The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  Searching for a way to enable the Muslims of the Caucasus and Central Asia to make the pilgrimage to Mecca without running afoul of the Russians, an Ottoman imperial official sent this order to the governor of Egypt:

  Because the accursed Portuguese are everywhere, owing to their hostilities against India, and the routes by which Muslims come to the Holy Places are obstructed and, moreover, it is not considered lawful for people of Islam to live under the power of miserable infidels…you are to gather together all the expert architects and engineers of that place…and investigate the land between the Mediterranean and Red Seas and…report where it is possible to make a canal in that desert place and how long it would be and how many boats could pass side-by-side.30

  The canal was not built. But the idea of one remained alive.

  Cyprus and a Treaty

  Selim II was known to have a fondness for wine—so much fondness, in fact, that he has gone down in history as Selim the Sot. His favorite wine came from the island of Cyprus, which was under the control of the Republic of Venice.31 And so in 1571, the Ottomans accused the Venetians of aiding pirates from Cyprus that attacked Ottoman vessels and seized the island. This was in violation of a peace treaty that Selim had concluded with the Venetians, but a Muslim cleric issued a fatwa for Selim, explaining that a peace treaty with infidels could be set aside for the greater good of Islam.

  A land was previously in the realm of Islam. After a while the abject infidels overran it, destroyed the colleges and mosques, and left them vacant. They filled the pulpits and galleries with the tokens of infidelity and error, intending to insult the religion of Islam with all kinds of vile deeds, and by spreading their ugly acts to all corners of the earth.… When peace was previously concluded with other lands in possession of the said infidels, the aforenamed land was included. An explanation is sought as to whether, in accordance with the [sacred law], this is an impediment to the Sultan’s determining to break the treaty.

  ANSWER:

  There is no possibility that it could ever be an impediment. For the Sultan of the people of Islam (may God glorify his victories) to make peace with the infidels is legal only where there is benefit to all Muslims. When there is no benefit, peace is never legal. When a benefit has been seen, and it is then observed to be more beneficial to break it, then to break it becomes absolutely obligatory and binding.32

  Lepanto

  The Sublime Porte (as the Ottoman central government was known) financed the Cyprus campaign by selling monasteries and churches out from under the Christians who owned them.33 But Selim the Sot was to pay a heavy price for his Cyprus wine: in response to the Ottoman action in Cyprus, Pope Pius V called another Crusade and formed the Holy League, which consisted of the Papal States, Spain, the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Knights of Malta, the Duchy of Savoy, and several Italian duchies, and was intent upon destroying the Ottoman Empire as a maritime power.

  On October 7, 1571, the Holy League and the Ottomans, both with over two hundred ships, met in what was until then the largest sea battle ever at Lepanto, in the caliphate’s domains in Greece. The commander of the Christian forces, Don John of Austria, told his men just before the battle: “My children, we are here to conquer or to die as Heaven may determine. Do not let our impious foe ask us, ‘Where is your God?’ Fight in His holy name and in death or in victory you will win immortality.”34

  It was to be in victory. The Christian triumph was total: the Ottoman fleet was completely destroyed, and as many as forty thousand jihadis were killed. Eyewitnesses recalled that the sea was red with blood.35

  For the first time in a major battle, the Christian Europeans had defeated the Ottomans, and there was rejoicing throughout Europe. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the author of Don Quixote, lost his left hand at Lepanto and was known thereafter as El Manco de Lepanto, that is, the One-Handed One of Lepanto. Referring to his own injury, and himself in the third person, Cervantes said: “Although it looks ugly, he holds it for lovely, because he received it on the most memorable and lofty occasion which past centuries have beheld—nor do those [centuries] to come hope to see the like.”36 He recalled the Battle of Lepanto as “that day so fortunate to Christendom when all nations were undeceived of their error in believing that the Turks were invincible.”37 When Pope Pius V heard the news, he thought of Don John of Austria and murmured words from the New Testament: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.”38

