The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  In 1023, Mahmud prayed to Allah for assistance and invaded India again, this time with a force of thirty thousand jihad warriors on horseback.64 After crossing a desert, the Muslims came upon a fort, inside of which were wells and abundant water. The people inside the fort came out and tried to appease Mahmud’s wrath, but the sultan was having none of it: he killed all the inhabitants and broke their idols into pieces.65

  According to Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani, “He led an army to Nahrwalah of Gujarat, and brought away Manat, the idol, from Somnath, and had it broken into four parts, one of which was cast before the entrance of the great Masjid at Ghaznin, the second before the gateway of the Sultan’s palace, and the third and fourth were sent to Makkah and Madinah respectively.”66

  In Somnath there was a magnificent temple of Shiva; Manat was the name of one of the pre-Islamic goddesses of Mecca. It was rumored among the Muslims that when Muhammad cleansed the Ka’aba of its pre-Islamic idols and transformed it into a Muslim shrine, and idol worship was extinguished in Arabia, an idol of Manat was transported to India and set up in the temple in Somnath. Thus Mahmud, in destroying this temple, was doing something particularly great in Muslim eyes, as he was extinguishing the last remnant of Arabian idol worship and completing a job begun by none other than Muhammad himself.67

  In any case, the spoils, in both treasure and human beings, were once again immense: Ghazni was filled with stolen Indian goods that the jihadis had appropriated, and even though the Muslims killed fifty thousand people at Somnath, Hindu slaves were again so plentiful that they sold for as little as two or three dirhams.68

  The Muslim advance was relentless. Conquering a fortress of Bhim, a Gujarati king, Mahmud and the Muslims plundered it thoroughly, carrying away one hundred gold and silver idols. Mahmud had one of the more impressive and splendid golden images melted down to make grand new gold doors for the mosque of Ghazni, replacing the old iron ones.69 At Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, Mahmud stripped the Hindu temples of all their gold and silver and then had all the temples set ablaze.70

  Triumphant, Mahmud had coins minted that proclaimed: “The right hand of the empire, Mahmud Sultan, son of Nasir-ud-Din Subuk-Tigin, Breaker of Idols.”71 Like that of Harun al-Rashid, Mahmud’s court became a center of culture and learning, with the sultan patronizing scientists and poets, including the renowned Ferdowsi.72 This element of Mahmud’s legacy tends to be remembered in the contemporary West more than his bloody ventures into India.

  Mahmud of Ghazni died in 1030, having made immense gains for Islam in the Punjab and Sindh, and establishing a foothold also in Kashmir and Gujarat. His son Masud followed in his footsteps. In 1037, Masud led a jihad force into Hindustan and sacked the Hindu fort of Hansi. According to the eleventh-century Tarikh-us-Subuktigin, “The Brahmins and other high-ranking men were slain, and their women and children were carried away captive, and all the treasure which was found was distributed among the army.”73

  During all of his jihad ventures into India, however, Mahmud had neglected to protect his home base, and by the time Masud ventured into India in 1037, Ghazni itself was vulnerable. While Masud and his men were enjoying this great jihad victory, the Seljuk Turks, who had converted to Islam in the late tenth century, sacked Ghazni and overran most of Masud’s Western domains. The jihad against India would come to a halt, albeit, as always, only temporarily.

  III. THE SHI’ITE FATIMID CALIPHATE

  In the early tenth century, Ismaili Shi’a claiming descent from Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, secured control of large expanses of North Africa, and later over Egypt and the Levant. The Fatimid caliphate existed in an almost perpetual state of jihad against its Sunni neighbors, but it imposed the strictures of dhimmitude upon its non-Muslim subjects no less rigorously than they did. In the early twelfth century, the Fatimid caliph Al-Amir bi-Ahkamillah issued this edict:

  Now, the prior degradation of the infidels in this world before the life to come—where it is their lot—is considered an act of piety; and the imposition of their poll tax [jizya], “until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled” (Koran 9:29) is a divinely ordained obligation. As for the religious law, it enjoins the inclusion of all the infidels in the payment of the jizya, with the exception, however, of those upon whom it cannot be imposed; and it is obligatory to follow in this respect the line laid down by Islamic tradition.

