A History Of Conquest – Islam’s History Of Political Power & Bloody Warfare Against Non-Muslims
Beginning in the 630s, just after Muhammad is traditionally believed to have died in 632, armies streamed out of Arabia and swiftly conquered Damascus, much of Iraq, Jerusalem, Caesarea, Armenia, Egypt, and North Africa. Nowadays the claim is common that these were easy conquests because the people of these regions were so sick of Byzantine oppression that they welcomed the invaders as liberators. In reality, however, the caliph Umar, whom Islamic tradition says ruled from 634 to 644, once asked a critic a revealing question: “Do you think that these vast countries, Syria, Mesopotamia, Kufa, Basra, Misr [Egypt] do not have to be covered with troops who must be well paid?” If the natives had welcomed the conquerors, why did their lands have to be “covered with troops”?
By 711, the Arab conquerors controlled an empire that stretched from Spain to India, and entered France, where they were repulsed in 732. Like the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria fourteen centuries later, the Islamic jihadis in France burned churches in Bordeaux and Poitiers before they were pushed back into Spain.
None of these lands and nations had ever attacked Arabia or the Muslims (although in the ninth century Muslims fashioned accounts, of doubtful historicity, of Byzantine persecution of early Muslims); these were gratuitous imperialistic endeavors.
And they continued. India, too, felt the force of jihad. Hindu historian Sita Ram Goel notes that by 1206, the Muslim invaders had conquered “the Punjab, Sindh, Delhi, and the Doab up to Kanauj.” The jihad also continued elsewhere. When the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet besieged Constantinople in 1453, he offered the Byzantines a triple choice: “surrender of the city, death by the sword, or conversion to Islam.” This was based upon the tradition in which Muhammad told the Muslims to offer unbelievers conversion to Islam or submission to Islamic hegemony, or war if they refused both.
No one made a secret of what was fueling all this. Even the great twelfth-century Muslim philosopher Averroes said it plainly: “The Muslims are agreed that the aim of warfare against the People of the Book…is twofold: either conversion to Islam, or payment of poll-tax (jizya).” Nowadays that would get Averroes labeled an “extremist,” as would be the thirteenth-century Muslim jurist Ibn Taymiyya, who defined jihad as “the punishment of recalcitrant groups, such as those that can only be brought under the sway of the Imam by a decisive fight….For whoever has heard the summons of the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, and has not responded to it, must be fought, ‘until there is no persecution and the religion is God’s entirely’ (Koran 2:193, 8:39).”
Not only was the idea that Islam was violent not hidden or consigned to “Islamophobia”; it was a point of pride. The pioneering Muslim historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun compared Islam favorably to other religions because of jihad: “The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty to them, save only for purposes of defence. It has thus come about that the person in charge of religious affairs in (other religious groups) is not concerned with power politics at all.” But Muslim leaders, by contrast, must be concerned with “power politics,” because Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.”
After the Ottoman siege of Vienna was broken on September 11, 1683, the Ottoman caliphate went into decline and was ultimately dubbed “the sick man of Europe.” Jihad became a less common feature of the European landscape, not because Islamic theology had been reformed, but because Muslims generally no longer had sufficient means to pursue it.
Not only non-Muslims, but Muslims who get out of line are threatened. Islam also mandates death for those who leave Islam. Muhammad is reported as saying: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.” His word, in this and so much else, is law.
That makes Islam, for untold numbers of people, a captor. There is no doubt that there are many people who are identified as Muslims who would leave the religion if they did not have to live in fear of being killed for doing so. When we refuse to criticize Islam, we are turning our backs on the millions of people who suffer from being forced to live under tyrannical Islamic regimes. Just as it was immoral to turn our backs on those oppressed by Communist governments during the Cold War, we betray our own values when we turn a blind eye to Muslim suffering and instead praise their oppressors.
Article posted with permission from Robert Spencer
