart of the Islamic world. Did this transformation take place through preaching and the conversion of hearts and minds? Not at all: The sword spread Islam. Under Islamic rule, the non-Muslim majorities of those regions were gradually whittled down to the tiny minorities they are today, through repression, discrimination, and harassment that made conversion to Islam the only path to a better life.

Guess what?

• What is known today as the “Islamic world” was created by a series of brutal conquests of non-Muslim lands.
  
• These were wars of religious imperialism, not self-defense.
  
• The early spread of Islam and that of Christianity sharply contrast in that Islam spread by force and Christianity didn’t.
  

PC Myth: Early Muslims had no bellicose designs on neighboring lands

Toward the end of Muhammad’s life, after his successful expedition against the pagan Hawazin and the Thaqif tribes, whom he defeated at Hunayn (a valley near Mecca), he attempted to move beyond Arabia, beginning an expedition against the Byzantines in Tabuk. He also contacted the Byzantine emperor, Heraclius, and other rulers in the region, by letter: “the Prophet of Allah wrote to Chosroes (King of Persia), Caesar (Emperor of Rome) [that is, Heraclius], Negus (King of Abyssinia) and every (other) despot inviting them to Allah, the Exalted.”
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He exhorted them to “embrace Islam and you will be safe.”
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None did, and Muhammad’s warning proved accurate: None of them were safe. Not long after Muhammad’s death, the Muslims invaded the Byzantine Empire—fired up by Muhammad’s promise that “the first army amongst my followers who will invade Caesar’s city [Constantinople] will be forgiven their sins.”
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In 635, just three years after Muhammad died, Damascus, the city where Saint Paul was heading when he experienced his dramatic conversion to Christianity, fell to the invading Muslims. In 636, the caliph Umar, who ruled and expanded the empire of Islam from 634 to 644, took al-Basrah in Iraq. Umar gave instructions to his lieutenant ‘Utbah ibn Ghazwan in words that echoed the Prophet Muhammad’s triple choice for unbelievers: “Summon the people to God; those who respond to your call, accept it from them, but those who refuse must pay the poll tax out of humiliation and lowliness. If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency. Fear God with regard to what you have been entrusted.”
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Antioch, where the disciples of Jesus were first called “Christians” (Acts 11:26), fell the next year. It was Jerusalem’s turn two years later, in 638. Like Damascus and Antioch, Jerusalem was a Christian city at that time. It was the unhappy task of Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, to hand over the city to the conquering Umar. The caliph stood happily on the site of Solomon’s Temple, from which he may have believed that the Prophet Muhammad, his old master, once ascended into Paradise (cf. Qur’an 17:1, a verse that has inspired centuries of debate as to its precise meaning). Sophronius, watching in deep sorrow nearby, recalled a Bible verse: “Behold the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet.”
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PC Myth: The native Christians of the Middle East and North Africa welcomed Muslims as liberators

Many modern analysts of the Crusades and Christian-Muslim relations in general seem to think that Sophronius said, “Welcome, liberator!” According to conventional wisdom, Byzantine rule was so oppressive on the Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, and Egyptians in particular, that they couldn’t wait to give them the bum’s rush and open their arms to the Muslims who liberated them from this oppression. But, in fact, the Muslims conquered and held Egypt only in the face of great resistance. In December 639, the general ‘Amr began the invasion of Egypt; in November 642, Alexandria fell and virtually all of Egypt was in Muslim hands. But this swift conquest was not uncontested, and the Muslims met resistance with brutality. In one Egyptian town they set a pattern of behavior that they followed all over the country. According to a contemporary observer:

Then the Muslims arrived in Nikiou. There was not one single soldier to resist them. They seized the town and slaughtered everyone they met in the street and in the churches—men, women and children, sparing nobody. Then they went to other places, pillaged and killed all the inhabitants they found…. But let us now say no more, for it is impossible to describe the horrors the Muslims committed when they occupied the island of Nikiou.

Not only were many native Christians killed—others were enslaved:

Amr oppressed Egypt…. He took considerable booty from this country and a large number of prisoners…. The Muslims returned to their country with booty and captives. The patriarch Cyrus felt deep grief at the calamities in Egypt, because Amr, who was of barbarian origin, showed no mercy in his treatment of the Egyptians and did not fulfill the covenants which had been agreed with him.
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Christian Armenia also fell to the Muslims amid similar butcheries: “The enemy’s army rushed in and butchered the inhabitants of the town by the sword…. After a few days’ rest, the Ismaelites [Arabs] went back whence they had come, dragging after them a host of captives, numbering thirty-five thousand.”
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The same pattern prevailed when the Muslims reached Cilicia and Caesarea of Cappadocia in 650. According to a Medieval account:

They [the Taiyaye, or Muslim Arabs] moved into Cilicia and took prisoners…and when Mu’awiya arrived he ordered all the inhabitants to be put to the sword; he placed guards so that no one escaped. After gathering up all the wealth of the town, they set to torturing the leaders to make them show them things [treasures] that had been hidden. The Taiyaye led everyone into slavery—men and women, boys and girls—and they committed much debauchery in that unfortunate town; they wickedly committed immoralities inside churches.
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Caliph Umar made a telling admission in a message to an underling: “Do you think,” he asked, “that these vast countries, Syria, Mesopotamia, Kufa, Basra, Misr [Egypt] do not have to be covered with troops who must be well paid?”
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Why did these areas have to be “covered with” troops, if the inhabitants welcomed the invaders and lived with them in friendship?

