The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  In 833, al-Ma’mun ventured into Byzantine territory and made significant gains. He retook the city of Tyana for the Muslims, where Harun al-Rashid had built a mosque, but which the Muslims had evacuated when Nicephorus sued for peace. When he had originally conquered it in 831, al-Ma’mun had ordered the city destroyed, after which the Muslims again withdrew from the area. When he took it yet again in 833, however, al-Ma’mun realized its value as a fortress and base for further operations against the Byzantines and ordered it rebuilt yet again. According to the twelfth-century chronicler Michael the Syrian, “He started to rebuild it through taxes demanded from the country so harshly that every tongue cursed him.”74

  Al-Ma’mun, if he heard these imprecations, was undoubtedly unmoved; it was the will of Allah that the dhimmi People of the Book pay for the upkeep and works of the Muslims. But shortly thereafter, the caliph died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of forty-seven, after eating green dates while relaxing on a riverbank.75

  Not long thereafter, two Muslim commanders, Nasr and Babak, converted to Christianity with a portion of their troops and offered themselves to Theophilus’ service. Theophilus, delighted and emboldened, conducted several raids into caliphate territory.

  Al-Ma’mun’s successor as caliph, al-Mu’tasim, was enraged. He led a huge army into Asia Minor, conquered Ancyra (modern Ankara), and proceeded on to Amorium, a major city at that time, which he put under siege. After twelve days, a Christian prince named George betrayed the city, allowing it to fall into al-Mu’tasim’s hands. The caliph gave full vent to his rage upon the city’s inhabitants. The Muslims raided the monasteries and took thousands of nuns as sex slaves, killed eighteen thousand people, and destroyed the city’s churches. Then al-Mu’tasim’s son Daoud, a devout young man, prevailed upon his father to restrict the lives of the captive Christians even more than they had been already, forbidding funeral processions, church bells, the open display of the cross on church buildings, the public celebration of the Divine Liturgy, and the consumption of pork.76 With the exception of the last, these became part of Islamic law for the treatment of Christians in Islamic lands.

  Yet even after this, Theophilus again tried to make peace. He sent the caliph gifts and asked that he exchange Byzantine prisoners for Muslim ones. Al-Mu’tasim sent the emperor gifts in return but rejected a one-for-one prisoner exchange: “It is not the Arab custom to exchange [one] Arab for a Byzantine since the Arabs have greater value. But if you give up our [people] then I will return many of your people.”77

  It remains part of Islamic law to this day that the life of a Muslim is worth more than that of a non-Muslim. A manual of Islamic law certified as reliable by al-Azhar, the foremost authority in Sunni Islam today, specifies that “the indemnity paid for a Jew or Christian is one-third the indemnity paid for a Muslim. The indemnity paid for a Zoroastrian is one-fifteenth that of a Muslim.”78

  Theophilus agreed to an unequal prisoner exchange, and for a brief period there was peace in Asia Minor.

  The Jihad in Rome

  As the jihad against Sicily continued, Muslims also began jihad raids on the Italian mainland. In 846, they attacked Rome, the grandest city in Christendom aside from Constantinople, but were unable to get through its walls. The basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul Outside the Walls, however, as the latter’s name indicated, were outside the city’s defenses. The jihadis plundered both, taking as much silver and gold as they could, including a sumptuous silver altar from St. Peter’s. But finding Rome’s walls too strong to breach, they continued down the Appian Way to nearby Fondi, which they plundered, and Gaeta, which they besieged.

  Although the jihadis had left the immediate vicinity of Rome, the people in the great city were thoroughly alarmed. Despite the Muslims’ inability to break through into the heart of the city, the Romans criticized Pope Sergius for not doing enough to keep the city safe. When he died in 847, his successor, Pope Leo IV, swiftly began shoring up Rome’s defenses, building new walls and repairing the existing ones, as well as repairing the damage the Muslims had done to St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s.

