The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  On his way out of Spain, however, Charlemagne’s men destroyed the walls of Pamplona, the city of the Basques, out of fear that forces opposed to the king were coalescing there. In revenge, the Basques, probably allied with some Muslim forces, ambushed the Franks at Roncevaux Pass, inflicting more severe losses on Charlemagne than he suffered at any other time in his career.

  Over time, as century after century passed filled with aggression from the warriors of jihad, the Battle of Roncevaux Pass became in legend a Muslim ambush on Charlemagne’s retreating army. In the eleventh century, three hundred years after the battle, the French epic poem known as The Song of Roland appeared, describing the heroism of Charlemagne’s nephew Roland, who is leading the rear guard of Charlemagne’s forces and is caught up in the Muslim ambush. Roland has an oliphant, a horn made of an elephant’s tusk, which he can use to call for help, but he initially declines to do so, thinking it would be cowardly. Finally, Roland does blow his horn. Charlemagne, way ahead of the rear guard, nonetheless hears Roland’s horn and hurries back, but it is too late: Roland and his men are dead, and the Muslims victorious. Charlemagne, however, pursues and vanquishes the Muslims, and captures Saragossa.

  Thus, the legend. The Song of Roland was enormously popular and inculcated in the Christians who sang and celebrated it in what came to be known (in the European Middle Ages) as knightly virtues: loyalty, courage, and perseverance, even in the face of overwhelming odds. These were virtues that would be needed if Europe was to hold out against the ever-advancing jihad.

  VI. RAIDING BYZANTIUM

  Harun al-Rashid at Chalcedon

  Some Christians were ready to display those virtues. In the late 770s, the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi traveled to Aleppo, where twelve thousand Christians greeted him with great honor. Al-Mahdi, however, was not disposed to respond in kind, and told them: “You have two options. Either die or convert to our religion.”53 Most of the Christians chose to die rather than embrace Islam. In and around Baghdad, he noticed that the Assyrian Christians had built new churches since the Muslim conquest, in violation of dhimmi laws; he ordered them destroyed; five thousand Christians in Syria were given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Many stayed true to their ancestral faith and chose death.

  However, loyalty, courage, and perseverance were not always in evidence. In 782, al-Mahdi sent his son, Harun al-Rashid, into Byzantine territory. Harun advanced swiftly, taking seven thousand Christian slaves and getting all the way to Chalcedon, right across the Bosporus from Constantinople.54 He seemed on the verge of achieving what the warriors of jihad had tried and failed to do twice before: conquer the imperial city and destroy the Eastern Roman Empire. However, the Byzantine logothete Staurakios was able to move Byzantine troops to a position east of Harun’s forces and surround the Muslims, cutting off their path to return to the caliphate.

  Harun’s position seemed desperate, but then he received help from an unexpected quarter: another in a long and continuing line of shortsighted and opportunistic non-Muslims who saw the jihad as their chance to line their pockets or improve their standing. The Byzantine Empire at this point was riven by the iconoclast controversy: a fierce dispute over whether it was permissible or proper to create and venerate images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. The Byzantine general Tatzates, an iconoclast, feared that the iconodule empress regent Irene was going to dismiss him; she was indeed removing iconoclasts from positions of influence. In the jihadis’ advance he saw an opportunity: with Harun’s army encircled, Tatzates deserted and joined the Muslims, taking much of his army with him.

  This momentous desertion was kept secret, so that Harun could use Tatzates to lure Staurakios and other Byzantine officials to the negotiating table. When the Byzantines arrived for the negotiations, Harun took them hostage and used them as bargaining chips to extract favorable terms from Irene.55 Harun was ultimately able to proceed unmolested back to Abbasid domains, taking with him a substantial sum of Byzantine gold and Irene’s promise to pay the Muslims seventy thousand dinars in jizya each year for the next three years.56 Harun rewarded Tatzates by appointing him governor of Armenia.

