Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World's Fastest-Growing Faith

by Robert Spencer

  That's how it happened in one place and time. But the story was repeated, again and again, wherever Muslim armies were triumphant.

  Here is a contemporary account of the Muslims' arrival in Nikiou, an Egyptian town, in the 64os:

  Then the Muslims arrived in Nikiou. There was not one single soldier to resist them. They seized the town and slaughtered everyone they met in the street and in the churches-men, women and children, sparing nobody. Then they went to other places, pillaged and killed all the inhabitants they found.... But let us now say no more, for it is impossible to describe the horrors the Muslims committed when they occupied the island of Nikiou.

  In addition to massacres, this process involved exile and enslavement, all based on a broken treaty:

  Amr oppressed Egypt. He sent its inhabitants to fight the inhabitants of the Pentapolis [Tripolitania] and, after gaining a victory, he did not allow them to stay there. He took considerable booty from this country and a large number of prisoners.... The Muslims returned to their country with booty and captives. The patriarch Cyrus felt deep grief at the calamities in Egypt, because Amr, who was of barbarian origin, showed no mercy in his treatment of the Egyptians and did not fulfill the covenants which had been agreed with him.

  Once the Muslims were entrenched in power, they began to levy the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims:

  Amr's position became stronger from day to day. He levied the tax that had been stipulated.... But it is impossible to describe the lamentable position of the inhabitants of this town, who came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month, finding no one to help them because God had abandoned them and had delivered the Christians into the hands of their ene- mies.7

  An eyewitness of the Muslim conquest of Armenia in 642 tells what happened when they took the town of Dvin: "The enemy's army rushed in and butchered the inhabitants of the town by the sword.... After a few days' rest, the Ismaelites [Arabs] went back whence they had come, dragging after them a host of captives, numbering thirty-five thousand."'

  On the island of Cos a few years later, the Muslim general Abu al-A'war, according to another contemporary account, "laid waste and pillaged all its riches, slaughtered the population and led the remnant into captivity, and destroyed its citadel."9

  According to the Orthodox patriarch Michael the Syrian (1126-ii99), Muslims conquered Cilicia and Caesarea of Cappadocia in the year 650 in this way:

  They [the Taiyaye, or Muslim Arabs] moved into Cilicia and took prisoners ... and when Mu'awiya arrived he ordered all the inhabitants to be put to the sword; he placed guards so that no one escaped. After gathering up all the wealth of the town, they set to torturing the leaders to make them show them things [treasures] that had been hidden. The Taiyaye led everyone into slavery-men and women, boys and girls-and they committed much debauchery in that unfortunate town; they wickedly committed immoralities inside churches.10

  Even Muslim chroniclers of the time make no secret that this kind of activity went on. The Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir (116o-1233), in his world history entitled The Complete History, includes this account of eighth- and ninth-century Muslim incursions into Spain and France:

  In 177 [17 April 7931, Hisham, [Muslim] prince of Spain, sent a large army commanded by Abd al-Malik b. Abd al-Wahid b. Mugith into enemy territory, and which made forays as far as Narbonne and Jaranda [Gerona].... For several months he traversed this land in every direction, raping women, killing warriors, destroying fortresses, burning and pillaging everything, driving back the enemy who fled in disorder. He returned safe and sound, dragging behind him God knows how much booty.

  Were these escapades a source of shame for the Muslim chronicler? Hardly. He concludes his account of them by noting proudly: "This is one of the most famous expeditions of the Muslims of Spain." (Similarly, a thirteenth-century Persian Muslim wrote of Islamic victories with "no idea of what is cruel and what is not cruel," as Naipaul puts it.)" Ibn al-Athir goes on to tell more:

  In 223 [z December 837], Abd ar-Rahman b. al-Hakam, sovereign of Spain, sent an army against Alava; it camped near Hisn al-Gharat, which it besieged; it seized the booty that was found there, killed the inhabitants and withdrew, carrying off women and children as captives.... In 246 [27 March 86o], Muhammad b. Abd ar-Rahman advanced with many troops and a large military apparatus against the region of Pamplona. He reduced, ruined and ravaged this territory, where he pillaged and sowed death.12

  In Amorium in Asia Minor in 838, says Michael the Syrian, "there were so many women's convents and monasteries that over a thousand virgins were led into captivity, not counting those that had been slaughtered. They were given to the Moorish slaves, so as to assuage their lust."13

  In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon recounts the Muslim drive into the heart of France, which was turned back at Tours in 732. They pushed "above a thousand miles from the Rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire: the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassible than the Nile or the Euphrates and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames." Had that happened, says Gibbon, "perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet."14

  "The blood ran in rivers"

  Centuries later, when Muslim armies resumed their expansion in Europe after a period of relative decline-which included, most notably, the loss of Sicily in io9r, the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in io99, and the steady erosion of power in Spain-they maintained the same pattern of behavior. On May 29, 1453, the city of Constantinople, the jewel of Christendom, finally fell to an overwhelming Muslim force after weeks of resistance by a small band of valiant Greeks. According to Steven Runciman, the preeminent historian of the Crusades, the Muslim soldiers "slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profit."15 The options for Christians after conquest had been spelled out by the pioneering sociologist Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century: "It is [for them to choose between] conversion to Islam, payment of the poll tax, or death. 1116 The historian of jihad Paul Fregosi puts it succinctly: "It was a case of `your money or your life'!""