  When he learned of the catastrophic defeat, Selim was enraged, and declared that he was going to order that all the Christians in his domains be executed.39 But cooler heads prevailed, and this order was not issued. By the time the grand vizier Mehmed Sokullu met with Barbaro, the ambassador from the Republic of Venice to the sultanate, in Constantinople a few days after the battle, the Ottomans were determinedly downplaying the significance of the battle. “You come to see how we bear our misfortune,” said Sokullu to Barbaro. “But I would have you know the difference between your loss and ours. In wresting Cyprus from you, we deprived you of an arm; in defeating our fleet, you have only shaved our beard. An arm when cut off cannot grow again; but a shorn beard will grow all the better for the razor.”40

  The Ottomans did indeed rebuild their fleet, and the Holy League was not able to follow up on this victory with further effective strikes against the caliphate. The shorn beard did indeed grow back. Nonetheless, Lepanto became a celebrated name throughout Europe and was clear proof that the Ottomans could, after all, be beaten.

  The last casualty of Selim the Sot’s seizure of Cyprus was Selim himself. In 1574 he visited a Turkish bath, where he drank a whole bottle of his prized wine from Cyprus. Soon after, he slipped on the marble floor and cracked his skull, dying at age fifty.41 His successor, Murad III, was enamored of women as much as Selim was of wine, to the degree that the price for sex slaves in the slave markets of Constantinople doubled as the demand from the imperial court alone began to exceed the supply. Murad was the father of over a hundred children.42

  Murad was also mindful of jihad, launching an attack against Shi’ite Persia in 1578 that included the Ottoman seizure of Christian Georgia, where the Muslims quickly converted the churches into mosques.43 In 1587, Murad seized the Church of the Pammakristos in Konstantiniyye, which had been the seat of the patriarchate of Constantinople since the fall of the city in 1453, and converted it into the Mosque of Victory (Fethiye Camii).44

  The jihad against Europe also continued, when it was possible to continue it amid increasing political instability. At Keresztes in northern Hungary in 1596, the Ottomans under Sultan Mehmet III, bearing the standard of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, decisively defeated a Christian force of thirty thousand men.45 Ten years later, however, the Ottomans concluded a treaty with Habsburg Austria that demonstrated how weak the sultanate had become. In the past, when temporary truces had been concluded between the Ottomans and Austria, they had been contemptuously headed “Graciously accorded by the Sultan, ever victorious, to the infidel King of Vienna, ever vanquished.”46 This new treaty, however, treated the Ottoman sultan and the Austrian emperor as equals.

  And the decline continued. In 1621, the seventeen-year-old Osman II, who had become sultan upon the deposition of his uncle Mustafa the Mad (whose nickname reveals the reason for the deposition), led a jihad force against Poland, but was so ignominiously defeated that the janissaries deposed him as well. He was murdered soon afterward.47

  New Rigor

  After a period of lax enforcement, in 1631 the sultan Murad IV attempted to ensure that the Ottoman decline was not a result of incurring the divine wrath by lax enforcement of the Sharia. He issued a decree restating the dress restrictions for dhimmis, to ensure that they would “feel themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29):

  Insult and humiliate infidels in garment, clothing and manner of dress according to Muslim law and imperial statute. Henceforth, do not allow them to mount a hor
se, wear sable fur, sable fur caps, satin and silk velvet. Do not allow their women to wear mohair caps wrapped in cloth and “Paris” cloth. Do not allow infidels and Jews to go about in Muslim manner and garment. Hinder and remove these kinds. Do not lose a minute in executing the order that I have proclaimed in this manner.48

  Murad may have believed that this had worked in 1638 when he defeated the Safavids and took Baghdad (which the Persians had seized back from the Ottomans in 1623). And indeed, the fortunes of the empire began to turn, if ever so slightly. His successor, the sultan Ibrahim, in 1645 took the jihad back to Christian Europe once again, after pirates operating from Malta captured a Turkish ship on which was one of his favorite sex slaves.49 Ibrahim, in a wild fury, ordered the killing of all the Christians in Ottoman domains. Once his noblemen talked him out of that, he ordered that all Christian ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire be imprisoned, and upon learning that the Maltese pirates were French, contemplated jihad against France. France, however, was far away; Crete, a possession of the Republic of Venice, was closer. Ibrahim decided to seize it, but in the end, it took the Ottomans twenty-four years to do so.50

  Worries about the divine wrath returned in 1660, when a fire destroyed much of Constantinople. The Ottomans blamed the city’s Jews and expelled them from the city. Inscribed in the royal mosque in the city was a reference to Muhammad’s expulsion of the Jews from Medina; the mosque’s endowment deed includes a reference to “the Jews who are the enemy of Islam.”51 Allah’s wrath, presumably, was averted once again.

