The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  The caliph Suleyman appointed his brother, Maslama, as commander of the Muslim forces for the siege. Maslama set out for Constantinople with a force of over one hundred thousand men and a huge fleet. As the siege began, the Byzantine general Leo the Isaurian, soon to be Emperor Leo III, asked for negotiations; Maslama sent a Muslim commander named Ibn Hubayrah.

  The negotiations proceeded as a game of verbal chess. Ibn Hubayrah tried to maneuver Leo into admitting that resistance to the Muslim armies was foolish, asking him: “What do you consider to be the height of stupidity?”33

  Instead of admitting that the Byzantines’ situation was hopeless, however, Leo responded: “The man who fills his stomach with everything that he finds”—a slap at the Muslims’ apparently insatiable desire for conquest.34

  Ibn Hubayrah replied that he was only following orders: “We are men of religion, and our religion calls for obedience to our leaders.”35

  Leo then offered to pay the Muslims to leave: one dinar for the head of everyone in the great city. Maslama, however, rejected this offer, whereupon Leo came back to him with a new one. He told Maslama: “The people [of Constantinople] know that you will not advance against them in a bold attack and that you intend to prolong the siege as long as you have food. But if you were to burn the food, they would submit,” as they would be afraid that the Muslims were burning their food because they were not planning to stay long but were preparing an imminent attack.36

  Maslama believed him and burned the Muslims’ food supplies. But the Byzantines did not surrender. According to the historian Tabari, during the difficult winter of 718, the jihadis camped around Constantinople “ate animals, skins, tree roots, leaves—indeed, everything except dirt.”37 The winter was so severe that Suleyman could not send the Muslims supplies or reinforcements.

  The caliph Suleyman died with the Muslims still besieging Constantinople; his successor, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, recognized that the Muslim armies were ill-supplied and ill-equipped to deal with the Greek Fire that the Byzantines were using to destroy much of the Muslim fleet. On August 15, 718, the Muslims ended the siege, which the grateful citizens of Constantinople attributed to the aid of the Virgin Mary, whose falling asleep and departure from this world, or Dormition, was celebrated on that day.

  IV. DEFEATS AND INTERAL STRIFE

  The jihadis’ failure at Constantinople was costly. The Muslims limped back to Umayyad domains with their fleet mostly destroyed. The Byzantines took immediate advantage of this, driving the Muslims out of Sicily and conducting raids in Syria and Egypt.

  Meanwhile, the warriors of jihad were losing elsewhere as well: in 720, the Turkic Turgesh warrior Kursul defeated them in battle near Samarkand. Four years later, the jihadis, harassed by a superior Turkic force, beat a hasty retreat to the river Jaxartes in Transoxiana (modern Tajikistan), only to find their path back to Umayyad domains blocked by hostile forces. Knowing this would be a fight to the death, the Muslims burned their supplies, valued at one million dirhams, and fought successfully to break through despite increasing hunger and thirst in what would come to be known as the Day of Thirst—a humiliation that would burn in the memories of many Muslims until long after the Muslim losses were regained and their prestige restored.

  The Muslim presence in Central Asia was now substantially diminished, albeit only temporarily.38 The Umayyads continued to send forces into Khurasan and Transoxiana (modern-day northeast Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and the surrounding areas), but they were hampered in their ability to secure the region by some of their own policies.

  The Umayyads have gone down in Islamic history as notably irreligious, a curious charge for a dynasty that was established within thirty years of the generally accepted date of Muhammad’s death, raising the inevitable questions of why the fervor for Islam was lost so quickly after its founding, and how the Umayyads retained power over the Muslims for nearly a century while continually flouting or ignoring core precepts of the religion. The most plausible explanation for this is that the Umayyads were not actually irreligious, but that Islam itself was at the time of their reign in an inchoate state, with even the Qur’an and the elements of the life of Muhammad that would become the sources and foundation of Islamic doctrine not set in their final form until the Umayyads had ruled for four or five decades. Later, however, when it became accepted even among non-Muslim historians that Uthman had codified and distributed the Qur’an in 653, and statements attributed to Muhammad that appear only in the eighth or ninth centuries were taken for granted as having actually been spoken by him in the seventh, the only explanation for the Umayyads’ apparent indifference to all of this material was that they were impious and sinful.