  During his twenty-three-year reign as Abbasid caliph (786–809), Harun al-Rashid invaded the Byzantine Empire eight times. Each time, he demanded the submission of the territories his armies entered and the payment of the jizya. If the Christians refused, his forces would plunder the area thoroughly, making sure to take more than they would have collected in tribute.57 Meanwhile, the jizya still came annually from the imperial court in Constantinople. In 802, however, the empress Irene was deposed and exiled, and her successor, Nicephorus, sent envoys to Harun in Baghdad with a defiant message. It said that Irene “considered you as a rook, and herself as a pawn. That pusillanimous female submitted to pay a tribute, the double of which she ought to have exacted from the Barbarians. Restore therefore the fruits of your injustice or abide the determination of the sword.”58

  After they delivered this message to Harun in his legendarily sumptuous court in Baghdad, Nicephorus’ messengers threw a bundle of swords at the caliph’s feet. Harun reacted coolly. He smiled, unsheathed his scimitar, and declared: “In the name of the most merciful God, Harun al Rashid, commander of the faithful, to Nicephorus, the Roman dog. I have read thy letter, O thou son of an unbelieving mother. Thou shalt not hear, thou shalt behold, my reply.”59

  In 806, Harun made good on his threat, leading a massive Muslim force into the Byzantine Empire. At Cilicia in southern Asia Minor, he ordered sixteen churches demolished and used their stones to shore up the fortifications along the border between the caliphate and the Christian empire.60 Near Samosata in southeast Anatolia, he ordered all the churches in the area to be destroyed; at Keysun, the Muslims destroyed a magnificent church with fifteen altars that was said to have been constructed by the apostles of Christ themselves. They used the stones to build a fortress at the town of Hadath.61 At Tyana in Cappadocia, Harun had a mosque built, a declaration of his intentions to hold and Islamize the land.62 And he kept going, destroying not just the Christians’ churches, but also Byzantine fortresses, wherever he could.

  Harun advanced with alarming speed across Asia Minor, getting as far as Heraclea Pontica, just 175 miles from Constantinople. Nicephorus, thoroughly alarmed, saw that he was going to have to eat his words: it was he, not Harun, who was going to have to abide by the determination of the sword. He sued for peace and agreed to resume paying the jizya; Harun, according to the ninth-century Byzantine chronicler Theophanes the Confessor, was immensely pleased, as the money was a “token that he had subjected the Roman Empire.”63 Nicephorus also agreed not to rebuild the fortresses that the jihadis had destroyed, but once Harun withdrew, he rebuilt them anyway. Harun, hearing of Nicephorus’ perfidy, seized the city of Thebasa in Lycoania and the island of Cyprus, where he destroyed all the churches and forcibly resettled the Cypriots elsewhere.64

  As Harun carried out his jihad campaigns, he heeded the advice of a Muslim jurist, Abu Yusuf, who advised him:

  Whenever the Muslims besiege an enemy stronghold, establish a treaty with the besieged who agree to surrender on certain conditions that will be decided by a delegate, and this man decides that their soldiers are to be executed and their women and children taken prisoner, this decision is lawful. This was the decision of Sa’ad b. Mu’adh in connection with the Banu Qurayza. The decision made by the chosen arbitrator, if it does not specify the killing of the enemy fighters and the enslavement of their women and children, but establishes a poll tax, would also be lawful; if it stipulated that the vanquished were to be invited to accept Islam, it would also be valid, and they would therefore become Muslims and freemen. It is up to the imam to decide what treatment is to be meted out to them and he will choose that which is preferable for the religion and for Islam. If he esteems that the execution of the fighting men and the enslavement of their women and children is better for Islam and its followers, t
hen he will act thus, emulating the example of Sa’ad b. Mu’adh.65

  Sa’d ibn Mu’adh was the Companion of Muhammad who pronounced the judgment that the men of the Qurayzah Jewish tribe be executed, and the women and children enslaved, after which Muhammad beheaded between six hundred and nine hundred men.