  Sobieski to the Rescue

  With the jihad for Crete finally concluded successfully, the Ottomans again moved against Poland, this time more successfully than before. In 1672, the sultan Mehmet IV defeated a substantial Polish force and won significant territorial concessions north of the Black Sea. The Polish king Jan Sobieski would not, however, accept this, and went to war with the Ottomans again four years later. Again the sultanate was victorious, winning even more territory than it had before.52

  Jan Sobieski, although forced in 1676 to accept the terms of a humiliating peace treaty, was still not willing to accept this as a result. He would be heard from again. His third chance came in the late summer of 1683, when Mehmet IV assembled a large force of jihad warriors and set forth once more into Europe, intent upon succeeding in bringing it to heel where his illustrious forbears had failed. At Osijek in the Ottoman domains of Croatia, the forces of the Hungarian anti-Habsburg count Emmerich Tekeli joined the Ottomans. Tekeli was the sultan’s vassal king of western Hungary, set up to challenge and harass the Habsburgs. Tekeli’s troops carried a standard inscribed “For God and Country” and “Kruczes,” or “men of the cross,” thereby earning Tekeli a place among the long list of Christian servants of the jihad, going back to Count Julian and continuing to Pope Francis.53

  Mehmet’s grand vizier, Kara Mustafa, urged him to try again to take Vienna, arguing that it was the key to the conquest of Europe and that if he conquered it, “all the Christians would obey the Ottomans.”54 The jihadis duly placed Vienna under siege once again but did not count on Jan Sobieski, who hurried to the city with a relief force. Approaching Vienna, Sobieski saw the arrangement of the sultan’s forces around the city and remarked, “This man is badly encamped. He knows nothing of war, we shall certainly defeat him.”55

  In the dawn hours of September 12, he did. His forces descended upon the surprised jihadis with fury, with Jan Sobieski himself leading the charge. As the Polish king approached the very heart of the Muslim camp, the Tatar khan, another vassal of Mehmet IV, saw him and exclaimed in shock and horror: “By Allah! The King really is among us!”56

  The Ottoman siege was decisively broken, and Christendom once again saved. The warriors of jihad fled in confusion.

  Four years later, the Ottomans made one last stand in Central Europe, facing the Austrians at Mohacs, where they had won such a decisive victory in 1526. But these were no longer the days of Suleiman the Magnificent. The warriors of jihad were beaten so badly that Austria established control over much of Hungary and threatened Ottoman holdings in the Balkans.

  The jihadis would not return to the heart of Europe for several centuries. When they did once more strike the West, it was in the New World metropolises of New York and Washington. The day of that strike was September 11, 2001. Many have speculated that the mastermind of that jihad decided to set it on the anniversary of the high-water mark of the jihadi advance into Europe, the day before the defeat of the jihadis and the acceleration of the Ottoman decline set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the jihad’s becoming a dim memory in the West.

  In any case, after Vienna, Europe would, for a considerable time, get a respite.

  II. THE BARBARY STATES

  That respite was to be from large-scale jihad attacks. North African pirates, however, continued to harass European states with audacious jihad raids, during which the primary goal was to seize Europeans for service as slaves. This won them considerable renown among their peers; the Muslim chronicler al-Magiri reported: “They lived in Salé, and their sea-borne jihad is now famous. They fortified Salé and built in it palaces, houses and bathhouses.”57

  Non-Muslim slaves did the bulk of this work. In 1611, a slave from Timbuktu named Ahmed Baba, who had been enslaved by the Moroccans in 1591 and was learned in Islam, wrote to the Moroccan sultan Zidan Abu Maali protesting his enslavement on the grounds that he was a Muslim. “The reason for enslavement,” he explained, “is disbelief. The position of unbelieving Negroes is the same as that of other unbelievers, Christians, Jews, Persians, Turks, etc.”58 He repeated the classic Islamic formulation that unbelievers should be first invited to accept Islam or dhimmi status, with jihad being waged against those who refused both. Captives taken in these jihad battles, if they were non-Muslim, could legitimately be enslaved.

