Universal Jihad

The Prophet Muhammad was asked: “What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?” He answered: “The city of Hirqil will be conquered first”—that is, Constantinople … Romiyya is the city called today “Rome,” the capital of Italy. The city of Hirqil was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered]. This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice—once from the South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens.

—Dr. Yusuf Qaradawi, citing a hadith1

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live … the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world … were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.

—Winston Churchill2

The practice of social distancing that Ottoman theocracy prescribed for Muslims in relation to the non-Muslim nationalities had a special ingredient that charged this practice with a lethal animus: scorn blended with latent hatred.

—Vahakn Dadrian3

The Islamic calendar does not begin with the birth of the Prophet Muhammad or with the year in which he first began to recite the words he claimed came from the angel Gabriel. Instead, it begins with the hijra, Muhammad’s journey in 622 to a town called Yathrib to become its leader. In becoming the leader of that town, which he renamed Medina, Muhammad also became its lawgiver, laying down in a document known as the Charter of Medina the duties of the competing tribes of Arabs and Jews as well as those of his fledging Islamic followers.

After a brief attempt to woo the three Jewish tribes living there he expelled two of them and, after suspecting them of collaborating with his Meccan enemies, annihilated the third. As many as 800 men were beheaded, their land was stolen, and their wives and children were sold into slavery.4 Within a year of securing Medina, Muhammad turned his attention to another wealthy tribe of Jews near the town of Khaybar. The motivation here seems to have been primarily plunder and prestige, as there was no breach of covenant or overt hostility on the part of the Khaybar Jews.5 Again men were killed, women and children taken as slaves, and the abundant booty distributed among the faithful—with Muhammad receiving his customary 20 percent.

But Muhammad’s real aim was his hometown of Mecca, which still clung to its pagan affiliation. Raids on Meccan caravans brought wealth to Medina and humbled the pagans. Then in 630 Muhammad returned to Mecca at the head of an army of 10,000 Muslims. The town capitulated.

Two years after his triumphant return to Mecca, Muhammad was dead. But the foundation and pattern of Islamic empire had been laid. On his deathbed, he commanded that the land of the Arabs be made synonymous with the land of the Muslims. His followers would carry forward this mandate under the name of jihad—an unlimited religious obligation “to bring the world under Islamic law.”6

Central to the pattern established by Muhammad was the expectation of power. “I was ordered to fight all men,” he told his followers in a valedictory address, “until they say there is no God but Allah.”7 The community he forged at Medina was political as well as a religious—a small nation with himself as its Prophet-king.8 From the lips as well as the example of their Prophet, Muslims have received a solemn injunction to take by force that which they believe rightly belongs to them. And in the years immediately following their leader’s death we can see how they carried out this agenda.

THE SPREAD OF ISLAM UNDER THE FIRST CALIPHATES

The first task undertaken by the followers of Muhammad after his death was a campaign of territorial conquest.9 The thinking was that once Muslims took control over an area they would be free to impose Islamic law on its people. Conversion was always secondary to rule. Although the migration of Muslims into other lands also played a role in the spread of Islam, the indispensable element in its growth was violence. Islamic scholar Efraim Karsh explains:

Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In order to achieve this goal it is incumbent on all free, male adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising struggle “in the path of Allah,” or jihad. This in turn makes those parts of the world that have not yet been conquered by the House of Islam an abode of permanent conflict (Dar al-Harb, the House of War) which will only end with Islam’s eventual triumph.10

The Islamic community filled the vacuum left by the death of Muhammad by appointing as successor a Caliph, a position combining absolute spiritual as well as temporal authority, to lead the believers on their jihad. Tellingly, all of the first four men to hold the position were related to Muhammad by blood and/or marriage). Three of the four also had their caliphates cut short by assassination.

Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, was also the first to turn his attention to the regions outside of the Arabian Peninsula. To the north, the area was roughly divided between two empires. On the western side, the last vestige of the old Roman Empire (which historians refer to as the Byzantine Empire) ruled a wide expanse of territory that included the modern- day states of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Egypt. In the east the Persian Sassanid Empire governed an equally impressive expanse that included modern Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of central Asia and the Indus Valley. Both were of ancient standing with long-enduring cultures of learning and religious faith (Christian and Zoroastrian, respectively).