  None of this has become part of the legend of Harun al-Rashid. According to the historian Karen Armstrong, “Harun al-Rashid was a patron of the arts and scholarship and inspired a great cultural renaissance. Literary criticism, philosophy, poetry, medicine, mathematics and astronomy flourished not only in Baghdad [where the Abbasids had placed their capital] but in Kufah, Basrah, Jundayvebar and Harran.”66 In the West, Harun al-Rashid may be the best known of all the caliphs, and his name is generally associated with cultural advancement, scholarship, and poetry. After The Arabian Nights brought his name and legend to the West, he became a mythical philosopher-king on the order of King Arthur. Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Butler Yeats celebrated him in verse. Even the novelist Salman Rushdie, in hiding after the Islamic Republic of Iran offered a reward for his murder for his “blasphemous” 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, followed up in 1990 with Haroun and the Sea of Stories, in which the two main characters are called Haroun and Rashid in a tribute to Harun al-Rashid and an Islamic culture that Rushdie considered more enlightened than that of Ayatollah Khomeini.

  Yet Harun al-Rashid had another side. History does not record how many Christians and other non-Muslims this most enlightened of caliphs subjected to lives of slavery and degradation, or to immediate death after a defeat in battle. No one at his opulent court looked askance at this: the subjugation of the conquered peoples was taken for granted. It was the will of Allah.

  VII. MORE JIHAD FORAYS INTO EUROPE

  Hisham at Narbonne

  The warriors of jihad had not given up on France. In 791, the Umayyad emir of Córdoba, Hisham al-Reda, the son of Abd al-Rahman, declared jihad against the Franks, and determined for good measure to strike a hard blow against the nagging problem of the Christian Kingdom of Asturias. He led forty thousand jihadis across the Pyrenees and advanced as far as Narbonne and Carcassone in southern France, but was unable to go farther or hold the territory. He did, however, carry back an immense haul of plunder: forty-five thousand gold coins and many enslaved Christians. When his men sacked Oviedo, the new capital of the Kingdom of Asturias, they added even more to the booty. To show his gratitude to Allah for this bounty, Hisham gave a large part of the gold to finance the construction of the Great Mosque of Córdoba.67

  The Jihad in Crete and Sicily

  By this time, however, the jihad in France was largely over, at least until the twenty-first century. Elsewhere, however, it was just beginning. In 825, ten thousand Muslims from al-Andalus took to the sea and began to engage in the jihad of piracy, raiding infidel ships in search of booty and setting the pattern for jihad pirates down through the ages, including the Barbary pirates, who waged war against the newly independent United States, and the Somali pirates, who terrorized the waters around east Africa in the twenty-first century. Eventually they landed in Alexandria, where they plundered churches and Abbasid mosques, both considered to be the domains of infidels at war with the rightful Islamic authority, the Umayyads of Córdoba, and seized and sold six thousand Christians as slaves.68

  Driven out of Alexandria in 827 by the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun, the pirates set their sights on Crete, an outpost of the Byzantine Empire. The Muslims thought they were merely plundering the island until their chief, Abu Hafs, took a page from Tariq ibn Ziyad’s book and set fire to their ships.

  The jihadi sailors were enraged. Abu Hafs, however, quickly mollified them, saying: “Of what do you complain? I have brought you to a land flowing with milk and honey. Here is your true country; repose from your toils, and forget the barren place of your nativity.”

  The jihadis countered: “And our wives and children?”

  Abu Hafs had a ready answer: “Your beauteous captives will supply the place of your wives, and in their embraces you will soon become the fathers of a new progeny.”69 The idea that the Muslims might lose doesn’t seem to have entered anyone’s mind.

  Apparently convinced by Abu Hafs’ promise of “beauteous” spoils of war, the jihadis began to fight for control of the island. A former monk who had converted from Christianity to Islam led them to Chandax, an area of the island that was suitable for the construction of a fortress. The Byzantines were quickly defeated; the Emperor Michael II the Stammerer, alarmed at the loss of a land so strategically placed in the Mediterranean, sent several expeditions to recapture Crete, but none were successful. Abu Hafs established the Emirate of Crete, giving nominal obeisance to the Abbasid caliph while essentially ruling on his own. The Emirate of Crete would be a thorn in the side of the Byzantines for the next century and a half, harassing Byzantine shipping in the eastern Mediterranean and serving as a base for jihad raids elsewhere, until it was finally recaptured in a Byzantine offensive in 961.