  One example of this Umayyad impiety was that they imposed the jizya and the kharaj, a land tax, upon non-Arab converts to Islam in Central Asia. Muslim rulers who tried to reverse this policy faced complaints from Arab settlers in Khurasan, as well as an inevitable decline in tax revenues that threatened to make their position fiscally untenable. In the late 720s, the Umayyad governor of Khurasan, Ashras ibn Abdallah al-Sulami, promised the Soghdians, a Central Asian people among whom were Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and Nestorian Christians, equal tax rates with the Arabs if they converted to Islam. The mosques were flooded with converts, but local non-Arab rulers began to complain to Ashras that they could not meet their own tax quotas, since so many of their people were “becoming Arabs.”39

  Unnerved, Ashras began placing more stringent requirements upon converts, most notably that they provide proof of circumcision. Just ten years before, the caliph Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz had forbidden this, saying, “God sent Muhammad to call men to Islam, not as a circumciser,” and commanding that non-Arab converts to Islam be placed on an equal footing with the Arabs, but pressures from the Arabs themselves, and the need to keep tax revenues up, often led to these commands’ being ignored.40

  However, Ashras’ reneging on his initial offer led to an uprising of the non-Arab Muslims, aided by sympathetic Arabs, including a warrior named al-Harith ibn Surayj, who in 734 led a large-scale revolt against Umayyad rule in Khurasan and Transoxiana, promising equality of non-Arab Muslims with Arabs, and other reforms.

  The Arab response was swift and brutal. Arriving at Balkh, the ancient Bactria in what is now northern Afghanistan, the Muslim commander Juday al-Kirmani likened the people of the city to “the adulterous woman who gives access to her leg to whomever comes to her” for allying with al-Harith.41 He vowed that if he discovered anyone who was sending messages to al-Harith, “I will cut off his hand and foot and crucify him”—the punishment that the Qur’an (5:33) prescribes for those who “wage war against Allah and his messenger.42 The governor of Khurasan, Asad ibn Abdallah al-Qasri, ordered al-Kirmani to send him fifty of the leaders of Balkh, whom he immediately killed. Asad directed al-Kirmani to divide the rest of the men of the city into three groups, and to crucify one group, cut off the hands and feet of the second, and cut off the hands only of the third. Al-Kirmani complied, killing and crucifying four hundred men and auctioning off their property.43

  Despite the brutality of the Umayyads, the revolt continued. In 736, a Muslim named Ammar ibn Yazid, who called himself Khidash, arrived in Marw in Khurasan and began calling believers to allegiance not to the Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn Abdel Malik but to the Shi’ite leader, the fifth Imam, Muhammad ibn Ali. Khidash, however, was quickly captured and brought to Asad, who ordered him blinded and his tongue cut out. Asad told the rebel commander: “Praise be to God who has taken revenge on you for Abu Bakr and Umar.”44 Asad then ordered Khidash killed and the body crucified, and for good measure, had Muhammad ibn Ali, who was living quietly in Medina, murdered by poisoning.45

  Asad died in 738, and his successor, Nasr ibn Sayyar, stymied the rebellion by defeating and killing both Kursul and al-Harith. He also moved to take the wind out of the rebels’ sails by promising to end the collection of the jizya from non-Arab Muslims,
and the widespread exemption of non-Muslims from paying the jizya. At Marw, Nasr declared:

