Islam is presented to the world as a universal religion, open to all races and nations on equal terms. The historical record complicates this self-image. Islam was born in seventh-century Arabia as an Arab political and religious project, and its political sovereignty expanded for the first several centuries of its existence overwhelmingly through military conquest rather than persuasion. This is distinct from the separate and slower process by which individual populations, particularly in Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, converted to Islam through trade, migration, and gradual social incentive.
This essay concerns the former process: the conquest of pre-existing civilizations and their absorption into Islamic political rule. Its foundational text supplies a doctrinal license for that conquest. Its most influential twentieth-century theorists restate the same imperial ambition in modern political language. And the historical map of the pre-Islamic world, compared to the map of the Islamic world today, shows a trail of conquered and absorbed civilizations stretching from the Atlantic to the Indus. This essay sets out the textual mandate, the modern confirmation, and the historical outline, with the qualifications the sources themselves require.
The Textual Mandate
The Quran does not treat war against non-believers as an unfortunate historical accident. It commands it directly and repeatedly. The starkest instance is 9:5: “kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush.” [1] The immediately surrounding verses supply context that a fair reading cannot omit: 9:1-4 open by voiding prior treaties with polytheists who had violated their terms, explicitly protect those who had honored their treaties through the treaties’ stated duration, and set a four-month grace period for the rest to make new arrangements; 9:6 further instructs that any polytheist seeking asylum to hear the Quran be granted safe passage. Read strictly within that frame, 9:5 addresses a specific set of treaty-breakers in seventh-century Arabia. Classical jurists nonetheless generalized the verse well beyond that frame, a move examined later in this essay, and it is that later juristic generalization, more than the bare text alone, that turned 9:5 into a standing warrant.
Where 9:5 targets polytheists, 9:29 targets Jews and Christians, the “People of the Book,” and prescribes a specific political outcome short of death: subjugation. “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day… until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.” [2] Translators render the closing clause variously as “humbled,” “subdued,” or “in a state of subjection”; the range of translation differs in tone but agrees that submission, not conversion, is the required outcome. The verse asks for a tax and for acknowledged inferiority as the price of being permitted to remain non-Muslim under Islamic rule.
Elsewhere the Quran addresses the same fighting in two stages. 2:191 commands: “kill them wherever you overtake them and expel them from wherever they have expelled you… and fitnah is worse than killing.” [3] Two verses later, 2:193 states the objective: “fight them until there is no fitnah and worship is for Allah. But if they cease, then there is to be no aggression except against the oppressors.” [4] The stated endpoint is not the end of a specific hostility but a condition — worship “for Allah” alone — meaning the elimination of every rival religious and political order.
The Quran also promises supernatural aid to the conquerors and directs the manner of killing. 8:12: “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieved, so strike [them] upon the necks.” [5] 47:4 repeats the instruction almost verbatim: “when you meet those who disbelieve [in battle], strike [their] necks.” [6] And 5:51 forbids alliance with the two named religious communities that bordered Arabia at the moment of Islam’s expansion: “do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies.” [7] Together these verses form not a philosophy of tolerance interrupted by occasional war, but a program: fight, subjugate, tax, and do not ally with the conquered.
The doctrine also had a fiscal logic that reveals the imperial character of the enterprise. Jizya was not incidental; it was a revenue stream extracted from conquered non-Muslim populations for the benefit of the Arab conquest elite. The early Islamic state maintained a diwan, a register that paid stipends to Arab tribesmen out of the proceeds of conquest, ranked by seniority of conversion and closeness to Muhammad’s own tribe of Quraysh. Non-Arab converts to Islam, the mawali, were for generations taxed and treated as second-class Muslims regardless of their faith, a distinction that makes sense only if the system’s early loyalty ran to Arab ethnicity as much as to universal religious equality. [8] The theology supplied the justification; the diwan and the jizya supplied the economics of empire.
The most common counter-verse cited against this reading does not soften it as much as it first appears to. 2:256, “There is no compulsion in religion,” is often invoked to argue that Quranic tolerance is the default and the fighting verses are a narrow exception to it. 2:256 belongs to Surah Al-Baqarah, a Medinan chapter, revealed after Muhammad had already become the political and military ruler of Medina — not, as is popularly claimed, an early word spoken from weakness in Mecca. Some classical exegetes, including Ibn Kathir and al-Wahidi, held that 2:256 was abrogated outright by the later fighting verses; this is a real position within the tradition, but a minority one. Al-Tabari treated the question contextually rather than as blanket abrogation, Ibn Taymiyyah held that 2:256 remained operative, and al-Suyuti’s Al-Itqan, the standard classical reference on abrogation, does not list 2:256 among the abrogated verses. [9]
The abrogation question does not need to be settled for the underlying point to hold. Scholars on both sides of that dispute read 2:256 as governing individual conscience only — forbidding the forced conversion of a single heart — while treating armed jihad to bring non-Muslims under Islamic political sovereignty, and jizya as the price of declining to convert, as a separate and undiminished obligation. [10] “No compulsion in religion” and permanent war for political submission were never understood, by the tradition that produced both verses, as contradicting one another.