In the 30 years prior to Muhammad’s death, the two empires had been locked in a series of military campaigns that resulted in a bloody stalemate. The wars “ruined some of the richest provinces of both empires, and the taxation to pay for them had impoverished the rest.”11 In 634 Islamic armies began to sweep into the lightly defended and vulnerable borderlands between the two empires. In 636, the soldiers of jihad perpetrated “one of the great military massacres of antiquity,” killing some 50,000 soldiers in the Battle of Yarmuk.12 With that battle, all of Syria was lost. A year later, Jerusalem was also taken. Although the Byzantines would bounce back and resist for another 800 years, they never recovered from the loss of territory during this first onslaught.13

The Sassanid Empire, on the other hand, was completely wiped out. After the pivotal battle of Qadisiyya in 637, all of Mesopotamia fell under Arab-Islamic control. A century later, the Mesopotamian city of Baghdad, more developed and hospitable than either Mecca or Medina, would become the new capital of the Muslim empire. Masses of Zoroastrians in the former religious centers of the Sassanids were massacred, and surviving adherents faced intense persecution.14

In the 7th century, Egypt was a Christian nation, governed under the Byzantine Empire. It was one of the original patriarchates, with a community of believers who stretched back to the time of the Apostles. The inhabitants spoke the Coptic language, which descended from the language of the ancient Egyptians. The Coptic Church was the first in Christendom to adopt and develop a monastic system, which would later prove instrumental in the preservation and transmission of learning. In 639, an army of Arabs crossed into Egypt from Palestine. By 642, Alexandria was conquered and the library destroyed. The conquerors gave their subjects three options: convert to Islam, accept dhimmi status (essentially paying protection money to their Islamic overlords), or be destroyed. The Egyptians chose the second option.

The Egyptian option is an excellent illustration of the fate that befell every people who lived in a territory conquered by Muslims. The Coptic Christians found their lives to be full of continual legal and economic subjugation. Everyone was banned from criticizing the Qur’an, Islam, or its Prophet. Christians were not allowed to hold public funerals, to build homes higher than those of Muslims, or to hold certain positions of public authority.15 Christian men were forbidden from marrying Muslim women, although Muslim men could marry Christian women. Muslims could own Christians as slaves, but the reverse was unacceptable. Christians were also forced to wear clothing that distinguished them from the Muslim populace.16

The oppression only continued over the years. Depending on how “pious” a Muslim ruler was, regulations concerning dhimmis would be enforced with varying regularity. By the 15th century, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world had become a minority in their own country.

The invasions and deprivations of Islamic armies during the early Caliphates are too numerous to be included in full. Nevertheless, we must take note of some of the most significant advances made during the first centuries of Islamic expansion. It is fashionable among some historians to emphasize the religious tolerance of the Caliphs, as if they were beacons of multiculturalism. In reality, this period featured a mass extinction of ancient cultures. With the Sassanids of Iran it came in a sudden apocalypse. For others, it was a slow, grinding process.

After Egypt, the armies of jihad began to extend their authority across the whole of North Africa. In the words of historian Philip Jenkins, the Christianity established along the Mediterranean shores “did not simply fade away through lack of zeal or theological confusion: it was crushed, in a welter of warfare and persecution.”17 Along the way, the advancing tide also put an end forever to the glories of Carthage and the long-established Greco-Roman civilization that had flourished there for centuries.18

In the 8th century, Islamic armies made two significant encroachments upon Europe. The first was a full-scale invasion of Sicily in 740 after almost a century of raiding and pillaging expeditions. Over the course of the next 150 years, Muslim forces gradually wrested control of the island from its Byzantine rulers. Between 965 and 1060 Sicily was ruled as an independent Emirate until the Normans invaded and gradually expelled all Muslim influence.

Further west, Spain endured a far longer period of conquests and raiding. Fortunately for the Spaniards, their Muslim rulers were often more occupied in fighting against one another than they were in fighting the infidel. In the 9th century, the ruler al-Hakam in Toledo decapitated at least 700 of his Muslim subjects in a single day after becoming suspicious of a planned rebellion. Later, he crucified 300 more in Cordoba for demonstrating against high food prices.19 After military setbacks in France and northern Spain, the Muslims were unable to penetrate further into Europe. We should remember that when the conquistadors set sail for the New World, the Spaniards had just spent several centuries of hard fighting in retaking their land.