  It is true that these sins of the Muslims do not excuse the sins that Christians committed against them in return. One massacre doesn't cancel out another. But clearly what we now call "human rights abuses" have not come only from the Western side, and the recent defensiveness of the West before the House of Islam and the world on this issue is hardly justified by the facts.

  It is also important to point out once again that the Crusaders who pillaged Jerusalem were transgressing the bounds of their religion in all sorts of ways. As for the Muslim armies who murdered, raped, pillaged and enslaved-what Islamic principles were they violating? After all, they were following the example of their Prophet:

  It has been narrated on the authority of Ibn `Umar that the Jews of Banu Nadir and Banu Quraizi fought against the Messenger of Allah, who expelled Banu Nadir, and allowed Quraiza to stay on, and granted favour to them until they too fought against him. Then he killed their men, and distributed their women, children and properties among the Muslims, except that some of them had joined the Messenger of Allah who granted them security. They embraced Islam. The Messenger of Allah turned out all the Jews of Medina, Banu Qainuga' ... and the Jews of Banu Haritha and every other Jew who was in Medina.18

  In light of the violence with which Muhammad spread Islam (including forced conversions), there is a certain menace in his celebrated invitation to the Byzantine emperor Heraclitus: "Embrace Islam and you
will be safe."" Heraclitus didn't, and Byzantium wasn't.

  In fact, the portions of ancient Christendom that are now universally considered to be part of the House of Islam only became so in the same way as the Arabian Jewish tribes became Muslim: by being bathed in blood.

  Christendom Responds

  The jihad and the Crusade are often seen as synonymous. When President Bush called for his "crusade," one Pakistani exclaimed, "He has used the Christian word for jihad. "20

  Well, not precisely.

  Western Christendom, which emerged relatively unscathed from the Islamic onslaught, was distracted by internecine squabbles and did not rise to the defense of its beleaguered coreligionists until five centuries after the first Muslim conquests, when Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in the year 1o95. There followed centuries of intermittent conflict, through which the Muslims steadily rolled back the boundaries of Christendom.

  The circumstances of the First Crusade were these: Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being molested by Muslims and prevented from reaching the holy places. Some were killed. This was the impetus that finally moved Western Christianity to try to recover just one small portion of the Christian lands that had fallen to the Muslim sword over the previous centuries. Bernard Lewis observes,

  At the present time, the Crusades are often depicted as an early experiment in expansionist imperialism-a prefigurement of the modern European empires. To the people of the time, both Muslim and Christian, they were no such thing. When the Crusaders arrived in Jerusalem, barely four hundred years had passed since that city, along with the rest of the Levant and North Africa, had been wrested by the armies of Islam from their Christian rulers, and their Christian populations forcibly incorporated in a new Muslim empire. The Crusade was a delayed response to the jihad, the holy war for Islam, and its purpose was to recover by war what had been lost by war-to free the holy places of Christendom and open them once again, without impediment, to Christian pilgrimage."

  The lands in dispute during each Crusade were the ancient lands of Christendom, where Christians had flourished for centuries before Muhammad's armies called them idolaters and enslaved and killed them. Whatever evils Christians committed during their course, the Crusades were at base a defensive action, a belated attempt by Western Christians to turn back the tide of Islam that had engulfed the Eastern Church.

  And the effort was insufficient: all the Crusades essentially failed. The most successful was the first, and all it accomplished was to establish a few tottering Latin domains in Palestine and the surrounding regions. The Crusaders were far from home; their Muslim foes were not. These Christian principalities didn't last long.

  By Christian lights, many Crusaders undeniably sinned. On the Temple Mount, as Bill Clinton reminded the world, they transgressed the strict boundaries of the Just War doctrine. But this doesn't mean that their cause itself was wrong. Insofar as the Crusades were fought to protect Christians in the Holy Land and to turn back the Muslims who had conquered so much of Christendom, they represented a just cause.

  There is no reason to accept the permanence or inevitability of the incorporation of the Middle East and North Africa into the House of Islam-just as Muslim armies did not accept that those territories would be permanently Christian. Yet an assumption of historical necessity is the basis on which Muslims scold Christians (and Westerners in general) about the Crusades, which they call an incursion into Muslim lands. If Westerners had no right to invade these putative Muslim places, then Muslims had no right to conquer them to begin with. If they continue to insist that the Crusades were wrong, Muslims should also be willing to withdraw from the Middle East and North Africa. But this is to enter the realm of fantasy. Still, at the very least, Westerners should know the record of how those areas became Muslim, and they should insist that jihad be judged according to the same moral standards as the Crusades.

