The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (21 page)

Because Muslims considered the Hindus pagans who weren’t even entitled to the “protections” of dhimmi status, they treated them with particular brutality. Sita Ram Goel observes that the Muslim invaders of India paid no respect to codes of warfare that had prevailed there for centuries:

Islamic imperialism came with a different code—the Sunnah [tradition] of the Prophet. It required its warriors to fall upon the helpless civil population after a decisive victory had been won on the battlefield. It required them to sack and burn down villages and towns after the defenders had died fighting or had fled. The cows, the Brahmins, and the Bhikshus invited their special attention in mass murders of non-combatants. The temples and monasteries were their special targets in an orgy of pillage and arson. Those whom they did not kill, they captured and sold as slaves. The magnitude of the booty looted even from the bodies of the dead, was a measure of the success of the military mission. And they did all this as
mujahids
(holy warriors) and
ghazis
(
kafir
[unbeliever]-killers) in the service of Allah and his Last Prophet.
¹⁵

What did the Muslims want?

What was the ultimate goal of this seemingly endless warfare? It is clear from the commands of the Qur’an and the Prophet, who told his followers that Allah had commanded him, “to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.”
¹⁶
No Islamic sect has ever renounced the proposition that Islamic law must reign supreme over the entire world, and that Muslims must, under certain circumstances, take up arms to this end. They stopped waging large-scale jihads after 1683 not because they had reformed or rejected the doctrines that motivated them, but because the Islamic world had grown too weak to continue—a situation that began to change in recent times with the discovery of oil in the Middle East.

A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

Jihad In the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries
by Paul Fregosi; New York: Prometheus Books, 1998, is a popular, highly readable account of the depredations of jihad in the Western world and a vivid illustration of the posture of war that the Islamic world has maintained toward Christendom and the post-Christian West since its earliest days.

The Egyptian Qur’an commentator and Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) emphasized this clearly:

It is not the function of Islam to compromise with the concepts of Jahiliyya [the society of unbelievers] which are current in the world or to co-exist in the same land together with a jahili system…. Islam cannot accept any mixing with Jahiliyyah. Either Islam will remain, or Jahiliyyah; no half-half situation is possible. Command belongs to Allah, or otherwise to Jahiliyyah; Allah’s Shari’ah [law] will prevail, or else people’s desires: “And if they do not respond to you, then know that they only follow their own lusts. And who is more astray than one who follows his own lusts, without guidance from Allah? Verily! Allah guides not the people who are disobedient.” [Qur’an 28:50]…
The foremost duty of Islam is to depose Jahiliyyah from the leadership of man
, with the intention of raising human beings to that high position which Allah has chosen for him.
¹⁷
(Emphasis added)

Likewise, Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi (1903–1979), founder of the Pakistani political party Jamaat-e-Islami, declared that non-Muslims have “absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God’s earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines.” If they do, “the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.”
¹⁸

Do their utmost, even to the point of strapping on bombs and blowing themselves up in crowded buses or restaurants, or hijacking airplanes and flying them into office towers.

PC Myth: Christianity and Islam spread in pretty much the same way

This is one of many moral equivalence arguments made today—they’re so common that it seems as if some people cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that there could be anything negative about Islam unless they take pains to point out that the same negative thing exists in Christianity. And it’s certainly true that no group, religious or unreligious, has a monopoly on either misdeeds or virtue—but it doesn’t follow that all religious traditions are equal either in the nature of their teachings or in the capacity of those teachings to inspire violence.

For nearly the first three centuries of its existence, Christianity was outlawed and subject to sporadic persecution by Roman authorities. Not only was the religion
not
spread by violence, but the lists of Christian martyrs are filled with the names of people subjected to violence
because
they became Christians. In contrast, by the time of Muhammad’s death, the Muslims faced no organized or sustained opposition, and yet continued to take up the sword for their faith.

In the early days of Christianity, the Church sent missionaries to preach to non-believers and convince them of the truth of their faith. The ancient Christian nations of Europe all remember the Christian missionaries who brought the faith to them: Saint Patrick in Ireland; Saint Augustine of Canterbury in England; Saints Cyril and Methodius in Central and Eastern Europe; and others like them. They were priests and monks—not military men. Muslims, by contrast, put armies in the field that faced non-Muslim forces and offered them Muhammad’s triple choice of conversion, subjugation, or death. They drew their largest numbers of converts from among conquered dhimmi populations that saw the embrace of Islam as their only path to a livable existence. Given all the depredations of dhimmitude, it is hardly surprising that many dhimmis ultimately chose Islam.

