The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  At Kondapelli, the jihadis learned that there was still more glory to be had. Firishta wrote that while he was there, Muhammad Shah was “informed by the country people that at the distance of ten days’ journey was the temple of Kanchi, the walls and roof of which were covered with plates of gold and ornamented with precious stones, but that no Muhammadan monarch had as yet seen it or even heard of its name. Muhammad Shah accordingly selected six thousand of his best cavalry, and leaving the rest of his army at Kondapalli, proceeded by forced marches to Kanchi. He moved so rapidly on the last day, according to the historians of the time, that only forty troopers kept up with him.”132 Muhammad Shah prevailed over two Hindus in hand-to-hand combat, but then “swarms of people, like bees, now issued from within and ranged themselves under its walls to defend it. At length, the rest of the King’s force coming up, the temple was attacked and carried by storm with great slaughter. An immense booty fell to the share of the victors, who took away nothing but gold, jewels, and silver, which were abundant. The King then [March 12, 1481] sacked the city of Kanchi, and, after remaining there for a week, he returned to his army.”133

  Outdoing even Mahmud Bigarha and Muhammad Shah in devotion to Islam was the Delhi sultan Sikandar Lodi, who came to power in 1489. He adhered strictly to Sharia and was consequently extraordinarily antagonistic to Hinduism.134 According to the seventeenth-century Tarikh-i-Khan Jahan Lodi, by the Muslim court historian Niamatullah, “Sultan Sikandar was yet a young boy when he heard about a tank [pool of holy water] in Thanesar which the Hindus regarded as sacred and went for bathing in it. He asked the theologians about the prescription of the Shariah on this subject. They replied that it was permitted to demolish the ancient temples and idol-houses of the infidels, but it was not proper for him to stop them from going to an ancient tank. Hearing this reply, the prince drew out his sword and thought of beheading the theologian concerned, saying that he [the theologian] was siding with the infidels.”135

  The sixteenth-century Muslim historian Ahmad Yadgar recounted that “Sultan Sikandar led a very pious life. Islam was regarded very highly in his reign. The infidels could not muster the courage to worship idols or bathe in the [sacred] streams. During his holy reign, idols were hidden underground. The stone [idol] of Nagarkot, which had misled the [whole] world, was brought and handed over to butchers so that they might weigh meat with it.”136

  Another sixteenth-century Muslim historian, Shaikh Rizqullah Mushtaqi, provided more detail about that stone: “Khawas Khan…having been ordered by the Sultan to march towards Nagarkot, in order to bring the hill country under subjection, succeeded in conquering it, and having sacked the infidels temple of Debi Shankar, brought away the stone which they worshipped, together with a copper umbrella, which was placed over it, and on which a date was engraved in Hindu characters, representing it to be two thousand years old. When the stone was sent to the King, it was given over to the butchers to make weights out of it for the purpose of weighing meat. From the copper of the umbrella, several pots were made, in which water might be warmed, and which were placed in the masjids and the King’s own palace, so that everyone might wash his hands, feet and face in them and perform his purifications before prayers.”137

  The jihad in India, and the wholesale destruction of the idols, would continue into the sixteenth century, courtesy of Sikandar Lodi and a host of other Muslim leaders.

  IV. THE FALL OF AL-ANDALUS

  Meanwhile, toward the end of the fifteenth century came the culmination of what is to date the largest-scale resistance to jihad that has ever been successfully undertaken. In 1469 King Ferdinand of Aragon married Queen Isabella of Castile. Their combined forces began to confront the last remaining Islamic strongholds in Spain. In 1492, after ten years of war, they defeated the Emirate of Granada, the last bastion of al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula. Seven hundred eighty-one years after Tariq ibn Ziyad’s boats (the gift of the Christian Count Julian) landed in Spain, with the Muslim commander determined to take the land or die there, the Christians had fully driven the warriors of jihad from Spain.

  To this day, Spain remains one of the few places once ruled by Islam but no longer; usually what the jihadis have conquered, they’ve kept. Because of the Qur’anic command to “drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191), Spain remains high on the list of countries that contemporary jihad groups hope to reconquer for Islam. The Christian Reconquista may not be the last one Spain ever sees.