  That all this was necessary was taken for granted by everyone. The jihad forces were still in Italy, and the threat was urgent; it had not yet become customary for the Roman Pontiff to proclaim the peacefulness of Islam and benign character of the Qur’an, and to decry the building of walls. If anyone had been skeptical about the need for Pope Leo’s new walls, they were no longer so in 849, when Muhammad Abu’l Abbas, the emir of the Aghlabid dynasty that ruled in North Africa, ostensibly under the authority of the Abbasid caliph, sent a fleet to the mouth of the Tiber River, just sixteen miles from Rome. Leo, however, had formed an alliance with several Italian princes, as well as with the Byzantines, and a significant Christian force was there to meet the forces that the Christians called the Saracens. In battle at Ostia, a district of Rome, and aided by a storm that destroyed much of the Muslim fleet, the Christians were victorious, and the conquest and Islamization of Rome was prevented, at least for the foreseeable future.

  Elsewhere, the Christians were not so fortunate. Gibbon recounted the habitual savagery of the conquerors:

  It was the amusement of the Saracens to profane, as well as to pillage, the monasteries and churches. At the siege of Salerno, a Mussulman chief spread his couch on the communion-table, and on that altar sacrificed each night the virginity of a Christian nun. As he wrestled with a reluctant maid, a beam in the roof was accidentally or dexterously thrown down on his head; and the death of the lustful emir was imputed to the wrath of Christ, which was at length awakened to the defence of his faithful spouse.79

  Enforced subjugation

  Meanwhile, the Christians who were living in the domains of the caliphate demonstrated why it was so important for the Christians elsewhere to resist the jihadi onslaught. The eleventh-century Muslim historian al-Maliki noted that in the ninth century, a qadi (Sharia court judge) “compelled the dhimmis to wear upon their shoulder a patch of white cloth [riqa’] that bore the image of an ape [for the Jews] and a pig [for the Christians], and to nail onto their doors a board bearing the sign of a monkey.”80

  These were not singular instructions issued at only one time and in one location. In 850, the caliph al-Mutawakkil issued a decree designed to make sure that the dhimmis knew their place, and that the Muslims knew how to keep them in their place:

  It has become known to the Commander of the Faithful that men without judgment or discernment are seeking the help of dhimmis in their work, adopting them as confidants in preference to Muslims, and giving them authority over the subjects. And they oppress them and stretch out their hands against them in tyranny, deceit, and enmity. The Commander of the Faithful, attaching great importance to this, has condemned it and disavowed it. Wishing to find favor with God by preventing and forbidding this, he decided to write to his officers in the provinces and the cities and to the governors of the frontier towns and districts that they should cease to employ dhimmis in any of their work and affairs or to adopt them as associates in the trust and authority conferred on them by the Commander of the Faithful and committed to their charge…

  Do not therefore seek help from any of the polytheists and reduce the people of the protected religions to the station which God has assigned to them. Cause the letter of the Commander of the Faithful to be read aloud to the inhabitants of your district and proclaim it among them, and let it not become known to the Commander of the Faithful that you or any of our officials or helpers are employing anybody of the protected religions in the business of Islam.81

  Al-Mutawakkil was not innovating. He was extrapolating all of this from the directions of the Qur’an itself: “Let not believers take disbelievers as friends and protectors rather than believers. And whoever does that has nothing to do with Allah, except when taking precaution against them in prudence.” (3:28)

  The caliph was determined to ensure that the dhimmis lived in a
constant state of humiliation, as befitting those who had rejected the truth of Allah and his prophet, and to be readily recognizable for what they were, so that they would not be mistakenly accorded respect by an unwitting Muslim. While he issued the decree above, according to Tabari, the caliph also:

  …gave order that the Christians and the dhimmis in general be required to wear honey-colored hoods and girdles; to ride on saddles with wooden stirrups and two balls attached to the rear; to attach two buttons to the caps of those who wear them and to wear caps of a different color from those worn by the Muslims; to attach two patches to their slaves’ clothing, of a different color from that of the garment to which they are attached, one in front on the chest, the other at the back, each patch four fingers in length, and both of them honey-colored. Those of them who wore turbans were to wear honey-colored turbans. If their women went out and appeared in public, they were only to appear with honey-colored head scarfs. He gave orders that their slaves were to wear girdles and he forbade them to wear belts. He gave orders to destroy any churches which were newly built, and to take the tenth part of their houses. If the place was large enough it was to be made into a mosque; if it was not suitable for a mosque it was to be made into an open space. He ordered that wooden images of devils should be nailed to the doors of their houses to distinguish them from the houses of the Muslims. He forbade their employment in government offices and on official business where they would have authority over the Muslims. He forbade their children to attend Muslim schools or that any Muslim should teach them. He forbade the display of crosses on their Palm Sundays and Jewish rites in the streets. He ordered that their graves be made level with the ground so that they should not resemble the graves of the Muslims.82