  The Muslim conquest of Sicily began the same year as the conquest of Crete, 827. As with the jihad into Spain, a renegade Christian was its impetus. According to legend, a young man named Euphemius had become entranced with a young cloistered nun; unable to control himself, he kidnapped her from her cloister and married her, all against her will. News of this outrage reached the ears of the emperor Michael himself, who stammered out that the lust-drunk libertine Euphemius must be punished by having his tongue cut out.70

  Euphemius was not resolved to suffer such a punishment in silence. He fled Sicily, but knew that wherever he went in Byzantine domains, he was likely to be caught and punished even more severely than Michael had ordered. He went instead to North Africa, where he appealed for help from the Muslims, who were happy to oblige. Euphemius returned to Sicily in style with ten thousand new friends and one hundred ships. While initially successful, Euphemius and the Muslims soon encountered fierce resistance, and the traitor Euphemius was killed.

  By 829, the jihadi invaders had been almost completely driven off the island when they received unexpected help: an invading Muslim army from al-Andalus, led by Asbagh ibn Wakil. Although they ultimately took Palermo, the Muslims were not able to secure the eastern part of Sicily, stymied both by the ferocity of the native population and their own inability to unite their various factions. The fighting went on for decades.

  In 878, the Muslims finally took Syracuse, and the booty was immense. According to Gibbon, “the plate of the cathedral weighed five thousand pounds of silver; the entire spoil was computed at one million of pieces of gold [about four hundred thousand pounds sterling].” Along with the treasure, the Muslims enslaved over seventeen thousand Christians. The exact number is not known, but according to Gibbon, it exceeded the number of the seventeen thousand Christians who were captured and sent to Africa to lead lives of slavery when the Muslims took Taormina.71

  The warriors of jihad were finally able to secure complete control of Sicily in 902. The conquerors treated their new domains with extreme severity, brutally suppressing the Greek language and forcibly converting thousands of young boys to Islam.

  Jihad in Asia Minor

  The successors of Harun al-Rashid continued the jihad against the Byzantine Empire, but for a considerable period this took the form of raids into Byzantine territory in Asia Minor, in which the Muslims would capture treasure and slaves and then return to the caliphate. In the 830s, the Byzantine emperor Theophilus asked the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun for a peace accord, but al-Ma’mun’s response hewed to the Islamic tripartite choice for the People of the Book, and made it clear yet again that the Muslims were not fighting the Byzantines simply out of a desire for conquest:

  I should make the answer to your letter [the dispatch of] cavalry horses bearing steadfast, courageous and keen-sighted riders, who would contend with you over your destruction [thuklikum], to seek God’s favor by spilling yo
ur blood.… They have the promise of one of the two best things: a speedy victory or a glorious return [to God as martyrs in battle]. But I consider that I should proffer you a warning, with which God establishes clearly for you the decisive proof [of Islam], involving the summoning of you and your supporters to knowledge of the divine unity and the divine law of the religion of the hanifs [pre-Islamic monotheists]. If you refuse [to accept this offer], then you can hand over tribute [literally: a ransom] which will entail the obligation of protection [dhimmah] and make incumbent a respite [from further warfare]. But if you choose not to make that [payment or ransom], then you will clearly experience face-to-face our [martial] qualities to an extent which will make any effort [on my part] of eloquent speaking and an exhaustive attempt at description superfluous. Peace be upon him who follows the divine guidance!72

  To al-Ma’mun’s bellicose message, Theophilus prudently did not reply. Then, perhaps recalling (or coining) Muhammad’s dictum “War is deceit,” al-Ma’mun set out to harass Theophilus in a different way. In Cilicia in southern Asia Minor, a Christian approached the caliph and convinced him that he was Theophilus’ son and would be his vassal. Al-Ma’mun gave him a costly bejeweled crown and ordered Job, the Patriarch of Antioch, to consecrate the imposter emperor of the Romans. Job, knowing that his choice was to go along with the charade or be killed, complied, consecrating the new “emperor” with full pomp; when the Patriarch of Constantinople heard about what had happened, he excommunicated Job. Al-Ma’mun and his sham Byzantine emperor kept up the pretense for two years, but when they saw that none of the Byzantines were falling for the imposture and rising against Theophilus, they gave it up, and the false emperor converted to Islam.73