The Modern Confirmation
Twentieth-century Islamism did not soften this program. It restated it as an explicit political goal, unconstrained by the argument that the conquest verses were merely a response to seventh-century Arabian circumstances. Abul Ala Maududi, founder of Jamaat-e-Islami and the most influential Islamist theorist of the Indian subcontinent, wrote in 1939: “Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam.” [11] He did not confine this ambition to any territory. “Islam requires the earth — not just a portion, but the whole planet.” [11]
Muhammad Qutb, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood theorist and brother of Sayyid Qutb, dissolved the very idea of nationhood into Islamic identity: “A Muslim has no country except that part of the earth where the Shari’ah of God is established… a Muslim has no nationality except his belief.” [12] Under this formulation, every non-Islamic nation and every non-Islamic civilization is, by definition, illegitimate territory awaiting correction. His brother Sayyid Qutb, whose writing shaped al-Qaeda and its successors, argued the same conclusion from a different direction in Milestones, holding that Islam alone has the standing to abolish the man-made political and legal orders of every other nation on earth. [13]
Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and the direct intellectual predecessor of both Qutb brothers and of Maududi’s milieu, is widely credited with the line: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” [14] In his tracts on jihad, more securely sourced, he asserted that the Quran “appoints the Muslims as guardians over humanity… and grants them the right of suzerainty and dominion over the world.” [15] Three separate theorists across three separate decades converge on the identical claim: Islam’s programme, in their own words, is the political and territorial domination of the whole earth, not the private, voluntary faith it is now often marketed as.
The Historical Record
The doctrine did not remain theoretical. Within two decades of Muhammad’s death in 632, Arab armies had destroyed the Sassanid Empire outright and stripped the Byzantine Empire of its richest provinces. Sassanid Persia, a Zoroastrian empire predating Islam by more than a thousand years, fell at Qadisiyyah and Nahavand between 637 and 651, ending Zoroastrian political power in Iran permanently. Byzantine Syria and the Levant fell between 634 and 638. Byzantine Egypt, Hellenistic and Coptic Christian, fell between 639 and 646; the Byzantine Empire itself, reduced, would survive for roughly eight more centuries. Mesopotamia, heir to Sumerian, Babylonian, and Sassanid civilization, was absorbed in the same campaigns.
Conquest continued west along the North African coast through the later seventh century, destroying the Latin and Berber Christian civilization that had produced Augustine of Hippo; Christianity had all but disappeared from the Maghreb by the twelfth century. Visigothic Christian Spain fell in 711 and was held for over seven centuries until the Reconquista was completed in 1492. Sicily, Byzantine and Latin Christian, was conquered beginning in 827 and held until the Norman reconquest of 1061 to 1091.
To the east, the Buddhist and Zoroastrian civilizations of Afghanistan and Central Asia — Bactria, Sogdiana, Gandhara — were progressively Islamized between the eighth and tenth centuries; the Bamiyan Buddhas, standing witnesses to that civilization, survived until the Taliban destroyed them in 2001. Anatolia, the Greek Christian heartland of the Byzantine Empire, was conquered in stages from the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 through the fall of Constantinople in 1453, with the final erasure of Christian Anatolia completed by the Armenian and Greek expulsions and killings of the early twentieth century.
The conquerors carrying out this later expansion were rarely ethnically Arab. Seljuk and Ottoman Turks took Anatolia; Ghaznavid and Ghurid Afghans, and later Mughal rulers descended from Timur and Genghis Khan, took India. But the legal and theological apparatus each of them wielded was Arab inheritance, largely unaltered in substance: the same fard kifaya obligation to expand Dar al-Islam, the same jizya, the same classification of the unconquered world as Dar al-Harb. Ethnicity changed. The imperial program that Muhammad’s own Arab community had first codified did not.
India absorbed the longest and most sustained assault of any civilization on this list, beginning with the conquest of Sindh in 711 and continuing through roughly eight centuries marked by recurring episodes of temple destruction, coercive conversion, political subordination, and jizya taxation, applied unevenly across successive Islamic dynasties rather than as a single continuous policy. Institutional Buddhism collapsed across most of India over the same centuries; historians attribute this to a combination of causes, including declining royal patronage and gradual absorption into Hindu devotional traditions, compounded by episodes of monastery destruction — most catastrophically the sacking of the Buddhist university-monasteries at Nalanda and Vikramashila — that removed Buddhism’s institutional core at a moment when it was already weakened. Hindu civilization alone among the great pre-Islamic civilizations named here survived the assault as a living majority tradition, though badly wounded, its trajectory interrupted by British colonization rather than completed by conquest.
The administrative pattern confirms the same picture. Conquered territory was governed from newly built Arab garrison cities — Kufa and Basra in Iraq, Fustat in Egypt, Qayrawan in Tunisia — staffed by Arab tribal armies and ruled by governors answerable first to Medina and later to Damascus. This is the standard architecture of imperial occupation, the same pattern used by Rome and later by European colonial powers, not the organic spread of a voluntary faith.