  Verily, Bahramsis was the protector of the Magians [majus]; he favored them, protected them and put their burdens on the Muslims. Verily, Ashbdad son of Gregory was the protector of the Christians, just as Aqiva the Jew protected the Jews. But I am protector of the Muslims. I will defend them and shield them and make the polytheists carry their burdens. Nothing less than the full amount of the kharaj as written and recorded will be accepted by me. I have placed Mansur b. Umar b. Abi al-Kharqa as my agent [amil] over you and I have ordered him to act justly toward you. If there is a man amongst you who is a Muslim and from whom jizyah has been levied, or who has been charged an excessive amount of kharaj, thus lightening the burden for the polytheists, then let him raise that with Mansur b. Umar so that he may take the burden away from the Muslim and place it upon the polytheist.46

  Mansur acted quickly. “By the following Friday,” per Tabari, “Mansur had dealt with thirty thousand Muslims who had been paying the jizyah and eighty thousand polytheists who had been exempted from the jizyah. He imposed the jizyah on the polytheists and removed it from the Muslims.”47 The impetus of the revolt had been removed and a key element of Islamic law codified, placing the burden for filling the Islamic treasury squarely upon non-Muslims, and the rebellion was crushed.

  The Loss of France

  Nonetheless, Umayyad hegemony was weakening across the board. In the West, the Muslims faced more and even greater difficulties. After their defeat at Covadonga, the Muslims decided no longer to bother with Pelayo’s tiny band of holdouts in the mountains; a Muslim chronicler said derisively, “What are thirty barbarians perched on a rock? They must inevitably die.”48 The warriors of jihad had already entered France, where they conquered the ancient Roman province of Septimania in southwestern France without much difficulty, moved into Aquitaine, and pressed on. The people of southern France were poor and could offer little in the way of booty to the invaders, so the Muslims began despoiling churches and monasteries, as well as the popular shrine of St. Hillary of Poitiers, taking what they believed to be their due from the treasure of the infidels.

  There was another shrine that was a favored site of pilgrims and contained a good deal of silver and gold: that of St. Martin of Tours, in north-central France. In 732, the Muslims under the command of Abdul Rahman al-Ghafiqi, governor of al-Andalus, proceeded to march there.

  Frankish authorities, seeing their advance, were not sure if the jihadis constituted simply a raiding party determined to carry away the loot at St. Martin’s shrine or an actual invading force. Ultimately, however, there was little difference. Inspired by the exhortations of the Qur’an and Muhammad, the warriors of Islam ultimately intended to seize and hold every bit of land on earth and were determined to continue their jihad wherever and whenever possible. Whether they intended to hold Tours in 732 or not, they intended to do so eventually, and advance farther, as far as the land and sea would take them.

  In any case, it was the Muslims who made a far greater miscalculation, drastically underestimating the strength of the forces that gathered between Tours and Poitiers to stop them. The commander of those forces was a Frankish duke named Charles, who gained the name Martel, “The Hammer,” for his decisive victory there. October 25, 732 was a bitterly cold day, and the Franks routed the jihadis, who had come dressed for a Spanish summer. Al-Ghafiqi and the remnants of his army beat a scorched-earth retreat back to al-Andalus, burning and looting everything in sight.

  But the Franks would rebuild. The Muslims’ defeat was near total, and would be total before long. In 734, they lost Avignon in southern France, and not long thereafter were driven out of France altogether, even as they were strengthening and consolidating their hold on Spain.

  The Battle of Tours in 732 may have stopped the complete conquest and Islamization of Europe. The warriors of jihad would appear again in France, but they would not come close again to gaining control of the whole country until many centuries later, by vastly different means, when there was no longer a Charles Martel to stop them. The Muslim warriors had traversed immense distances and, in all of Europe, there were, in the early seventh century, no significant forces that could have stopped them were it not for the Battle of Tours. Eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon envisioned the continent’s complete Islamization had the Franks lost at Tours thus:

  A victorious line of march had been prolonged 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 impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. 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.49

  One twentieth-century European, however, was disappointed that Charles Martel had defeated the warriors of Islam, for the same reason that Gibbon was relieved. He exclaimed:

  Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers—already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity!—then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.50

  The man expressing that regret was Adolf Hitler.