Beginning in the 8th century, Muslims began to encroach eastward as far as the Indus Valley. They first came looking for Buddhist shrines to loot.20 The Hindu Kush and the Indus Valley, geographical areas that form the backbone of the modern nations of Pakistan and Afghanistan, were formerly home to ancient civilizations marked by religious pluralism and advanced learning.21 As described in more detail in the chapters on Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, the existing cultures of these regions were smashed, the lands militarily subdued, and the peoples enslaved and oppressed.22

THE RISE OF THE TURKS

The success and scope of the Islamic empire expanded the conflicts and problems associated with its direction and rule. By the 10th century two significant developments had taken hold. The ruling caliphate was losing its power over the Islamic nation as real power increasingly devolved to local governors who, although nominally serving under the Caliph’s authority, mostly made their own decisions.23 And Turkish slaves who had been imported into the caliphate to serve as soldier-slaves were becoming a force in their own right: “As the military became predominantly Turkish, and as the regimes of Islam became predominantly military, the Turks established a domination that lasted a thousand years.”24 The influx of Turkish influence, far from weakening the cause of jihad, gave it a new burst of fanatical energy. The soldier-slaves of Islam became its most militant advocates.25

In the 11th century the armies of the Seljuk Turks seized the torch of jihad. They wrested control of Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Syria from their fellow Islamic rulers and extended Islamic dominion over most of Byzantine Anatolia (which is present-day Turkey).26 The decisive moment came at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, when a Seljuk victory over the Byzantines opened the way for two centuries of Turkish migration into Anatolia.27

What marked Turkish Islam from the very beginning was its fanatical devotion to defending and advancing the faith and power of Islam by the sword.28 A 12th century Syrian recorded the fate of one of his people’s cities in 1057 where victorious Turks “began to massacre without pity.”29 For ten days, the Turk soldiers plundered and pillaged and finally burned the venerable metropolis. In similar fashion Edessa, one of the original centers of Christian civilization in the Middle East, was obliterated. The Turks massacred 30,000 inhabitants and enslaved 16,000 (almost the entire surviving population). In the year-long plunder that followed, numerous sites were destroyed beyond retrieval even for future archaeologists.30

In the light of this series of conquests we can more properly assess the accusations leveled against Europeans for the Crusades. Far from being a “long European onslaught,”31 it might be more accurate to see the Crusades as “an attempt to recover by holy war what had been lost by holy war.”32 The Middle East does not belong by rights to Islam; it was taken by force and converted by enormous social and political pressure. The original inspiration for the Crusades came from an exhausted and beleaguered Byzantium appealing to the Catholic west for aid.33 In response to these pleas, Pope Urban II in 1095 sought to rouse the first of the crusades to the so-called Holy Land.

At the time of the First Crusade, Muslim empires in the east were more interested in their struggle with one another for dominion over the caliphate than a small incursion into the Levant.34 If the Crusades were such an unforgivable wound to the heart of Islam, that seems to have eluded the Muslims who were actually around at the time. It was only a century later that Saladin led his successful campaign against the Crusaders.35 In fact, it was 19th century translations of European books about the Crusades which sparked interest in the period in the Islamic world. The first major treatment of the Crusades by an Islamic scholar came in 1899.36

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE—THE LAST CALIPHATE

The Seljuk dynasty fell apart in the wake of the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, but that wasn’t the end of the Turks. After the collapse of the Seljuks, Turks broke up into small societies animated by an enthusiasm that “combined the love of fighting and its spoils … with unwavering religious commitment to world conquest through perpetual raiding and colonization.”37 Rising from out of these societies, and coming to dominate them all, were the Ottomans. The Ottomans took a two-fronted stance which has since become familiar to modern observers of Islamic jihad. On the one hand, they believed it fell to them to unify the House of Islam under their sole command. On the other, they regarded it as their duty to fight against the West to destroy all opponents of Islam.38

Their rule of the Islamic world was opposed primarily by the Mamluk sultanate which had come to rule over Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and most of the Arabian Peninsula. Within their domains they had enacted a series of “ever-more draconian penal laws” designed to convert or destroy the remaining non-Islamic religions.39

The first significant move against Europe came in 1354 when the Ottomans occupied Gallipoli. In the 1380s Bulgaria was subjugated. Finally, the fate of the Balkans was sealed at the Battle of Kosovo with the crushing defeat of Serbian forces. Almost all that remained of the former Byzantine Empire was the capital of Constantinople. The grand city finally fell in 1453—an event which ironically aided the Renaissance in Europe, as fleeing Byzantines took what they could of the works of ancient Greece and Rome with them. With this victory, the Ottoman sultanate became the most prestigious power of the Islamic world.40

In 1480 the Ottomans made a play for southern Italy, dropping an invasion force of 18,000 troops at the walls of Otranto. After a 15-day siege in which a small garrison and the townsfolk struggled together to keep the invaders at bay, the Turks broke into the city. Troops broke into the Cathedral of Otranto, where they found Archbishop Stefano Agricolo waiting for them, crucifix in hand. The archbishop was beheaded at the altar and the priests and men with him were sawed in half.