The doctrine that makes this history intelligible is not confined to the past. Classical Islamic jurisprudence divided the world into two broad legal categories: Dar al-Islam, territory governed by Islamic law, and Dar al-Harb, the “abode of war” — everything else. [16] Formulations varied meaningfully across the Hanafi, Shafi’i, Maliki, and Ja’fari schools and across periods, and some jurists recognized intermediate categories, including Dar al-‘Ahd, the “abode of treaty,” for territory bound to Muslim rule by agreement rather than conquest or open hostility. Allowing for that variation, the general tendency across the major schools held that the default relationship between Dar al-Islam and unconquered territory was war rather than peace, and that a Muslim ruler could not conclude an everlasting treaty with a non-Muslim power. Truces, or hudna, were lawful, but classical scholars capped them at ten years, following the precedent of Muhammad’s own treaty at Hudaybiyyah in 628 CE. That treaty collapsed after the Quraysh-allied Banu Bakr attacked the Muslim-allied Banu Khuza’a; Muhammad treated this as a Quraysh violation voiding the agreement, a reading most classical and modern historians accept, though revisionist arguments exist on both sides. [17] Bringing Dar al-Harb under Islamic sovereignty through offensive jihad was codified in the Hanafi and Shafi’i traditions as fard kifaya — a collective legal obligation on the Muslim community — though again with variation by school and jurist. [18]
Under this doctrine, war against the non-believer, the kafir, has no built-in terminus. It is limited by strategy, capacity, and opportunity, not by any legal principle requiring it to end, and it is not bound to any single territory or century. The stated endpoint, in the Quran’s own language, is not a negotiated peace between equals but the day “worship is for Allah” alone — the elimination of every rival religious and political order. Fourteen centuries of conquest, from Qadisiyyah to Manzikert to Sindh, each separated by generations and thousands of miles, are not fourteen centuries of coincidence. They are the record of a single doctrine executed wherever and whenever the opportunity allowed it — restrained, at any given moment, by power, and by little else.
Notes
[1] Quran 9:5, Sahih International translation. Context of 9:1-6 per the same translation.
[2] Quran 9:29, Sahih International translation; alternative renderings of the closing clause appear across major English translations.
[3] Quran 2:191, Sahih International translation.
[4] Quran 2:193, Sahih International translation.
[5] Quran 8:12, Sahih International translation.
[6] Quran 47:4, Sahih International translation.
[7] Quran 5:51, Sahih International translation.
[8] On the diwan, mawali taxation, and the fiscal structure of the early caliphate: standard reference histories of early Islamic administration.
[9] On the abrogation debate over 2:256: Ibn Kathir, Tafsir; al-Wahidi, Asbab al-Nuzul; contrasted with al-Tabari, Tafsir al-Tabari, Ibn Taymiyyah, and al-Suyuti, Al-Itqan fi ‘Ulum al-Qur’an, which does not list 2:256 among abrogated verses.
[10] The distinction between compulsion of individual belief and obligatory political-military jihad is standard across classical and modern exegesis of 2:256 alongside 8:39 and 9:29.
[11] Abul A’la Maududi, “Jihad in Islam” (Al-Jihad fi’l-Islam), 1939 English pamphlet; also Islamic Law and Constitution, trans. and ed. Khurshid Ahmad (Lahore: Islamic Publications Ltd.), p. 262.
[12] Widely published as “A Muslim’s Nationality and His Belief” / “The Future Is For Islam.” This quotation is most consistently attributed in circulation to Muhammad Qutb rather than to his brother Sayyid Qutb; some secondary compilations conflate the two authors, and the attribution here follows the more consistent sourcing.
[13] Sayyid Qutb, Ma’alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones), 1964; the claim summarized here reflects the book’s argument for Islam’s unique standing to replace all other political and legal systems, rather than a single quoted line.
[14] This line is very widely quoted in secondary and popular sources and is generally traced to al-Banna’s writings on jihad, including material collected in Majmu’at Rasa’il al-Banna (Cairo: Dar al-Da’wa); a specific primary-source page citation could not be independently verified for this draft, and the attribution should be treated as well-established by repetition rather than as confirmed against an original edition.
[15] Hassan al-Banna, Five Tracts of Hasan al-Banna: A Selection from the Majmu’at Rasa’il al-Imam al-Shahid Hasan al-Banna, trans. Charles Wendell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 71.
[16] On the Dar al-Islam / Dar al-Harb division and its variation across schools, including the Dar al-‘Ahd category: Gamal M. Badr, “A Survey of Islamic International Law,” Proceedings of the American Society of International Law, 1982.
[17] On the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah and its collapse following the Banu Bakr attack on Banu Khuza’a: standard biographical sources on Muhammad (sira literature); revisionist readings exist and are contested.
[18] Offensive jihad as fard kifaya (collective obligation) is codified in the Hanafi and Shafi’i legal traditions, with variation among jurists within and across schools; see classical works of Abu Hanifa and al-Shafi’i on siyar.