  The Fall of the Umayyads

  The setbacks of the Muslims in Central Asia and Western Europe led to increasing dissatisfaction with the Umayyads, who were finally overthrown by a rival clan and an Islamic revivalist movement, the Abbasids, in 750. The Abbasids gained supporters by arguing that they had a superior claim to the caliphate than the Umayyads did, as they were members of Muhammad’s household, descendants of his uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, while the Umayyads were descendants of Abu Sufyan, the Quraysh chieftain who had fought Muhammad at the Battle of Uhud and the Battle of the Trench.

  This line of reasoning, had the Abbasids followed it to its logical conclusion, would have led them to acknowledge that the Shi’ites had the best claim of all to the caliphate, as their Imams were descended from Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s son-in-law. Of course, they did not go that far.

  The Abbasids also accused the Umayyads of impiety and promised to rule strictly in accord with the Qur’an and the teachings of Muhammad; and so, it was that they defeated the Umayyads in several battles and finally captured and killed the Umayyad caliph Marwan ibn Muhammad on August 6, 750. Abbasid warriors cut off the impious Marwan’s head and sent it as a trophy to the Abbasid caliph, the pious Abu al-Abbas.51

  Almost immediately, it looked as if Allah was favoring the Abbasids and blessing their seizure of the caliphate. In July 751, at the Talas River on the border of present-day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the forces of the new caliphate met those of the Chinese Tang dynasty, in what was to be the decisive battle for hegemony over Central Asia. China’s Westward expansion was stopped, and the region was definitively secured for Islam. The Buddhist and Christian presence in Central Asia went into rapid decline. The area would be Islamic ever after.

  V. UMAYYAD SPAIN

  Meanwhile, the Umayyads, vanquished as they were, were not prepared to vanish from history. Abd al-Rahman, an Umayyad prince and the grandson of the caliph Hisham ibn Abdel Malik, escaped Abbasid assassination squads and fled to al-Andalus, where he succeeded in gathering a force of Muslims who did not want to give their allegiance to the Abbasids; ultimately, he established himself as emir of Córdoba and continued to pursue jihad warfare against the Christian domains in Spain.

  The Abbasid caliph Mansur was not willing to take the loss of Spain lightly, and directed the commander Ala’a ibn Mugh
ith, who was stationed in North Africa, to invade Spain and destroy the Umayyad upstart. Abd al-Rahman, however, captured Ala’a ibn Mughith and other Abbasid commanders. He had each beheaded, and then had their heads placed in finely decorated boxes that were sent to Mansur. In the box containing Ala’a ibn Mughith’s head, Abd al-Rahman placed Mansur’s letter ordering his North African commander to go to Spain and fight Abd al-Rahman, along with a fragment of the black flag of jihad that Mansur sent Ala’a ibn Mughith to be his standard. Mansur, receiving this macabre package, murmured, “Thank Allah there lies a sea between Abdur Rahman and me,” and made no more attempts to secure Spain for the Abbasids.52

  Charlemagne at Saragossa

  The ongoing war between the Christians and Muslims in Spain became part of Western Europe’s foundational legend and myth. In 778, the grandson of Charles Martel, Charles, the King of the Franks, who became known to history as Charles the Great or Charlemagne, led an expedition into Spain at the invitation of a group of Muslim rulers who would not accept the authority of Abd al-Rahman: Husayn, the governor of Saragossa; Suleyman al-Arabi, governor of Barcelona and Girona; and Abu Taur, governor of Huesca. They promised fealty to Charlemagne if he would aid them against Abd al-Rahman; Charlemagne, like so many Christian leaders much later lulled into complacency by their Muslim partners in “interfaith dialogue,” trusted them and went on the march.

  When Charlemagne arrived at Saragossa, however, al-Arabi offered him his fealty as promised, but Husayn did not, claiming that he had never agreed to do so, and the gates of the city were not opened to him as promised. Charlemagne’s forces laid siege to Saragossa, but when the Frankish king learned that the Saxons were revolting against his rule in northern France, he opted to abandon the siege and retreat across the Pyrenees.