  VIII. SEIZING THE STONE

  The Qarmatians at Mecca

  In the second half of the ninth century, the jihad against infidels largely gave way to a jihad against Muslim rivals. The Abbasid caliphate was beset with internal strife, with four caliphs ruling between 861 and 870, as rival factions vied for power. In the mid ninth century, the Abbasids were so weakened by their internal divisions that the Byzantines were able to go on the offensive and recapture the provinces of Illyricum, Greece, Bulgaria, Northern Syria, Cilicia, and Armenia, which they had previously lost to the jihad.83

  Despite all their dissension and disunity, however, the Abbasids still had the time and energy to continue to persecute the Shi’ite minority. The caliph al-Mutawakkil forced the tenth Shi’ite Imam, Ali ibn Muhammad al-Naqi, to move from his home in Medina to Samarra, which the Abbasids had made their capital in 836. Once he had him close by, Al-Mutawakkil had al-Naqi mistreated, ridiculed, and tortured. Al-Mutawakkil died in 861, but the persecution continued until the caliph al-Mu’tazz bi-’llah had al-Naqi poisoned to death in 868.84 His successor as Imam of the Shi’a, Hasan ibn Ali al-Askari, lived under house arrest in Samarra until his death, also by Sunni poisoning, in 874.

  Shi’ite tradition holds that the prophecy that the twelfth Imam would be the Mahdi, the savior figure of Islam awaited by both Sunnis and Shi’ites, was widely known—so al-Askari was kept under wraps lest he father a son who could claim that title.85 Shi’ites believe, however, that he managed to have a son anyway, although there are differing traditions about who his wife was and where she was from, and no one is sure how she got to the Imam under the watchful eyes of the Sunnis.

  However it happened, the twelfth Imam, Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Mahdi, was born, and great things were expected of him. However, his father was killed when he was just four years old and, soon afterward, the long-awaited boy himself disappeared—probably also murdered by Sunnis, like most of the Imams before him. In the Shi’ite view, however, he went into “occultation,” unable to be seen by ordinary human eyes but still very much alive. Four men known as his special deputies claimed to be in contact with him, and they led the Shi’ite community for the next seventy years, always in an atmosphere of persecution from the Sunnis. The return of the twelfth Imam, and the triumph of the Shi’a over the Sunnis and all infidels, became a staple of Shi’ite apocalyptic literature.

  Meanwhile, a schism among the Shi’ites caused more trouble for the Abbasids. The sixth Imam, Jafar al-Sadiq, who reigned from 733 to 765, designated his son Ismail ibn Jafar as his successor. Ismail, however, died before Jafar did, and so Jafar was succeeded by his brother, Musa ibn Jafar al-Kazim. However, a party of the Shi’ites believed that since their Imams were infallible, Ismail was the rightful successor of Jafar, as Jafar would not have designated him otherwise, and that the Imamate belonged not to Musa, but to Ismail’s son Muhammad ibn Ismail.

  This Shi’ite group came to be known as the Ismailis, and they were beset by internal divisions as well. In the late ninth century, one group of Ismailis—known as Qarmatians, after their founder Hamdan Qarmat—preached an apocalyptic vision centered upon the imminent return of Muhammad ibn Ismail as the Mahdi, the savior figure of Islamic apocalyptic literature. The Qarmatians were fierce and fanatical, seeing even the pilgrimage to Mecca as idolatrous, because while there the pilgrims venerated the Black Stone of the Ka’aba, the sacred meteorite that Allah, it was said, had thrown down to that spot from Paradise.86