  "When accusing the West of imperialism," says historian Paul Fregosi, "Muslims are obsessed with the Christian Crusades but have forgotten their own, much grander Jihad." Conventional wisdom locates the beginning of Christian/Muslim hostility in the Crusades; according to Amin Malouf in The Crusades through Arab Eyes, the sack of Jerusalem in 1099 was "the starting point of a millennial hostility between Islam and the West." But the reality is somewhat different. Fregosi remarks that "the Jihad is more than four hundred years older than the Crusades." Comparing the Muslim occupation of Christian lands in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa to European colonialism, he finds that the latter was much briefer and less culturally pervasive. "Yet, strangely, it is the Muslims ... who are the most bitter about colonialism and the humiliations to which they have been subjected; and it is the Europeans who harbor the shame and the guilt. It should be the other way around."22

  The Long Muslim March

  Right or wrong, the Crusades are a historical fact. Yet long after they had become a distant memory in the West, the warriors of jihad continued to press into the heart of Europe. After the fall of Acre in 1291, no more Crusades were mounted. Through the next four centuries, however, Muslim armies solidified their hold on southeastern Europe and kept advancing whenever and wherever it was possible to do so.

  Muslim incursions into Europe from the east were finally stopped at the gates of Vienna, a defeat which heralded the beginning of the long decline of the Ottoman Empire. The date of that event is one that no doubt still stings in the mind of Osama bin Laden: September 11, 1683.

  It would be naive to think that between 1683 and 2001, jihad somehow became an antiquated or rejected concept. As the Muslim world was outstripped technologically and ultimately even colonized by the West, conditions became unfavorable, for a variety of reasons, to the enlargement of the House of Islam. Muslim states were relatively powerless, and the ensuing frustration and resentment contributed to the rise of Islamic militancy. Analysts who ascribe Islamic fundamentalism in our own day to various cultural and socioeconomic factors are thus partially right.

  Nevertheless, the seeds of jihad are always present within Islam. As we shall see in the pages ahead, the theology of jihad has never been discarded or even modified. Indeed, this theology is written into the charter of Islam, and is therefore, in the eyes of most Muslims, valid until the end of the world.

  Is Islam Tolerant

  of Non-Muslims?

  WHILE CHRISTENDOM HAS GOTTEN A BAD NAME for its treatment of nonChristians, Islam's reputation in this regard is not so bleak. Bernard Lewis acknowledges that the Muslim record of tolerance is poorer than that of the modern, secular West, but he asserts that Muslim regimes historically have far surpassed their Christian counterparts on this score. "There is nothing in Islamic history," he says, "to compare with the Spanish expulsion of Jews and Muslims, the Inquisition, the Auto da fe's, the wars of religion, not to speak of more recent crimes of commission and acquiescence.

  Does this mean that Christians and Jews actually lived well in the House of Islam? Not exactly: "There were occasional persecutions, but they were rare, and usually of brief duration, related to local and specific circumstances." Nevertheless, Lewis concludes, "Within certain limits and subject to certain restrictions, Islamic governments were willing to tolerate the practice, though not the dissemination, of other revealed, monotheistic religions."'

  One moving indication of this tolerance came at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when the new secular rulers of Turkey abolished the caliphate. The last caliph, exiled to Switzerland, was made to wait all day at Istanbul's railroad station for the Orient Express that would take him there. The Jewish station manager did his best to make the caliph, an old and broken man, comfortable during the wait, explaining:

  The Ottoman dynasty is the saviour of the Turkish Jews. When our ancestors were driven out of Spain, and looked for a country to take them in, it was the Ottomans who agreed to give us shelter and saved us from extinction. Through the generosity of their government, once again they received freedom of religion and language, protection for
their women, their possessions and their lives. Therefore our conscience obliges us to serve you as much as we can in your darkest hour.2

  Most modern Westerners would assume this is essentially the whole story, and that the Muslim record is one of tolerance from beginning to end. But the truth, as always, is more complicated.

  The Roots of Muslim Tolerance

  The limits and restrictions on the tolerance of non-Muslims that Lewis mentions were well defined virtually from the beginning of Islam. According to the Muslim historians A. Zahoor and Z. Haq, in the year 628 the Prophet Muhammad himself granted a charter of privileges to the Christian monks of St. Catherine's Monastery on Mt. Sinai. It is not certain whether Muhammad himself actually issued this document, but nonetheless it is revealing of several aspects of the Muslim attitude toward Christians during the time of the great Islamic conquests.

  In this charter, the Prophet says of Christians, "Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by Allah! I hold out against anything that displeases them. No compulsion is to be on them."

  This echoes the famous "tolerance verse" of the Qur'an: "There shall be no compulsion in religion" (Sura 2:256). Muslims and others use this verse to compare Christianity's record of forced conversions unfavorably with that of Islam. Yet if some Christians in certain times and places have thought that people should be converted by force, no branch of Christianity has ever taught such an idea. In fact, on this matter the principles of both religions are good, and the practice less so. At various points in their history, both Christians and Muslims have failed to live up to their stated ideals very well.

  The Muslim record of granting tolerance and freedom of religion is stained by many events and practices, including the devsbirme, the seizure of Christian children for slavery. These lads were given the choice of Islam or death. According to a historian of the janissaries, the Ottoman crack troops recruited from Christian families through the devshirme, "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