The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (26 page)

With the end of Crusader activity in the Holy Land, the jihad gained new energy. Some of this new energy was handed to them by shortsighted Christians: In 1345, in one notorious instance, the Byzantine emperor John VI Cantacuzenus asked for help from the Turks in a dynastic dispute.

This was by no means the first time that Christians had concluded agreements with the Muslims. John VI was following ample precedent. One of the principal sources of enmity between Eastern and Western Christians during earlier Crusades was the Byzantines’ willingness to conclude pacts with the enemies of Christianity. Alexius I Comnenus enraged the earliest Crusaders by engaging in negotiations with Egypt. Another Byzantine emperor, Manuel I Comnenus (1143–1180), likewise earned the contempt of the Crusaders for dealing with the Turks, and many blamed him for the disaster of the Second Crusade. Later, of course, Emperor Frederick II and other Crusaders entered into pacts with the warriors of jihad themselves. But according to Islamic law, Muslims may only conclude truces during jihad warfare with non-Muslims when they are in a position of weakness and need time to gather strength to fight again. Those who concluded agreements with the Crusaders did not lose sight of this principle and never entered into a pact that ultimately weakened the Muslims’ position.

The invitation from John VI was a prime example of Christian shortsightedness. The Muslims arrived in Europe to help him, crossing over the Dardanelles in 1348 and occupying Gallipoli in 1354. In 1357, they captured the imposing Byzantine fortress of Adrianople. In 1359, Sultan Murad I founded the janissary corps, a crack force of young men who were seized from their Christian families as boys, enslaved, and forcibly converted to Islam. According to historian Godfrey Goodwin, “No child might be recruited who was converted to Islam other than by his own free will—if the choice between life and death may be called free will.”
³

The janissaries became the Ottoman Empire’s most formidable warriors against Christianity. The collection of boys for this corps became an annual event in some places: Christian fathers were forced to appear in the town squares with their sons; the Muslims took the strongest and brightest young men, who never saw their homes again unless they happened to be part of a Muslim fighting force sent to that area.

Just Like Today: Winning hearts and minds

W
hen a deadly tsunami hit South Asia in December 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed hope that the aid the United States was giving to countries hit by the tsunami would turn the tide of anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world.

However, it was more than a year and a half before Powell’s statement that the South African mufti Ebrahim Desai, the imam of an “Ask the Imam” feature on a Muslim question-and-answer website, made a statement which, had Powell known of it, might have diminished his confidence in the religious effect of the aid. A questioner asked if the West should receive praise from Muslims for sending troops to Bosnia and condemning the killing of Muslims elsewhere. Desai’s answer was brief: “In simple the Kuffaar [unbelievers] can never be trusted for any possible good they do. They have their own interest at heart.”
⁴

One man’s opinion? Sure. But it is an opinion with deep roots in Islamic tradition, and it would therefore be naïve to dismiss it as simply Desai’s own mean-spiritedness. The Qur’an tells believers not to “take for friends or helpers unbelievers rather than believers. If any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah; except by way of precaution, that ye may guard yourselves from them” (Qur’an 3:28). Did John VI Cantacuzenes or Powell know of the existence of that verse?

Muhammad vs. Jesus

“The hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.”

Jesus (John 16:2)

“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, even if they are of the People of the Book [Jews and Christians], until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

Qur’an 9:29

The Muslims were in Europe to stay, and in the ensuing years they resumed the jihad. With Europe disunited and distracted, they were able to seize ever larger tracts of European land: Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Croatia, and more. On June 15, 1389, they engaged Christian forces in battle at Kosovo. On the night before the battle, the grand vizier opened the Koran at random seeking inspiration. His eyes fell upon the verse that said, “Oh Prophet, fight the hypocrites and unbelievers.” “These Christian dogs are unbelievers and hypocrites,” he said. “We fight them.”
⁵

Fight them he did, and prevailed against a stronger, larger force, making June 15 a day of mourning for Serbs ever after.

The advance into Eastern Europe was just beginning—arguably, it was the shortsightedness of John VI that had opened the door. What did John know about the motives and goals of the Turks? How aware was he of the jihad imperative that led them to accept his request for help and then, once in Europe, continue warfare against the Christians? Perhaps he thought that the theology and legal superstructure of jihad was just theory, and in reality Muslims were men with whom one could bargain. He might have thought that sophisticated men could reach an understanding across cultural and religious divides. He might even have thought that his invitation to the Muslims would show his goodwill, winning over their hearts and minds and stopping the assault against imperial domains.

He would not have been the first European statesman to think so, or the last.

The jihad in Eastern Europe

What did the Europeans do in the face of the Islamic onslaught? They continued to call Crusades, but instead of fighting over Jerusalem or Damietta, they found themselves fighting the jihadists ever closer to home and finally in Europe itself, with their backs increasingly against the wall. The kingdom of Jerusalem became the kingdom of Cyprus, whose king retained the title King of Jerusalem. But that title was now fiction. One king of Cyprus, Peter I (1359–1369), tried to gather support in Europe for a new Crusade, and actually seized Alexandria in 1365. But he had to withdraw after receiving no help from a Europe distracted by its internal problems. In 1426, Cyprus itself fell to the jihad of the Egyptian Mamluks.