  In accordance with the above, the governors of the provinces in their administration must not exempt from the jizya a single dhimmi, even if he be a distinguished member of his community; they must not, moreover, allow any of them to send the amount by a third party, even if the former is one of the personalities or leaders of their community. The dhimmi’s payment of his dues by a bill drawn on a Muslim, or by delegating a real believer to pay it in his name will not be tolerated. It must be exacted from him directly in order to vilify and humiliate him, so that Islam and its people may be exalted and the race of infidels brought low. The jizya is to be imposed on all of them in full, without exception.74

  IV. THE JIHAD IN ASIA MINOR

  In the early tenth century, the patriarch of Constantinople Nicholas I Mystikos made an early attempt at interfaith outreach, writing to the Abbasid caliph Muqtadir in cordial terms: “The two powers of the whole universe, the power of the Saracens and that of the Romans, stand out and radiate as the two great luminaries in the firmament; for this reason alone we must live in common as brothers although we differ in customs, manners and religion.”75

  Like later attempts at interfaith outreach, this one was for naught. The jihad continued.

  The End of Christian Rule in Asia Minor: Armenia

  The Seljuks took Baghdad in 1055. The Abbasids, essentially powerless in the face of growing Seljuk power, granted the Seljuk leaders the title of sultan; the Seljuk sultans paid nominal fealty to the Abbasid caliphs and set out to amass a considerable empire, taking up the jihad against infidels.

  The Christians made this easier for them than it might have been by fighting among themselves. In the middle of the eleventh century, the Byzantines seized a substantial portion of Armenia, primarily because they believed that this mountainous region of northeastern Asia Minor would serve as an effective barrier against the warriors of jihad.

  The Armenian historian Aristakes Lastivertsi (1002–1080) recalled with anguish the harshness of the invaders:

  In these days Byzantine armies entered the land of Armenia four times in succession until they had rendered the whole country uninhabited through sword, fire, and captive-taking. When I think about these calamities my senses take leave of me, my brain becomes befuddled, and terror makes my hands tremble so that I cannot continue my composition. For it is a bitter narration, worthy of copious tears.76

  Even worse, the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX, frustrated with the continued resistance of the Armenians, secretly contacted the Seljuk sultan Tugrul Beg in 1044 and urged him to attack the Armenian capital, Ani.77 Meanwhile, the Byzantines began a systematic persecution of the Armenians. This was because the Armenians held to Monophysite Christianity, which had been declared a heresy by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, to which the Byzantines adhered. The Byzantine persecution of the Armenians became so severe that many Armenian troops upon which the Byzantines were relying to man the border defenses deserted their posts, leading Lastivertsi to lament: “The cavalry wanders about lordlessly, some in Persia, some in Greece, some in Georgia.”78 Some Armenians even joined the Seljuks in their jihad raids into Byzantine territory.79

  While all of this was going on, a portion of the Byzantine army rebelled against the emperor Michael VI. The warriors of jihad were only too happy to exploit all of this internal dissension among the Christians. Noted Lastivertsi: “As soon as the Persians realized that [the Byzantine nobles] were fighting and opposing one another, they boldly arose and came against us, ceaselessly raiding, destructively ravaging.”80

 
By “Persians,” he was referring to the Seljuk Turks. In 1048, they seized the Armenian city of Ardzen. According to Matthew of Edessa, a twelfth-century Armenian chronicler, the rampaging jihadis killed 150,000 people, and Matthew lamented “the sons taken into slavery, the infants smashed without mercy against the rocks, the venerable old men abased in public squares, the gentle-born virgins dishonoured and carried off.”81 This was the kind of treatment Constantine IX was inviting when he had urged Tugrul Beg to attack Ani.

  Constantine IX died in 1055, so he did not live to see his wish fulfilled, but it was fulfilled indeed, and in a manner that visited yet more horror upon the Armenians: in 1064, Tugrul Beg’s successor as sultan of the Seljuks, Muhammad bin Dawud Chaghri, who for his exploits in jihad earned the honorific Alp Arslan, or Heroic Lion, besieged Ani.