  Also in 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed west, commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella to search for a new, westward sea route to Asia. He was on this search because the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims in 1453 effectively closed the trade routes to the East, making them too hazardous to traverse by non-Muslim tradesmen, who risked kidnapping, enslavement, and death by doing so. This was devastating for Europe, as European traders had until then traveled to Asia for spices and other goods by land. Columbus’ voyage was an attempt to ease the plight of these merchants by bypassing the Muslims altogether and making it possible for Europeans to reach India by sea, without being attacked by jihadis.

  He was, of course, to make a momentous discovery that would, as the years sped by, ultimately provide an entirely new field of operations for the warriors of jihad.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE OTTOMANS AND MUGHALS IN ASCENDANCE

  Jihad in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

  I. THE JIHAD IN EUROPE

  The Ottomans continued their ascent. The Safavid Persians, who had just adopted Shi’ism in 1501, were a new and potent force confronting the Ottoman sultanate in eastern Asia Minor; as the Ottomans grew in power and confidence, a confrontation was inevitable.

  There was, however, one obstacle: the Qur’an forbids Muslims to kill fellow Muslims (4:92), and so these Shi’a had to be declared non-Muslim. A decree therefore went out that “according to the precepts of the holy law,” the Safavid Shah Ismail and his followers were “unbelievers and heretics. Any who sympathize and accept their false religion or assist them are also unbelievers and heretics. It is a necessity and a divine obligation that they be massacred and their communities be dispersed.”1

  The Ottoman sultan Selim then wrote to Shah Ismail: “You have subjected the upright community of Muhammad…to your devious will [and] undermined the firm foundation of the faith; you have unfurled the banner of oppression in the cause of aggression [and] no longer uphold the commandments and prohibitions of the Divine Law; you have incited your abominable Shii faction to unsanctified sexual union and the shedding of innocent blood.”2

  The jihad against the Shi’ites thus justified, the Ottomans defeated them in 1514, and drove them from the eastern regions of Asia Minor. Two years later, the Ottomans defeated the Mamluks and gained control of Syria and the Holy Land and defeated them again to win Egypt shortly thereafter. Their preeminence in the Islamic world, outside of Persia and India, was now secured, and then cemented in 1517 when the last Abbasid caliph, al-Mutawakkil III, surrendered his authority to the Ottoman caliph Selim I.3

  Although the Holy Land had been occupied by Muslims since 1291, the Ottoman presence there was alarming to the crowned heads of Europe, who had long had an opportunity to see the Ottomans up close, far closer than they would have preferred. Pope Leo X tried to organize a new Crusade, and in 1518 called upon the leaders of Europe to stop their infighting and unite against the jihadis, but it was that very infighting that prevented any concerted European effort against the Ottomans.

  The Ottomans even became a rhetorical weapon in that infighting. In response to Pope Leo X’s efforts toward a new Crusade, the pioneering reformer Martin Luther declared that “to fight against the Turk is the same thing as resisting God, who visits our sin upon us with this rod.”4 In polemicizing against the Roman Church, Luther even charged that the papacy was worse than the Ottoman caliphate, thus making a Crusade against the Ottomans in alliance with the po
pe anathema to many Protestants:

  The Pope, with his followers, commits a greater sin than the Turk and all the Heathen.… The Turk forces no one to deny Christ and to adhere to his faith.… Though he rages most intensely by murdering Christians in the body—he, after all, does nothing by this but fill heaven with saints.… The Pope does not want to be either enemy or Turk.… He fills hell with nothing but “Christians”.… This is committing real spiritual murder and is every bit as bad as the teaching and blasphemy of Mohammed and the Turks. But whenever men do not allow him to practice this infernal diabolical seduction—he adopts the way of the Turk, and commits bodily murder too.… The Turk is an avowed enemy of Christ. But the Pope is not. He is a secret enemy and persecutor, a false friend. For this reason, he is all the worse!5

  Luther’s broadside was one of the earliest examples of what was to become a near-universal tendency in the West: the downplaying of jihad atrocities and their use in arguments between Westerners to make one side look worse.