According to tradition, at this time 800 adult males were told to convert to Islam or be slain. The men defiantly refused. The group was then taken to the Hill of Minerva (since renamed the Hill of Martyrs) and beheaded to the last man. Their resistance was not in vain, either. The Ottomans were delayed so long in taking Otranto that a force led by Alfonso of Aragon was able to gather and retake the city the following year. When the liberators discovered the bodies of the executed Otrantines, they were moved to the church and later honored. The “Martyrs of Otranto” were eventually canonized as saints in May 2013 by Pope Francis.

For a time, Islam’s further spread into Europe was only halted by the Kingdom of Hungary and its legendary sovereigns John Hunyadi and his son Matthias. But after the absorption of Mamluk territory into the Ottoman Empire in 1517, the Turks refocused their energies on Central Europe. The strategically critical city of Belgrade was captured in 1521, and five years later Hungarian strength was decisively broken at the Battle of Mohacs. This victory was followed by the usual Ottoman atrocity. The two thousand prisoners taken on the battlefield were first humiliated and then executed. The soldiers then headed north to plunder the royal city of Buda before setting their sights on the main prize: Vienna.41

Fortunately for European civilization, the campaign against Hungary would prove to be the Ottoman Empire’s high-water mark. Their first siege of Vienna in 1529 failed to win the city. In 1683 they suffered a decisive defeat there. Nevertheless, they remained the masters over a vast territory until World War I. No one in Europe bore this domination as heavily as the Christian populations in the Balkans. Orthodox churches everywhere were turned into mosques, and the people lived under constant threat of religious subjugation and enslavement.42 Even the nature of the people itself was degraded as the Ottomans forcibly removed the most promising Christian youths to serve as elite slave-troops (known as janissaries) for the Sultan.

The case of the Serbian people may stand as an example for the region. Under Ottoman rule the Serbs suffered from discrimination, loss of political and religious freedom, and economic and cultural isolation.43 Still, that didn’t stop the Serbs from engaging in a series of uprisings against Ottoman rule, the first coming between 1804 and 1813. In 1809 a band of 3,000 Serbians fought a desperate battle against a much large Turkish force near the city of Nis. The Turks lost thousands of men attempting to dislodge the Serbs, and finally managed to overwhelm them with numbers. Knowing that the fate of any captured Serbs would be death by impalement, commander Stevan Sindeliće fired his pistol into a gunpowder magazine, killing himself and the surrounding Serbians as well as all the Turkish soldiers in the area.

The Ottomans made a regular practice of building towers out of the skulls of their enemies to terrorize opponents. They did so with Sindeliće and his men, building Skull Tower, a ten-foot high tower with 952 Serbian skulls embedded on the four sides. Unfortunately for the Ottomans, Skull Tower had the opposite effect to what they intended. Instead of terrorizing the people, it became a symbol of their desire for independence and a place of pilgrimage.

Visiting the site in 1833, the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine recorded his impressions of Skull Tower:

My eyes and my heart greeted the remains of those brave men whose cut off heads made the corner stone of the independence of their homeland. May the Serbs keep this monument! It will always teach their children the value of the independence of a people, showing them the real price their fathers had to pay for it.44

Lamartine’s wishes were fulfilled. The Serbs in 1833 had been gradually asserting more autonomy for several years. In 1867, the Western powers successfully pressured the Ottomans into accepting reality and withdrawing their forces from Serbian territory for good.45

Although liberation from the caliphate was a blessing to the Serbs, the consequences of their long subjugation were not readily dispelled. The introduction of Muslim settlers to the region created demographic issues which persist even today. Through forced migrations, Serbs were driven away from the Kosovo region in favor of Muslim Albanian settlers who came with the blessing and support of Ottoman authorities.46 When Serbia gained independence from the Ottomans, Kosovo was regarded as part of their nation although it remained under the caliphate’s control. After the First Balkan War of 1912-3 Kosovo was united with the rest of Serbia—an event which eventually led to the Kosovo War in the late 1990s.