  This was indeed the general practice in Morocco. Many of the slaves in Morocco had been taken in raids on European Christian states. In July 1625, a twenty-ship contingent of pirates from Morocco arrived in Mount’s Bay in southern England. Bursting into the local parish church during a service, they captured sixty men, women, and children from the terrified congregation and took them back to Morocco, to live a life of slavery. At Looe, they took eighty more and set the town ablaze. In a series of similar raids, they took two hundred people as slaves and seized twenty-seven British ships as well.59

  During another raid soon after that, they seized Lundy Island and made it their base, raising the flag of Islam. More slave raids followed. The English could do little in response; as Francis Stuart, a veteran mariner whom the Duke of Buckingham had sent to get rid of the pirates, said of his foes, “They are better sailers than the English ships.”60 By the end of 1625, the English had lost a thousand ships to the pirates, and the warriors of jihad from Morocco had gained a thousand English slaves.

  One of these slaves, Robert Adams, who was ransomed and returned to England, recounted that as a slave in Morocco he had been given only “a littell coarse bread and water,” and lived in “a dungion under ground, wher some 150 or 200 of us lay, altogether, having no comforte of the light, but a littell hole.” Adams recounted that he was “every day beaten to make me turn Turk,” that is, convert to Islam.61

  Despite efforts to conclude a truce and end the raids, they continued for years; in May 1635 alone, the Muslims seized and enslaved 150 more English people.62 In 1643, Parliament ordered English churches to begin taking up collections to pay ransom to the Muslims and buy back the English slaves.63 In the 1660s, the Moroccans began targeting American colonial ships and enslaving those upon them as well.64

  All of this was in full accord with Islamic law, which envisions Muslims taking non-Muslims captive in jihad attacks and, if it is deemed beneficial to the Muslims, enslaving them. A manual of Islamic law stipulates that “when an adult male is taken captive, the caliph considers the interests…[of Islam and t
he Muslims] and decides between the prisoner’s death, slavery, release without paying anything, or ransoming himself in exchange for money or for a Muslim captive held by the enemy.”65

  A revered Islamic jurist from the eleventh century, Al-Mawardi, agreed: “As for the captives, the amir has the choice of taking the most beneficial action of four possibilities: the first, to put them to death by cutting their necks; the second, to enslave them and apply the laws of slavery regarding their sale or manumission; the third, to ransom them in exchange for goods or prisoners; and fourth, to show favor to them and pardon them.”66

  The piracy and slave raids would continue, despite European efforts to end them by force or persuasion.

  III. THE JIHAD IN INDIA

  Sikandar Lodi and Babur

  In 1501, the Delhi sultan Sikandar Lodi marched upon Dhulpur, where he was able to occupy a Hindu fort. Upon entering the fort, Sikandar demonstrated what to modern-day non-Muslims is the paradox of jihad activity. He immediately fell to his knees and gave thanks to Allah for the victory. At that same moment, according to Niamatullah, “the whole army was employed in plundering and the groves which spread shade for seven kos around Bayana were torn up from the roots.”67

  For Sikandar Lodi and his jihadis, prayers juxtaposed with plunder was not odd at all. Allah had granted the Muslims victory, and by the dictates of Allah’s own law, that victory entitled them to the possessions of the vanquished.

  Three years later, during Ramadan, the month of jihad, in which Muslims were to struggle to show their devotion to Allah, Sikandar, according to Niamatullah, “raised the standard of war for the reduction of the fort of Mandrail; but the garrison capitulating, and delivering up the citadel, the Sultan ordered the temples and idols to be demolished, and mosques to be constructed.” Then he “moved out on a plundering expedition into the surrounding country, where he butchered many people, took many prisoners, and devoted to utter destruction all the groves and habitations; and after gratifying and honouring himself by this exhibition of holy zeal he returned to his capital Bayana.”