  No Crusade was forthcoming. And so, with their rivals defeated or at bay, the now undisputed Ottoman caliphate could turn its attention once again to Europe. The janissaries were the spearhead of this new jihad effort. As converted Christians, they were more trustworthy as slaves of the sultan than Muslims would have been, as it was widely believed that the Muslims would use their position to favor their relatives and home regions.

  But the janissaries, cut off from their families and homelands, aroused no such concerns. A contemporary observer explained: “If Christian children accept Islam, they become zealous in the faith and enemies of their relatives.”6 This was so widely accepted as axiomatic that a Christian visitor, Baron Wenceslas Wradislaw, noted: “Never…did I hear it said of any pasha, or observe either in Constantinople or in the whole land of Turkey, that any pasha was a natural born Turk; on the contrary, kidnapped, or captured, or turned Turk.”7

  Commanding this force of zealous converts from 1520 to 1566 was the sultan who came to be known as Suleiman the Magnificent, who took the Ottoman caliphate to the height of its power. His jihadis defeated the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, whom the Ottomans regarded (in the words of an official of the sultanate) as “professional cutthroats and pirates,” taking the island of Rhodes after a 145-day siege in 1522.8

  Ottoman power over the eastern Mediterranean was near total, with only Cyprus and Crete remaining outside the domains of the caliphate. But the Ottomans generally neglected Rhodes, to the degree that the Venetian envoy Pietro Zeno asserted the year after its conquest that “the Sultan has no use for Rhodes.”9 Zeno may not have realized that the Ottomans had not taken Rhodes to put it to any particular use, but simply because the jihad imperative was universal and absolute.

  In 1526, the sultan ordered his jihad warriors to take Vienna. The armies were under the supervision of Ibrahim Pasha, Suleiman’s grand vizier, a Greek Christian who had been captured, enslaved, and converted to Islam as a boy, and who had then risen high in the Ottoman court after befriending Suleiman. When the jihadis arrived at Belgrade on their way to Austria, Suleiman ordered Ibrahim to take it, recounting later in his diary that he told him “it will be but a bite to last him till breakfast at Vienna.”10 Once Belgrade was taken, Suleiman noted with satisfaction that “the Grand Vezir has 500 soldiers of the garrison beheaded; 300 others are taken away into slavery.”11

  The jihadis moved into Hungary, where they soundly defeated a massive Hungarian force at Mohacs. On August 31, 1526, Suleiman recorded in his diary, speaking of himself in the third person: “The Sultan, seated on a golden throne, receives the homage of the viziers and the beys; massacre of 2,000 prisoners; the rain falls in torrents.”12 He ordered Mohacs to be burned. Its site came to be known among Hungarians as “the tomb of the Hungarian nation.”13

  Four days later, the jihadis took Buda. Suleiman recorded the details: “Sept. 4. Order to massacre all peasants in the camp. Women alone exempted. Akinjis forbidden to plunder.”14 The akinjis were the Ottoman cavalry and advance troops. They ignored the antiplunder order, and Suleiman did not punish them for doing so.15 The jihadis burned Buda and seized the treasures of its renowned library and much of its great art, including statues of Hercules, Diana, and Apollo, for shipment back to Constantinople.16 Suleiman took the most satisfaction in seizing two immense cannons that Mehmet II was forced to leave behind after one of his campaigns. The Hungarians had put them on display as trophies signifying their defeat of the Ottomans; there was to be no more of that.17

  Suleiman lingered awhile in Hungary, but unexpectedly, he did not make it part of the Ottoman Empire. The historian Kemal Pasha Zadeh, a contemporary of Suleiman, wrote: “The time when this province should be annexed to the possession of Islam had not yet arrived.… The matter was therefore postponed to a more suitable occasion.”18 He instead chose the next Hungarian king, John Zapolya, and made him his vassal.

  Apparently, the sultan did not think that the territory could be held securely or governed effectively from Constantinople at that time, and this was reinforced when he set out again in May 1529 and his armies, stymied by heavy rains, took almost four months to return to Buda.19 Once there, Suleiman crowned his vassal Hungarian king and embarked for Vienna. When they arrived in September 1529, the Muslims plundered and set fire to the villages surrounding the city, and then laid siege to the city itself.