Beginning in the 18th century, Western Europe entered a period of social, economic, and scientific development that would again change its relationship to the Islamic world. Freed from prior limitations, the populations of European countries soared. Technological breakthroughs transformed warfare. In large part, the Islamic world lagged behind. By the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire was the “sick man of Europe,” still ruling over a wide territory but much of it depopulated and in obvious decline. The Ottomans sided with the Central Powers during World War I, and proved unable to survive their defeat.

Even on its way out, the Ottoman caliphate had one last crime up its sleeve: the Armenian Genocide. It began in 1915 in Constantinople with the arrest of about 250 leaders of the Armenian community on the trumped-up charge of aiding the Allies. A series of government-directed actions against the Armenian people followed. These included mass burnings of whole villages,47 mass confiscation of property followed by deportation48 and death marches.49 These death marches involved the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Armenian people who were forced into the Syrian deserts. Along the way, many died of sickness, disease, and exhaustion. Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians reportedly allowed others to rob, kill, and rape their charges—sometimes even getting involved in such activities themselves.50 In all, between half a million and 1.5 million Armenians died as a result of policies and actions carried out by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1918.51

Following the military defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, a military officer named Mustafa Kemal led a successful Turkish War of Independence against the Allied forces. Out of the ruin of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal was instrumental in forging the new nation of Turkey. Inspired by a vision of Turkey as a modern European-style democracy, Kemal instituted wide-ranging reforms aimed at transforming the nation from an Islamic to a secular nation. Following his lead, the Republic of Turkey was declared in 1923 and the old caliphate abolished a year later. This was the end of the last caliphate (so far) of the Islamic world.

DHIMMI STATUS IN ISLAMIC LANDS

It is impossible to understand the way Muslims treated the infidels within the realms they conquered without understanding what dhimmi status means. Those people who were not destroyed or converted to Islam became dhimmi. Some apologists for Islam have tried to portray this as a benign form of protection, but this obscures the true nature of the relationship between Islam and its conquered peoples. As 20th century Islamic revivalist Abdul Ala Maududi explained, the whole purpose of fighting non-Muslims is “to put an end to the sovereignty and supremacy of the unbelievers so that the latter are unable to rule over men … unbelievers who do not follow this true faith should live in a state of subordination.”52

Maududi’s statement is in line with sentiments expressed in the Qur’an, which directs Muslims encountering unbelievers, “blows to the neck shall it be until, once you have routed them, you are to tighten their fetters.”53 Dhimmi status was a way of institutionalizing those fetters and confirming the dominion of Islam.

Crucial to dhimmi status was the paying of the jizya tax. Jizya is established in the Qur’an, which directs Muslims to fight against unbelievers “until they pay the jizya tax out of hand, degraded.”54 This last word provided what became an essential part of dhimmi status as a whole and the jizya in particular. As one Islamic law expert explains, jurists interpreting this passage “prescribed ways for the Muslim collector to convey a sense of insult and humiliation to the non-Muslim.”55 For example, a 12th century Syrian jurist wrote these instructions:

When the muhtasib [the market inspector] or his agent come to collect the jizya, he should stand the dhimmi in front of him, slap him on the side of the neck and say: “Pay the jizya, unbeliever.” The dhimmi will take his hand out of his pocket holding the jizya and present it to him with humility and submission.56

A 15th century Moroccan jurist went even further:
The acting officials representing the Law shall be placed above them and shall adopt a threatening attitude so that it seems to them, as well as to the others, that our object is to degrade them by pretending to take their possessions. They will realize that we are doing them a favor (again) in accepting from them the Jizya and letting them (thus) go free … When paying, the dhimmi will receive a blow and will be thrust aside so that he will think that he has escaped the sword through this (insult); this is the way that the friends of the Lord, of the first and last generations, will act toward their infidel enemies, for might belongs to Allah, to His Apostle, and to the Believers.57

In imagining the effect such calculated demeaning of non-Muslims must have had, recall that for many years it was a burden placed by a foreign minority on the backs of a tyrannized majority. The same people who had invaded and seized power were now demanding signs of humiliation from a conquered people. This is hardly anyone’s idea of tolerance.

Besides being a mark of inferiority, the jizya was a serious financial burden. “The tax was the largest budget item,” one scholar notes, “for [families] whose wage earner was a teacher or a laborer, for example.”58 The hardship was made worse by the fact that even those who were supposed to be exempt could have the tax demanded from them:

Nine- or ten-year-old boys could be considered responsible, giving poor fathers of large families a substantial bill to pay, and poverty did not necessarily excuse payment of the tax as a matter of practice.59

The jizya helped ensure that non-Muslims were economically as well as socially beneath Muslims.