PC Myth: Early jihad warriors were merely defending Muslim lands from their non-Muslim neighbors

The Muslim armies swept quickly over huge regions that had never threatened them—and probably hadn’t even heard of them until the invaders arrived. Around the same time Egypt, the Middle East, and Armenia were falling to the Muslims, Europe was not exempt: Other Muslim forces carried out raids on Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, and Sicily. They carried off booty and thousands of slaves. These were but preludes to the first great Muslim sieges of what was then the grandest city of Eastern Christendom and one of the greatest in the world: Constantinople. Muslim armies laid siege in 668 (and for several years thereafter) and 717. Both sieges failed, but they made it abundantly clear that the House of Islam was continuing its policy of bloody imperialism toward Christendom.

Muslim warriors did all this in obedience to the commands of their god and his prophet. One Muslim leader of that era put it this way: “The Great God says in the Koran: ‘O true believers, when you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads.’ The above command of the Great God is a great command and must be respected and followed.”
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He was referring, of course, to the Qur’an: “When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads and, when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly” (47:4).

Muhammad vs. Jesus

“All who take the sword will perish by the sword.”

Jesus (Matthew 26:52)

“Know that Paradise is under the shades of swords (
Jihad
in Allah’s cause).”
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French president Jacques Chirac has remarked, “Europe owes as much to Islam as it does to Christianity.”
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But this is like saying that the hen owes as much to the fox as it does to Farmer John. For Europe in the eighth century would soon know just how seriously the Muslims took the commands of Allah about meeting the unbelievers on the battlefield. The Muslims swept rapidly through Christian North Africa, and by 711 they were in a position to invade Spain. Christian Europe was beset from both the East and the West. The campaign went well—so well, in fact, that the Muslim commander, Tarik, exceeded his orders and pressed his victorious army forward. When he was upbraided by the North African emir, Musa, and asked why he had kept going so far into Christian Spain in defiance of orders, Tarik replied simply, “To serve Islam.”
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He served it so well that by 715 the Muslims were close to conquering all of Spain (which they held, of course, for over seven hundred years), and began to press into France. Charles Martel, “the Hammer,” stopped them in 732 at the city of Tours.

Despite this defeat, the Muslims didn’t give up. In 792, the ruler of Muslim Spain, Hisham, called for a new expedition into France. Muslims around the world enthusiastically responded to his call to jihad, and the army that gathered was able to do a good deal of damage—but ultimately did not prevail.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that Hisham’s call was religiously based—and that it antedates the Crusades, which are supposed to mark the beginning of Christian-Muslim hostility, by just over three hundred years. Some fifty years later, in 848, another Muslim army invaded France and wreaked considerable havoc. But over time, their fervor faded. In the course of the Muslim occupation, many of the occupiers were converted to Christianity, and the force dissipated.

Somewhat earlier, in 827, the warriors of jihad set their sights on Sicily and Italy. The commander of the invading force was a noted scholar of the Qur’an who forthrightly cast the expedition as a religious war. They pillaged and looted Christian churches, all through these lands, terrorizing monks and violating nuns. By 846, they had reached Rome, where they exacted a promise of tribute from the pope. While their hold on Italy was never strong, they held Sicily until 1091—when the Normans drove them out.

In Spain, of course, the
reconquista
began to slowly chip away at Muslim domains, until 1492, when the Christians had entirely recaptured the nation. However, as battles raged in Spain, the Muslims continued to press Christendom’s eastern flank. The Seljuk Turks decisively defeated the forces of the Byzantine Empire at the Armenian town of Manzikert in 1071, paving the way for the Muslim occupation of virtually all of Asia Minor—some of the central and most well-known lands of Christendom. Henceforth Christians would suffer second-class dhimmi status in the great Christian cities to which Paul addressed many of his canonical epistles. It is against the backdrop of all this, as we shall see, that Pope Urban II called the first Crusade in 1095.

Just Like Today: Islam must be spread by force

S
ome of the modern-day Islamic thinkers who are most revered today by jihad terrorists taught (in no uncertain terms) that Islam must impose itself by force upon non-Muslims—not as a religion, for that would violate the Qur’an’s dictum that “there is no compulsion in religion” (Qur’an 2:256)—but as a system of laws and societal norms. They taught that Muslims must fight to impose Islamic law on non-Muslim states, relegating its citizens to dhimmi status or worse.

Not only West, but East

Muslim forces pressed eastward as well as westward, mounting a sea invasion of India as early as 634. Land invaders pressed into what are now Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India beginning in the eighth century, making slow but steady progress. Historian Sita Ram Goel observes that by 1206, the Muslim invaders had conquered “the Punjab, Sindh, Delhi, and the Doab up to Kanauj.”
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Later waves expanded these holdings to the Ganges and beyond.