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June 22 - July 3, 2025
First, in most cases Islamic armies saw themselves as expansionary and messianic, eager to engage the West and annex its territory and convert its people. Inasmuch as Western armies were on the offensive, it was in the context of their belief that they were reclaiming areas of the Middle East, Northern Africa, Southern Europe, and Asia Minor that had been Roman or earlier belonged to the Hellenistic Greek world for over a half millennium before the birth of Islam.
That Muhammad had only won over some one hundred followers after a decade of peaceful preaching in Mecca—but nearly the whole of Arabia after a decade of successful raiding, “an average of no fewer than nine campaigns annually”5—speaks for itself.
Muslim philosopher Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) described the Arabs of his time (let alone those from Muhammad’s more primitive era eight centuries earlier) as “the most savage human beings that exist.
That Islamic scriptures portray paradise in decidedly carnal terms—food, drink, gold, and “eternally young boys” who “circulate among” the believers also await the martyr—should not be surprising considering the aforementioned primitivism of Muhammad’s society.
In other words, the West is what remained of Christendom after Islam conquered some three-fourths of its original territory.
the term “the West” shortchanges its own history with and truncation by Islam. It further implies that all those “eastern” lands conquered by Islam were never part of “Western civilization,” when in fact they were the original inheritors of its Greco-Roman and Christian heritage.
(That said, and because of its brevity—“Byzantium” versus “Eastern Roman Empire”—both words are employed in the following history.)
Muhammad’s chief reason for denouncing Christianity revolved around Christ. While he agreed that Jesus was born of a virgin, performed miracles, and was essentially sinless, he rejected claims that Christ was crucified and resurrected. Muhammad/Allah especially denounced claims that Jesus was the Son of God—which is tantamount to the greatest crime in Islam, shirk, the idolatrous association of others with Allah, or polytheism.*
in keeping with the recommendations of the Strategikon—a military manual written by Emperor Maurice (d. 602) that recommended “endless patience, dissimulation and false negotiations, timing, cleverness, and seemingly endless maneuvering”16—sought to bribe, intimidate, and sow dissent among the Arabs.
The vengeful and God-hating Saracens, the abomination of desolation clearly foretold to us by the prophets,
Outside the cultivated coastal cities dwelled the Berbers (from the Greek barbaros, or “barbarians”). A tribal, semicivilized people, they practiced a syncretic religion with pagan, Jewish, and Christian elements.
In Islamic historiography, Uqba is to the conquest of North Africa what Khalid is to the conquest of Syria.
Everywhere archeologists have found evidence of massive destruction; and this corresponds precisely with what we know of Islam as an ideology.”
And yet the Islamic scimitar would not have been thousands of miles away from its Arabian homeland, poised to invade Europe through its easternmost and westernmost gateways (Chapters 2 and 3, respectively) had it been shattered at Yarmuk. This fact has prompted generations of historians, past and present, Christian and Muslim, to wonder: How and why did the Muslims win, especially considering that the Roman military was superior to them in virtually every way?
Put differently, two-thirds (or 66 percent) of Christendom’s original territory†—including three of the five most important centers of Christianity—Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria‡—were permanently swallowed up by Islam and thoroughly Arabized.
One of the earliest records on Islam, written soon after Muhammad’s death, the “Doctrina Iacobi nuper baptizati [,] also implies that Muslims tried, on threat of death, to make Christians abjure Christianity and accept Islam” (Kaegi 1995, 109). As for the much touted Koran 2:256—“there is no compulsion in religion”—this seems more of an assertion, a statement of fact, than an imperative for Muslims to uphold. After all, it is true: no Muslim can make a non-Muslim convert. But that does not mean they cannot entice, cajole, and reward on the one hand, and enslave, extort, and slaughter on the
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At the head of “an army of seven thousand men, chiefly Berbers and slaves, very few only being genuine Arabs,”7 he made his fateful voyage to Spain through the Pillars of Hercules, and landed on what is now, in honor of the invader, called Gibraltar (“Tarek’s Hill” in Arabic). To make clear that retreat was not an option, Tarek ordered all their boats burned on touching European soil: “We have not come here to return. Either we conquer and establish ourselves here or we will perish.”
And yet, it all came in response to more than a century of nonstop jihad. As eminent historian Henri Pirenne correctly put it, “Without Islam the Frankish Empire would probably never have existed and Charlemagne, without Mahomet, would be inconceivable.”
Moreover, as mentioned in the Introduction, all who fought under the banner of jihad—from many of Muhammad’s first Arab recruits, to the Bedouins who were always eager to join the jihadi caravan, to the Berber masses that first entered Europe—were always motivated by the promise of plunder. Such motives never clashed with Islam, the deity of which incites his followers to war on the promise of booty, both animate and inanimate—so much so that an entire sura, or chapter of the Koran, “al-Anfal,” is named after and dedicated to the spoils of war.
He fought fire with fire and sought to terrorize Muslims as they had terrorized Christians—including by hurling their decapitated heads back over their fortifications.10 He scorned all Muslim attempts at negotiations and spurned offers of submission and tribute. “Against the forces of Islam, it was war to the death” for Nikephoros.
To Muslims, Nikephoros was known as the “Pale Death.” Arabic sources tell of a “monstrosity of a man” who was “unyielding with the Muslims.”
But it was his young wife—“You conquered all but a woman” is inscribed on his mausoleum—that was his undoing.
Vigilance was abandoned; rule “passed into the hands of a series of dotards, sensualists and courtesans—female rule once again predominated.”