The jizya also had a curious double effect on the new societies where it was levied. On the one hand, it provided a strong motivation for conquered peoples to convert. On the other, it provided an economic justification for leaders to “allow” the people to continue practicing their old religions.60 In 724, when 24,000 Egyptian Copts converted to Islam because the jizya was driving them to poverty, the Islamic government responded by extending the jizya tax to include new converts as well.61 In Mesopotamia, when local peasants converted “en masse” and tried to leave the land, they were often rounded up and returned to their servitude.62

One of the most vulnerable peoples granted dhimmi status in the Middle East and North Africa were the Jews. Despite their protections, thousands of Jews in Granada were killed by their Muslim “protectors” in 1066.63 The Jewish intellectual Maimonides was one of the most respected figures in Islamic Spain for his learning and his accomplishments in medicine, philosophy and theology. Yet in a letter to his fellow Jews in Yemen, Maimonides has this to say about Islamic tolerance:

God has hurled us into the midst of this people, the Arabs, who have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us … Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase and hate us as much as they.64

The treatment Maimonides complained of wasn’t limited to Spain. We have records of pogroms against Jews in Morocco in 1728, 1790, 1875, and 1884; in Tunisia in 1864 and 1869; in Persia in 1839 and 1867; in Iraq in 1828; in Libya in 1785 and 1860; in Algeria in 1805; in Syria in 1840; and in Egypt in 1882.65 The British Vice-Consul in Jerusalem reported in the 1830s that Jews in the city were treated as little better than dogs by their Ottoman rulers:

Scarcely a day passes that I do not hear of some act of tyranny and oppression against a Jew … In two instances, I have succeeded in obtaining justice for Jews against Turks. But it is quite a new thing in the eyes of these people to claim justice for a Jew.66

SLAVERY IN ISLAMIC LANDS

An assessment of the Islamic conquest is also incomplete without some consideration of the practice of slavery in Islamic lands. Despite the enormous scope and scale of the slave trade and the use of slaves in the Islamic world, the subject has received little attention in the West. With modern narratives more focused on depicting western culture in a negative light, there is little interest in studying a slave trade that both pre-dates and post-dates that of the western world—and dwarfs it in scope by several orders of magnitude.67

The enslavement of non-Muslims is authorized and sanctioned by the Qur’an. From the very beginning, Muslims showed themselves eager to engage in the practice. The example of Muhammad provided ample justification for taking slaves as war booty. As the forces of jihad spread beyond the Arabian Peninsula, their use and need for slaves expanded with them.

One of the vilest applications of Islamic slavery was the practice of claiming an annual “youth levy” from the children of defeated peoples. This was the practice used by the Ottomans to construct their janissary troops from eastern European peoples. The Zaranj people in what is now south-west Afghanistan were forced to pledge an annual tribute of a thousand boys to their conquerors.68 By means of this practice, Muslims essentially appropriated future generations of the people they governed and molded them into weapons for the propagation of Islam.

Ironically, the Ottoman practice of levying white Europeans to serve as their elite troops ended up having a destabilizing effect on its empire. According to Ottoman expert Caroline Finkel:

The governing class of the Ottoman Empire was largely composed of men who had entered Ottoman service through the youth-levy imposed upon the sultan’s Christian subjects … Albanian, Bosnian, Greek, Bulgar, Serbian and Croatian boys were preferred.69

The janissary army became such a feared and integral part of Ottoman military campaigns they could hardly be dispensed with. That indispensable quality led the janissaries to assume enormous social privileges which the Empire was hard pressed to reign in.

By no means were such levies the sum of Islamic slavery. At the beginning of the 9th century a brisk slave trade was well-established in Islamic lands. Traders dealt in “Turkic nomads captured in warfare and the Slavs of the eastern European forests and agricultural zones, taken in slave raids.”70 Even as conventional warfare brought in a steady supply of Slavic captives in the east, “surprise razzias against the Christian seaboard” brought an equally steady supply from the west to Islamic North Africa.71 Slaves were “the primary commodity by far” in the Caliphate for centuries.72