  This time Luther green-lighted the defense of Christendom against the Turks, and a combined force of Catholics and Protestants, some of whom had just arrived three days before the Ottomans, were inside Vienna ready to defend it against the jihadi onslaught. The bad weather forced Suleiman to leave behind some of his key equipment at Buda, and this hampered the assault by the Muslims, yet they still had a considerable force to throw at the city, and they did.

  The Christians held firm. Suleiman abandoned the siege in mid-October, burning to death all of his prisoners except those who would be useful as slaves, and set out for Constantinople. Back at Buda, John Zapolya lavished flattery upon his master, congratulating Suleiman for his “successful campaign.”20

  Suleiman tried again in 1532 to take Vienna but wasn’t even able to get into Austria; Archduke Ferdinand of Austria stopped the jihadis in Hungary. However, the sultan did not forget Vienna.

  He had better luck against the Shi’ite Safavids, from whom he took Baghdad in 1534. On a fortress in Bessarabia (modern-day Mol-dova), Suleiman inscribed a boast proclaiming himself the master of the Safavids, Byzantines, and Mamluks: “In Baghdad I am the shah, in Byzantine realms the Caesar, and in Egypt the sultan.”21 The Safavids and Mamluks were not entirely subdued, but he had beaten them both enough to give substance to the boast. Egypt became a valued source for slaves captured from sub-Saharan Africa: at the Turkish port of Antalya, a customs official in 1559 noted the arrival of cargo from Egypt, among which “black slaves, both male and female, constituted the bulk of the traffic. Many ships carried slaves exclusively.”22

  Mindful of his Islamic responsibility, Suleiman oversaw extensive renovations at Mecca, ensuring a pure water supply for pilgrims and opening schools of Islamic theology. In Jerusalem, he had the Dome of the Rock redecorated in the Ottoman style. He was careful always to keep the dhimmis in their place. In 1548, the French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, M. d’Aramon, visited the Holy Land and reported: “Jerusalem has been enclosed by city walls built by the Turks, but there are neither ramparts nor a ditch. The town is medium-sized and not much populated, the streets are narrow and unpaved.… The so-called temple of Solomon is at the base of the city…round and with a lead-covered dome; around its core are chapels as in our churches, which is all one can surmise because no Christian is permitted to enter the area without threat of death or having to become a [Muslim].”23

  As he grew older, Suleiman’s zealousness for jihad waned. His campaigns against Christian Europe became a distant memory. For some of those around him, this
was an indictment. In 1566, when Suleiman was seventy-one years old and had not led an expedition into Europe for twenty-three years, his daughter Mihrimah Sultan reproached the caliph for neglecting his Islamic obligation to lead the armies of Islam in jihad warfare against non-Muslims.24

  Suleiman was stung by the criticism, particularly from a woman, and found no better retort than to get back on his horse. Several months later, outside the fortress of Szigetvar in Hungary, which the jihadis were besieging, the old warrior died in his tent.25 To avoid demoralizing the troops, his death was not announced for forty-eight days; a page who slightly resembled him was dressed in his clothes and carried in his litter on the journey home, but most onlookers saw through the ruse.26

  The real Suleiman’s heart, liver, and some other organs were buried in a tomb there that became a popular pilgrimage site for Ottoman Muslims; the rest of his remains were taken back to Constantinople—which the Ottomans often referred to as Istanbul (“to the city” in Greek) or, using the Turkish cognate, Konstantiniyye—and buried there.27

  Russia and a Canal

  Suleiman’s successor as sultan and caliph, Selim II, immediately faced new challenges. In 1552, the Russian czar Ivan the Terrible annexed the Central Asian Tatar khanate of Kazan; in 1556 he likewise incorporated the Astrakhan khanate into his domains. A large number of Muslims came under Russian rule. In 1567, he built a fort on the River Terek in the Caucasus. Muslims in the area appealed to Selim for help, claiming that because the Russians controlled Astrakhan, they could not safely make the pilgrimage to Mecca, as the route now required they pass through Russian domains.28 In 1571, the Tatars raided Moscow, yet failed to repeat that victory the following year, and had to give up hope of reconquering the area.29