  The Armenians, whatever their distaste for the Byzantines may have been, knew that their treatment at the hands of the Muslims would be worse, and initially resisted with everything they had. But the siege lasted for twenty-five days, and the people of Ani grew progressively more desperate. At one point they sent their comeliest young men and women out to Alp Arslan, hoping to appease him with this sumptuous offering of sex slaves; the jihad commander, however, would not turn aside from his goal. Once the Muslims broke through the city’s defenses, they were merciless. The thirteenth-century Muslim historian Sibt ibn al-Jawzi recounted the testimony of an eyewitness:

  The army entered the city, massacred its inhabitants, pillaged and burned it, leaving it in ruins and taking prisoner all those who remained alive.… The dead bodies were so many that they blocked the streets; one could not go anywhere without stepping over them. And the number of prisoners was not less than 50,000 souls. I was determined to enter the city and see the destruction with my own eyes. I tried to find a street in which I would not have to walk over the corpses; but that was impossible.82

  The Debacle at Manzikert

  Something even worse was coming. In 1071, Alp Arslan besieged the Byzantine fortress of Manzikert, in eastern Asia Minor, but was not trying to provoke a large-scale war with the Byzantines, whose history, going back to Julius Caesar and before that, was legendary, and whose immense might was respected. The Eastern Roman Empire of the late eleventh century was just a shadow of that former glorious entity, but the extent of its weakness was not yet fully known. In any case, instead of engaging with the Byzantines and risking a disaster, Alp Arslan turned south, determined to confront and destroy the Ismaili Shi’ite Fatimid caliphate.

  Alp Arslan was besieging Aleppo when the news came that the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes was heading east from Constantinople with a massive force. The sultan hurriedly broke off his siege and headed north, losing a good bit of his army along the way: the jihadis who had been looking forward to the spoils that would come from the plunder of Aleppo knew that the haul would be substantially smaller for defeating a Byzantine army in a dusty outpost of Asia Minor, away from any major city, advancing without their treasure and without their women. A substantial number of the Seljuk forces peeled off.83

  But Romanos’ army, which was made up of a large number of foreign mercenaries, was growing smaller as well. The eleventh-century Byzantine historian Michael Attaleiates recounted that as the imperial army traveled eastward, Romanos began to alienate his own men: “He became a stranger to his own army, setting up his own separate camp and arranging for more ostentatious accommodation.”84

  Discontent was growing in the Byzantine ranks, and it was compounded by confusion: Alp Arslan had extraordinarily good intelligence on the ground in Asia Minor, and knew exactly where Romanos and his forces were and where they were heading at any given time; by contrast, the Byzantines did not have the vaguest idea of where the jihadis were, or of how many of them there were, until it was far too late.85

  The Byzantine forces were routed. Romanos himself was captured. Brought before Alp Arslan, Romanos was exhausted from the battle, his once fine clothes tattered and covered with dust. Alp Arslan couldn’t believe that this bedraggled prisoner was the Byzantine emperor; once he was convinced, however, he ordered Romanos to kiss the ground before him, and then put his foot on the defeated sovereign’s neck.86

  The humiliation of the emperor, however, was little more than a ritual formality, a public demonstration of the victory and supremacy of Islam. Once it was completed, Alp Arslan ordered that Romanos be treated with the respect due his station. He was, after all, still the emperor of the Romans, even if captured.

  However, worse was in store for Romanos. Alp Arslan asked him what he would do if the tables were turned: “What would you do if I was brought before you as a prisoner?”

  The emperor responded frankly: “Perhaps I’d kill you, or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople.”

  To that, Alp Arslan said: “My punishment is far heavier. I forgive you, and set you free.”87

  Alp Arslan was not being ironic. He was completely serious: it would have been a far lighter punishment for Romanos to have been killed at Manzikert than to have returned to his imperial capital. This became immediately clear when Romanos did return to Constantinople. The Byzantine army was devastated and Asia Minor essentially defenseless before the Seljuk advance, all because of Romanos’ decision to confront the Seljuks at Manzikert.