Today, many Muslims hotly deny that Islam spread by force, and point out that forced conversion is forbidden in Islam. That is absolutely true: What spread by force was the political and social hegemony of the Islamic system. Conversions to Islam followed the imposition of that system as the dhimmis began to feel their misery.

Part II

THE CRUSADES

Chapter 10

WHY THE CRUSADES WERE CALLED

T
he Crusaders’ sack of Jerusalem in 1099, according to journalist Amin Maalouf in
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes
, was the starting point of a millennial hostility between Islam and the West.”
¹
Islamic scholar and apologist John Esposito is a bit more expansive—he blames the Crusades (“so-called holy wars”) in general for disrupting a pluralistic civilization: “Five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed before political events and an imperial-papal power play led to centuries-long series of so-called holy wars that pitted Christendom against Islam and left an enduring legacy of misunderstanding and distrust.”
²

Guess what?

• The Crusades were
  not
  acts of unprovoked aggression by Europe against the Islamic world, but were a delayed response to centuries of Muslim aggression, which grew fiercer than ever in the eleventh century.
  
• These were wars for the recapture of Christian lands and the defense of Christians,
  not
  religious imperialism.
  
• The Crusades were not called in order to convert Muslims or anyone else to Christianity by force.
  

Maalouf doesn’t seem to consider whether “millennial hostility” may have begun with the Prophet Muhammad’s veiled threat, issued over 450 years before the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, to neighboring non-Muslim leaders to “embrace Islam and you will be safe.”
³
Nor does he discuss the possibility that Muslims may have stoked that “millennial hostility” by seizing Christian lands—which amounted to two-thirds of what had formerly been the Christian world—centuries before the Crusades. Esposito’s “five centuries of peaceful coexistence” were exemplified, he says, by the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 638: “churches and the Christian population were left unmolested.”
⁴
But he doesn’t mention Sophronius’ Christmas sermon for 634, when he complained of the Muslims’ “savage, barbarous, and bloody sword” and of how difficult that sword had made life for the Christians.
⁵

Muhammad vs. Jesus

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Jesus (Matthew 5:8–10)

“Allah assigns for a person who participates in (holy battles) in Allah’s Cause and nothing causes him to do so except belief in Allah and His Messengers, that he will be recompensed by Allah either with a reward, or booty (if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise (if he is killed in the battle as a martyr).”
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PC Myth: The Crusades were an unprovoked attack by Europe against the Islamic world

Wrong. The conquest of Jerusalem in 638 stood at the beginning of centuries of Muslim aggression, and Christians in the Holy Land faced an escalating spiral of persecution. A few examples: Early in the eighth century, sixty Christian pilgrims from Amorium were crucified; around the same time, the Muslim governor of Caesarea seized a group of pilgrims from Iconium and had them all executed as spies—except for a small number who converted to Islam; and Muslims demanded money from pilgrims, threatening to ransack the Church of the Resurrection if they didn’t pay. Later in the eighth century, a Muslim ruler banned displays of the cross in Jerusalem. He also increased the anti-religious tax (jizya) that Christians had to pay and forbade Christians to engage in religious instruction of others, even their own children.

Brutal subordination and violence became the rules of the day for Christians in the Holy Land. In 772, the caliph al-Mansur ordered the hands of Christians and Jews in Jerusalem to be stamped with a distinctive symbol. Conversions to Christianity were dealt with particularly harshly. In 789, Muslims beheaded a monk who had converted from Islam and plundered the Bethlehem monastery of Saint Theodosius, killing many more monks. Other monasteries in the region suffered the same fate. Early in the ninth century, the persecutions grew so severe that large numbers of Christians fled to Constantinople and other Christian cities. More persecutions in 923 saw additional churches destroyed, and in 937, Muslims went on a Palm Sunday rampage in Jerusalem, plundering and destroying the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection.
⁷

In reaction to this persecution of Christians, the Byzantines moved from a defensive policy toward the Muslims to the offensive position of trying to recapture some of their lost territories. In the 960s, General Nicephorus Phocas (a future Byzantine emperor) carried out a series of successful campaigns against the Muslims, recapturing Crete, Cilicia, Cyprus, and even parts of Syria. In 969, he recaptured the ancient Christian city of Antioch. The Byzantines extended this campaign into Syria in the 970s.
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