The nearby Christian kingdom of Armenia was first to receive the brunt of Turkic Islam. In 1019
Military recruits from the sturdy Anatolian peasants that Byzantium had for centuries relied on drastically fell during this time; “indifferent foreigners were enlisted,
That night, Yusuf held a great feast with his family and friends. “Then during the night he savagely slew his wife and three children with his own hands, so that they might not fall into the hands of the sultan and be his slaves.”
Having discussed the doctrine of jihad and its motivations at some length (see Introduction) here it is necessary to compare and contrast the motivations behind the crusades. Shocking as it may seem, love—not of the modern, sentimental variety, but a medieval, muscular one, characterized by Christian altruism, agape—was the primary driving force behind the crusades.
centuries before Islam, Christian theologians had concluded that “the so called charity texts of the New Testament that preached passivism and forgiveness, not retaliation, were firmly defined as applying to the beliefs and behavior of the private person” and not the state, explains historian Christopher Tyerman. Christ himself distinguished between political and spiritual obligations (Matt. 22:21).
Yet perhaps the most unforeseen and ironic aspect of the crusades is that a distorted and demonized version of them was eventually disseminated in and continues to haunt the West—while exonerating ongoing Muslim aggression as “payback”—to this very day.
“I will not associate with the Arabs in friendship nor will I submit to their authority,” asserted Pelayo.6 Then the rebel made a prophecy that would be fulfilled over the course of nearly eight centuries: “Have you not read in the divine scriptures that the church of God is compared to a mustard seed and that it will be raised up again through divine mercy?”
Western knights everywhere—mostly French but also English, Scottish, German, Spanish, Italian, and Polish—took up the cross in one of the largest multiethnic crusades against Islam.
Never again would the West unite and crusade in the East. “Henceforward it would be left to those whose borders were directly threatened to defend Christendom against the expansion of Islam.”65 All of this was a sign of the times, of a burgeoning secularization in the West that prioritized nationality over religion.
From Hungary, three hundred thousand were enslaved and “carried off in just a few days”; from Serbia and Transylvania one hundred thousand were hauled off.¶ “The massive enslavement of slavic populations during this period gave rise, in fact, to our word ‘slave’: in Bartolomeo’s time, to be a slave was to be a Slav.”
Hungary’s John Hunyadi, Albania’s Skanderberg, and later Wallachia’s Vlad the Impaler (“Dracula”)—valiantly fought the Turks till their dying breath, but the writing was on the wall.
In short, and as contemporary European observers had long said of the Turks, “the Tartars had [also] adopted Islam because it was the easy religion, as Christianity was the hard one,” to quote Ricoldo of Monte Croce (d. 1320).20 Whereas Islam complemented their preexisting way of life, Christianity only challenged it.
A Catholic clergyman named Martin Luther (1483–1546) had initiated history’s Protestant Reformation. Whatever else can be said of him, Luther unwittingly did much to weaken European unity against invading Islam. Although he maintained the traditional Christian view on Islam—denouncing the Koran as a “cursed, shameful, desperate” book filled with “dreadful abominations”—he condemned the concept of crusading and originally preached passivity45 against the Muslim invaders,*
Perhaps worst of all, by portraying the Catholic pope as more of an “Antichrist” than the Ottoman sultan—an office held by Muslim leaders responsible for the slaughter and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Christians—Luther and other Reformation leaders† ushered in a sort of relativism that prevails to this day, one that cites (often distorted) episodes from Catholic history to minimize ongoing Muslim atrocities.‡
Indeed, according to the conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.”
Would to Heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into nonexistence.”
American jizya payments—which took up 16 percent of the entire federal budget—began to be made to Algeria in 1795. In return, some 115 American sailors were released, and the Islamic sea raids formally ceased. American payments and “gifts” over the following years caused the increasingly emboldened pirates to respond with increasingly capricious demands.
Thus the United States’ first war—which erupted before it could even elect its first president and intermittently lasted some thirty-two years—was against Islam; and the latter had initiated hostilities on the same rationale that had been used to initiate hostilities for the preceding 1,200 years.
From then until the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia, and Moscow in particular, saw itself as the “Third Rome.” As blood-descendants of the last Roman emperor who died fighting defending his city, its tsars (literally Caesars) claimed the mantle of defenders—if not avengers—of the twelve million Orthodox Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and had a special interest in restoring Constantinople. They waged a series of wars on and made inroads into Ottoman territory. A cycle soon developed: Russian encroachments emboldened Balkan Christians to seek liberation from their Islamic overlords.
By 1853, Tsar Nicholas I could realistically appeal to “the European powers to divide the Ottoman Empire by mutual agreement and turn Constantinople into a free city.”155 Instead, France and Britain, apprehensive of the Eastern Orthodox nation’s growing might and influence, openly allied with the Turks against Russia in the scandalous Crimean War (1853–1856).
That Catholic France and Protestant Britain sided with Muslim Turks against Orthodox Russia—in certain respects yet another manifestation of Christendom’s schisms—is often cited as proof that Europe’s wars with the Ottomans, certainly in the nineteenth century, had little to do with a Christian-Muslim divide and everything to do with realpolitik. This is only partially true.
It was only in the twentieth century that Christian concerns began to disappear from international diplomacy.”
Islam did not change, but the West did: Muslims still venerate their heritage and religion—which commands jihad against infidels—whereas the West has learned to despise its heritage and religion, causing it to become an unwitting ally of the jihad.
In short, if Islam is terrorizing the West today, that is not because it can, but because the West allows it to.