Whole Islamic kingdoms owed their existence and prosperity to the slave trade— none more than the notorious Barbary states. The “Barbary Corsairs” made their name plundering the coastlines of Europe in constant efforts to resupply their stock of white slaves. Fueled by contemptuous hatred of Christian infidels, these pirates raided and pillaged everywhere their ships could reach from Greece and Italy to Spain to England and Ireland and even as far as Norway.73 Spain received the brunt of their attention for its temerity in pushing out its Islamic invaders. Along the Atlantic coast of Spain, “entire villages … were sold into slavery.”74 By one estimate, the Barbary state enslaved around 5,000 white Europeans a year over a period lasting more than two centuries.75

Distance provided but little protection. Between 1609 and 1616 Muslim pirates captured 466 English trading vessels. In 1625 the same pirates began to raid England’s vulnerable southwest coast, dragging English adults and children from their fishing villages to lives of brutal and degrading treatment.76

European involvement in the African slave trade is well known, but few in the West realize that Muslims were the major players there—and remained so long after the Europeans had abandoned slavery. “So thoroughly were many parts of [East Africa] combed by Arab slavers,” as one scholar puts it, “that whole areas were depopulated.”77 The need for soldiers in particular drove the Africa slave trade. During the Abbasid Caliphate, hundreds of thousands of black Africans were bought and sold to fill the ranks of Islam’s armies.78 Social prestige also played a role in the Islamic slave trade. Hence, many were driven to jihad as much for the slaves it brought in as for the religious imperative to extend the frontiers of Islam.79

But we cannot neglect what could be “the most common and enduring purpose for acquiring slaves in the Arab world”—namely, sexual exploitation.80 There was always a huge demand in the Islamic world for female concubines, a practice which—along with polygamy—was authorized by Islamic law. Young women and girls were popular among slave traffickers, and no slaves commanded higher prices save for the male eunuchs that wealthy slave masters put in charge of their harems.81

The harems of Muslim sheikhs and sultans were filled with thousands of female slaves who were subjugated to match every whim of their allegedly pious captors. White women in particular were extremely highly prized. An English merchant sent to Algiers in the 1640s to buy back British slaves paid an average of £38 apiece. To put it in perspective, £38 was about what a moderately successful merchant could make in a year at that time. This same English merchant had to shell out nearly £3,300 for three British female slaves.82

Muslim pirates were finally put down by a British fleet in 1816. But even as forces were gathering in England that would put the worldwide slave trade to an end, the Islamic world was gathering to resist. When western nations persuaded the Ottoman Empire to restrict the practice of slavery in the mid-19th century the Ottomans were faced with religious outrage:

The head of the Mecca clerical establishment delivered a juridical opinion excoriating this and other … reforms which he considered contrary to sacred law, and holy war was declared against the “Turks.”83

This same cleric asked Muslims to join in battle against the Ottomans, saying that those who fought against them would be assured of heaven.

ISLAMIC CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

Islam did not maintain control over its empire merely through physical coercion. A look at the modus operandi of Islamic conquerors reveals two parallel patterns. On the one hand, we find appropriation of the forms, structures, practices, and achievements of their predecessors and subjects so as to make them appear to be Islamic. On the other, we find the imposition of replacement forms and practices.

We can begin with the Qur’anic description of Christians and Jews as “People of the Book.” Although this is sometimes taken to indicate a brotherhood or kinship between Islam and the other Abrahamic faiths, it is actually an imposition upon Christians and Jews of an epistemology they do not share. The Islamic conception of prophecy is that God gives an eternal book of his own words verbatim to particular prophets at certain times. “People of the Book” are those who attempt to follow the words given in previous books (by prophets such as Moses, David, and Jesus). But because there are obvious differences between Islamic and Jewish or Christian practice, Islam holds that Christians and Jews

have distorted their own religious records. The whole reason Muhammad was necessary, according to Islam and the Qur’an, is that the previous recipients of God’s revelation messed it up.

“People of the Book” is not a formula for religious pluralism and equality. It is an accusation against Christians and Jews for failing to keep to the eternal truth of Islam. The prophets and heroes of the other traditions are retroactively turned into Muslims. Christian and Jewish history, to the extent that Muslims accept it as true, is reinterpreted as stages of Islamic history. Robert Spencer has called this appropriation of Christian and Jewish belief “a kind of theological imperialism that can serve as a useful analogy and paradigm for the true nature of the tolerance that Islamic jurists envision for the world.”84