  His rivals in Constantinople immediately took advantage of his weakness; Romanos was deposed and blinded, and he died of his wounds soon thereafter. His legacy was nothing like anything he would have been able to endure imagining: his failure at Manzikert enabled Asia Minor, which had been populated by the Greeks since time immemorial, ultimately to become Turkey, and before that the seat of the last great Islamic caliphate, in which the native Greeks and Armenians were dhimmis, living precariously under the overlordship of Islam.

  The Aftermath of Manzikert

  Alp Arslan did not take immediate advantage of his victory, but it was only a matter of time. The Byzantine presence in Asia Minor was history, and for them, the situation was going to get worse still. In 1076, the Turks conquered Syria; in 1077, Jerusalem. Victorious, the Seljuk emir Atsiz bin Uwaq promised not to harm the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but once the jihadis had entered the city, they murdered three thousand people.88 Meanwhile, in 1075, Seljuk sultan Suleymanshah established the sultanate of Rum (Rome, referring to the New Rome, Constantinople) with its capital in Nicaea, the once great Christian city that had been the site of two ecumenical councils of the Church and was perilously close to Constantinople itself.89 From here they continued to threaten the Byzantines and harass the Christians all over their new domains.

  The situation was desperate, and desperate times called for desperate measures. Back in 1054, the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople, after having had a rocky relationship with each other for centuries, issued mutual excommunications, and what came to be known as the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Churches began. Necessity, however, tended to make the differences between the two seem less important than the more pressing matter of simple survival, at least for the Byzantines.

  The emperor Alexius I Comnenus, who reigned from 1081 to 1118, fought back against the Seljuk advance and met with some success, but he didn’t have the resources to follow through to victory, and the Turkish presence in Asia Minor was like a knife at the empire’s throat. Accordingly, in 1095, Alexius sent envoys to Piacenza in northern Italy, where the Church of Rome was holding a synod. Addressing the assembled bishops and eminent laymen, the Byzantine ambassadors explained the situation and the need, and asked for help, stressing that to come to the aid of the venerable Christian empire would be a great service to God and the Church.

  Pope Urban II and his entourage listened intently and were intrigued. The envoys had come at a time when the leaders of Western Europe were quite concerned with what was happening in the East. Besides helping the Byzantines, the Westerners were interested in liberating Jerusalem, where Ch
ristians had suffered for centuries. A few examples: in the early eighth century, sixty Christian pilgrims from Amorium were crucified; around the same time, the Muslim governor of Caesaria seized a group of pilgrims from Iconium and had them all executed as spies—except for a small number who converted to Islam; and Muslims demanded money from pilgrims, threatening to ransack the Church of the Resurrection if they didn’t pay. Later in the eighth century, a Muslim ruler banned displays of the cross in Jerusalem. He also increased the jizya that Christians had to pay and forbade them to engage in religious instruction of their own children and fellow believers.90

  In 772, the caliph al-Mansur ordered Christians and Jews in Jerusalem to be stamped on their hands with a distinctive symbol. In 789, Muslims beheaded a monk who had converted from Islam and plundered the Bethlehem monastery of St. Theodosius, killing many more monks. In the early ninth century, the persecutions grew so severe that large numbers of Christians fled to Constantinople and other Christian cities. Fresh persecutions in 923 saw more churches destroyed, and in 937, Muslims went on a rampage in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, plundering and destroying the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection.91

  In the 960s, the Byzantine general Nicephoras Phocas (a future emperor) carried out a series of successful campaigns against the Muslims, recapturing Crete, Cilicia, Cyprus, and even parts of Syria. In 969, he recaptured the ancient Christian city of Antioch. The Byzantines extended this campaign into Syria in the 970s.92

  Saif al-Dawla, ruler of the Shi’ite Hamdanid dynasty in Aleppo from 944 to 967, launched annual jihad campaigns against the Byzantines. He appealed to Muslims to fight the Byzantines on the pretext that the Byzantines were taking lands that belonged to the House of Islam. This appeal was so successful that jihadis from as far off as Central Asia joined the jihads.93