The Crusaders were pushed relentlessly westward. A large Crusader force was defeated in Nicopolis, a town on the Danube, in 1395. All of Europe now lay open to the Turks, with virtually nothing standing in the way of their conquest of Rome, Paris, or even London. It looked as though the Muslims’ attempt to conquer Europe was finally going to succeed. It had begun seven hundred years earlier, when the jihad armies first besieged Constantinople and entered Spain, and had been fueled over all those centuries by the theology and legal superstructure of jihad as mandated by the Qur’an and the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad. For the first time in over a thousand years, since before the Roman Emperor Constantine proclaimed himself a Christian and legalized Christianity, the smart money was on the complete disappearance of Christianity—and the relegation of virtually every Christian in the world to dhimmi status.

Help from an unlikely quarter

But then arose a most unlikely source of aid for Christendom: the Mongols. These were not the pagan Mongols of a century before, hoping to make common cause with the Christians against the Muslims. These Mongols were Muslims. Tamerlane (“Timur the Lame,” 1336–1405), the bloody conqueror of Central Asia, was probably a member of the Naqshbandi Sufi sect of Islam.
⁶
This is noteworthy because the Sufis are often presented today as a peaceful, tolerant sect of Islam; however, their history is full of jihad (e.g., Chechnya).

A direct descendant of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane began to attack the Muslim lands of the Middle East. Faced with immense losses, the Mamluk and Ottoman Turkish jihadists were forced to divert their attention from Europe. But Tamerlane didn’t appear all that interested in Europe either, although his victories were enough to compel the Byzantine Emperor John I to pay him tribute. After crushing the Ottomans at Ankara in 1402, Tamerlane turned his attention to China, leaving Muslims in the West too weak to continue the jihad against Europe. A Muslim had, in effect, saved Christendom.

A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read

Hatred’s Kingdom
by Dore Gold; Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003, traces the history and development of the violent Wahhabi sect in Saudi Arabia. Gold’s history demonstrates the foolhardiness of entering into lasting accords with Islamic states that regard bonds with any non-Muslim state not as genuine alliances between equals, but as temporary arrangements that are useful only as long as they strengthen the Muslims, and not a minute longer.

The respite, however, was only temporary. The Ottoman sultan Murad II (1421–1451) set his sights on the jewel of Christendom, Constantinople. He laid siege to its land walls in 1422, but could not break through them. He didn’t give up, though; he took Thessalonica in 1430 and blockaded Constantinople. Byzantine emperor John VIII appealed to Rome for help and even agreed to a reunion between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches on Western terms at the Council of Florence, hoping to persuade Westerners to come to the aid of the diminished Empire. Pope Eugenius IV duly called a Crusade, and an army assembled from the Eastern European states of Poland, Wallachia, and Hungary. However, the last hopes for Constantinople were dashed when Murad soundly defeated a Crusader army of thirty thousand at Varna, Hungary, in November 1444. Although in reaching Varna, the Crusaders had entered Turkish territory (the Muslims had conquered the town in 1391), it was a far cry from the days when the Crusaders established their own kingdoms in Antioch and Jerusalem and struck fear in the heart of the Sultan in Cairo.

After the disaster of Varna, it was only a matter of time before Constantinople fell. The end came on Tuesday, May 29, 1453. After weeks of resistance, the great city finally fell to an overwhelming Muslim force—which, as we have seen, brutally massacred those inside.

Even then the jihadist advance was not over. The Turks besieged Belgrade in 1456 and even tried to get to Rome, but at this point they were turned back. Finally, the tide was starting to change. The Muslims were turned away from Malta in the sixteenth century and failed in their first siege of Vienna in 1529. Later, they defeated the Poles in 1672 and seized large portions of the Ukraine, but they lost what they had gained fewer than ten years later. Finally, they besieged Vienna again, only to be turned back by Poland’s King Jan III Sobieski and thirty thousand Polish hussars on a day that marks the high point of Muslim expansion in Europe: September 11, 1683.

The Crusades had accomplished nothing of what they had set out to do, and would go down in history as one of the West’s most spectacular failures.

But were they really?

Chapter 13

WHAT IF THE CRUSADES HAD NEVER HAPPENED?

I
f the Crusades had never taken place, what kind of a world would we live in today? Would there be peace, understanding, and goodwill between Christians and Muslims? Would the Islamic world be free of the suspicion and often downright paranoia with which it regards so much that comes from the West? After all, Amin Maalouf says, “there can be no doubt that the schism between these two worlds dates from the Crusades, deeply felt by the Arabs, even today, as an act of rape.”
¹