Consider the example of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. This structure was built by the Caliph Abd al-Malik at the end of the 7th century. Choosing to build such a thing in Jerusalem was a calculated move in the strategy of undermining and replacing a civilization which preceded Islam. Note that Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Qur’an, and although a later hadith claims that Allah supernaturally transported Muhammad there one night, this story was unverified and likely did not exist during al-Malik’s lifetime. Islam, as al-Malik knew it, had nothing to do with Jerusalem. But he knew that Jerusalem was the site of the ancient Jewish temple, and building an Islamic religious structure on the Temple Mount was an obvious statement of one religion physically replacing another.85

A hallmark of Islamic cultural dominance is the enforced linguistic hegemony of Arabic. One scholar describes how Islamic culture bloomed from the 9th to the 12th century “as scholars translated philosophy and science from Greek to Arabic,” little realizing that what he intends as praise sounds like simple cultural appropriation.86 It was certainly wise of Islamic rulers to absorb what they could from those who had come before them. What we know of as “Arabic numerals,” for example, are actually of Hindu origin. The early Arabic conquerors certainly found Persian standards of imperial administration and political organization useful.87 But these can hardly be called Islamic accomplishments.

Western civilization provided by far the richest source of material for Muslims to appropriate. In the words of one scholar:

Countless Hellenistic sources and fields of learning were incorporated en masse into the nascent Islamic civilization: medicine and pharmaceutics, botany and zoology, mineralogy and meteorology, mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy, and above all, Philosophy.88

Any benefits that may have later arisen from this cultural absorption should not distract us from recognizing its nature and purpose. Persian, Indian and Hellenistic achievements were just one more case of booty to be taken possession of, not multicultural influences to be honored:

As far as Muslims were concerned, there was no fundamental difference between the material and the intellectual properties of the vanquished peoples. Both were legitimate spoils of war that could readily be appropriated by the conquerors

without attribution and regarded as an indigenous part of the House of Islam.89 It is one thing to see the benefits in, and make use of, what others have done. It is quite another to take the credit and ownership for yourself.

What reputation Islam has for sophistication often is the reflection of qualities possessed by its conquered peoples. One example is Syriac, a linguistic variant of Aramaic which was the lingua franca of the Middle East prior to Islamic invasion. Syriac scholars were the ones largely responsible for keeping the works of Aristotle and other ancient authors alive. After the Arabs came, Syriac Christians were also responsible for translating these works into Arabic, making them available for later Muslim scholars. An 11th century Syriac-speaking bishop could claim in a debate with his Muslim counterpart, without fear of refutation, that “Arabs had learned most of their science from Syriac sources, while the reverse had seldom occurred.”90

Another example can be found in Persian culture. Unlike the Syriac-speaking culture or even the Egyptian Copts, Persia has retained much of its language and culture in the face of tremendous pressure toward Arabization. In the 11th century, Persian scholars translated into Arabic works that would later make their way to the West in Latin. Even the philologists who established and recorded an Arabic grammar were Persian.91 Although these Persian scholars were likely Muslims, their training and outlook relied on a sophisticated culture than long predated the Islamic takeover.

It would be a grievous mistake to assume that Islam’s universal jihad has ended in the 21st century. The attacks on September 11, 2001 were part of this jihad, as the chapter on 9/11 describes in detail. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have carried out 23,259 terror attacks—and counting.92 Islam has not changed: only its tactics have changed. Unable to prevail militarily against the West, Islam has increasingly turned to terror and to the logic of demographic jihad. Former Algerian president Houari Boumedienne described the latter during a 1974 speech to the UN:

One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.93

These words may have seemed fanciful in 1974; today, they could be prophetic.
Today, one of the fastest-growing communities in Germany is its Turkish population. A detailed 2012 study of how this community saw its relationship to Germany uncovered sentiments Boumedienne might have well approved of. Almost every Turk surveyed considered it “absolutely necessary” to preserve their Turkish identity. 87 percent believed Germany had to change to accommodate them (rather than the other way around). 90 percent described themselves as “religious” or “highly religious” Muslims, with young Turks on average holding more radical religious views than their parents. Nearly half expressed the hope that one day Germany would have more Muslims than Christians.94

This same pattern can be found everywhere in Europe. There are now 50 million Muslims living across Europe (not including 16 million in Russia alone). Many refuse to assimilate. They reproduce in great numbers, taking full advantage of the liberal social assistance provided to them. As detailed in the chapters on demographic jihad, the Muslims in Europe (and increasingly in the United States) are slowly fulfilling Boumedienne’s prophecy. The gates of Vienna are under Islamic assault once again, but this time—from within.