  In 899, the Qarmatians captured Hajr, the capital of Bahrain, and established Bahrain as their stronghold, setting up a utopian society with no Friday services and, indeed, no mosques at all; apparently, they jettisoned Islamic practices in anticipation of the Mahdi’s arrival and the consummation of all things.87 Thirty thousand black slaves did the work, and another twenty thousand served as the army. No taxes were levied, as the community relied on plunder for its sustenance. The Qarmatians were energetic in pursuing that plunder: the Qarmatians began raiding the caravans of pilgrims to Mecca. In 906, they killed twenty thousand pilgrims who were returning from Mecca, and in 924 massacred another pilgrim caravan. They also began seizing Abbasid strongholds, sacking Kufa in 925 and coming close to taking Baghdad in 927.88

  In 928, the Qarmatians struck their mightiest blow yet against Abbasid power: they stormed Mecca and stole the Black Stone from the Ka’aba, carrying what they considered a focus of idolatry back to Bahrain. The theft of the Black Stone signified, the Qarmatians said, the end of Islam and the commencement of the age of the Mahdi. They were, however, willing to return it for a ransom back to Mecca, but the Abbasids never made any effort to pay up.

  Finally, in 950, on the orders of the Fatimid Shi’ite caliph who had established himself in Cairo and whose authority they had accepted, the Qarmatians threw the Black Stone into the Great Mosque of Kufa in central Iraq, along with a note saying, “By command we took it, and by command we have brought it back.”89 It had been in three pieces when it was taken; perhaps from the impact of being thrown into the mosque, it had now broken into seven, but fragmentary or no, it was still the Black Stone, or the closest thing to the Black Stone that anyone actually possessed.

  The Abbasids, no doubt breathing a sigh of relief that it had finally been returned to Kufa, restored it to its place for veneration at the Ka’aba in Mecca. And that was that. Abbasid power was severely shaken, but the jihad imperative remained and would eventually be taken up again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CONSOLIDATION AND OPPRESSION

  Jihad in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries

  I. THE JIHAD IN SPAIN

  Islam in Power in Spain

  The jihad in Spain slowed down considerably in the late ninth and early tenth centuries. In fact, the Christian domains in Spain were growing, but very slowly and amid many setbacks. As in all wars, long and short, matters became complicated; on occasion, Christians and Muslims forged alliances for short-term goals. Whatever the utility of these coalitions of convenience, and however successful they were, the jihad imperative remained a constant, and there was never any shortage of Muslims in al-Andalus who were ready to pursue it.

  In 920, the forces of the Emirate of Cór
doba routed the Christians of the Kingdom of León, the successor to Pelayo’s Kingdom of Asturias, at Valdejunquera. But those who were determined to resist the jihad were by no means wiped out, and they fought on.

  From 929 on, the Umayyad rulers of Spain styled themselves as caliphs of Córdoba. That caliphate, and Islamic al-Andalus in general, has become a potent myth in the twenty-first century. Historians have painted it as a paradise of protomulticulturalism: Karen Armstrong, author of Islam: A Short History, claims that “until 1492, Jews and Christians lived peaceably and productively together in Muslim Spain—a coexistence that was impossible elsewhere in Europe.”1 Historian María Rosa Menocal asserts that the Muslim rulers of Spain “not only allowed Jews and Christians to survive but, following Quranic mandate, by and large protected them.”2

  This myth has come to be taken for granted in the West. In his June 4, 2009, outreach speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, U.S. president Barack Obama said: “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia.”3

  Yet Umayyad Spain was hardly a comfortable place for the Christians and Jews who were subjugated there under the rule of Islam. Several decades after the Umayyads proclaimed their caliphate in Córdoba, the Holy Roman emperor Otto I sent an emissary, John of Gorze, to Muslim Spain. John of Gorze noted that the Christians of al-Andalus were living in fear and suffering under the burden of systematic discrimination.4 But when he proposed informing Otto I about the plight of the Christians in al-Andalus, a Spanish bishop told him that to do so would only make matters worse. “Consider,” he told John, “under what conditions we live. We have been driven to this by our sins, to be subjected to the rule of the pagans. We are forbidden by the Apostle’s words to resist the civil power. Only one cause of solace is left to us, that in the depths of such a great calamity they do not forbid us to practise our own faith.… For the time being, then, we keep the following counsel: that provided no harm is done to our religion, we obey them in all else, and do their commands in all that does not affect our faith.”5