Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West

by Raymond Ibrahim

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.

Muslim armies went to war against the West more often as religious rather than as national or ethnic forces, and their warring against the Westerners was so seen as mostly a monolithic struggle against Christendom rather than particular European states.

Western approach. Fourth, often Muslims enjoyed as much, if not more protection living in Christian lands than did Christians in Islamic lands—and often without special taxes and levees predicated on their non-Christian status.

His point is not that Christians were saints and Muslims sinners,

but that over the centuries, and with ample moral latitude given to the times, there was less of a Sermon on the Mount tolerance inherent in Islamic fundamentalism than in its Christian counterpart—

Despite all this, the only conflicts highlighted today include the crusades, European colonialism, and any other Western venture that can be made to conform to the popular view that Europeans initiated hostilities against non-Europeans. Even among less ideologically charged historians, the macrocosmic significance of the aforementioned millennium, when “Christian Europe was under constant threat from Islam,” is unintelligible.

When Osama bin Laden opened his messages to the West with the words “Peace to whoever follows guidance,” few knew that these irenic words were lifted directly from Islamic prophet Muhammad’s “introductory” letters to non-Muslim kings; even fewer knew that Muhammad’s follow-up sentence—which bin Laden wisely omitted—clarified what “following guidance” really means: “submit [to Islam] and have peace.” When Yasser Arafat made a peace treaty with Israel in 1994 that was criticized by fellow Arabs and Muslims as offering too many concessions, the Palestinian leader justified his actions by saying, “I see this agreement as being no more than the agreement signed between our Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh in Mecca”—that is, a truce that Muhammad abolished on a pretext once he was in a position of power and able to go on the offensive.3 Whereas many of the world’s Muslims make the connection and appreciate the continuity of the words and deeds of their politically active coreligionists, the West remains oblivious.

A number of writers and analysts, myself included,4 have sought to answer this question by showing that Islamic scriptures and their mainstream exegeses often do indeed support the Islamic State’s and other jihadi organizations’ actions. What few have done, however, is answer this question from a macro-historical perspective—that is, not by citing what most in the West instinctively dismiss as “abstract,” “theoretical,” and thus “open-to-interpretation” words of old scriptures, but by documenting what Muslims have actually done to and in the West for centuries. This is an admittedly more complex task that requires a familiarity with and distillation of a number of arcane texts written over the span of a millennium and in a variety of languages—not just key verses in the Koran and hadith. Yet within the context of its stated purview, this book does just that: it records a variety of Muslims across time and space behaving exactly like the Islamic State and for the same reasons.

“For most of their common history, relations between the two communities were shaped by attack and counterattack, jihad and crusade, conquest and reconquest.”5 Thus, while this book is not a general history of Western-Muslim

historical record between the two civilizations straight and, in so doing, demonstrates once and for all that Muslim hostility for the West is not an aberration but a continuation of Islamic history.

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.

When the Quraysh chieftain of Mecca—who, since Muhammad began preaching some two decades earlier, had only mocked and persecuted him as a false prophet—came to parley, Muhammad trumpeted, “Woe to you, Abu Sufyan; isn’t it time that you recognize that I am Allah’s apostle?” “As to that,” replied the crestfallen pagan, “I still have some doubt.” One of Muhammad’s raiders instantly ordered him to “submit and testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the apostle of Allah before you lose your head!”7 Abu Sufyan, followed by the Meccans, proclaimed the shahada to resounding cries of “Allahu Akbar!”

The appeal of Muhammad’s message lay in its compatibility with the tribal mores of his society, three in particular: loyalty to one’s tribe, enmity for other tribes, and raids on the latter to enrich and empower the former.

This is no exaggeration: 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. Compared with sedentary people they are on a level with wild, untamable animals and dumb beasts of prey. Such people are the Arabs.”

From here the argument can be made that Muhammad’s most enduring contribution to world history is that, in repackaging the tribal mores of seventh-century Arabia through a theological paradigm, he also deified tribalism, causing it to outlive its setting and spill into the modern era. Whereas most world civilizations have been able to slough off their historic tribalism and enter into modernity, to break with tribalism for Muslims is to break with Muhammad and his laws—to break with cardinal Islamic teachings.

“Allah has bought from the believers their lives and worldly goods, and in return has promised them Paradise: they shall fight in the way of Allah and shall kill and be killed.… Rejoice then in the bargain you have struck, for that is the supreme triumph”

All this is important to keep in mind because many of the greatest jihadis* in the coming pages led otherwise un-Islamic lives (for instance by drinking alcohol or engaging in homosexuality). This fact has caused Western historians to disassociate these Muslims—and their often sadistic treatment of infidels—from Islam. Meanwhile Islamic historiography reveres them as good Muslims precisely because they waged successful jihads on the infidel.

In other words, the West is what remained of Christendom after Islam conquered some three-fourths of its original territory.

Simply put, the West is actually the westernmost remnant of what was a much more extensive civilizational block that Islam permanently severed.

Therefore, to understand Muhammad’s history with and law of war concerning the West is to understand his history with and law of war concerning Christianity.

Around the time Muhammad was becoming master of Mecca, he sent a letter† to Heraclius, the Christian emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire who had that same year just defeated the Persian Empire after decades of warring. The heart of the prophet’s letter consisted of two Arabic words, aslam taslam—that is, “submit [to Islam] and have peace.”24 It was rejected. Muhammad responded in 629 by sending an expeditionary force of some three thousand Arabs chanting “victory or martyrdom!” into Christian territory.

In other words, Islam’s three choices had come to Jews and Christians: either they converted, died fighting, or kept their religions by paying extortion money and accepting an inferior position as dhimmis in Muslim society.

And while the Church at that time was being troubled thus by emperors and impious priests, Amalek rose up in the desert, smiting us, the people of Christ, and there occurred the first terrible downfall of the Roman army, I mean the bloodshed at Ajnadayn and Yarmuk.

It is neither hunger nor poverty that has driven us from our land [Arabia]. We, the Arabs, are drinkers of blood and we know there is no blood more tasty than that of the Greeks. That is why we have come, to spill and to drink your blood.

The prophet gave him his “eagle,” a black flag with white writing proclaiming the shahada (the Islamic State’s flag is a facsimile).

During the Ridda Wars, Khalid accused Malik bin Nuwayra, a well-liked Arab chieftain, of apostasy from Islam. The Sword of Allah slaughtered him and, that same night, raped—Islamic chronicles call it “married”—his wife, Layla. Not content, he decapitated Malik, stood his head up between two stones, set it aflame, and cooked his evening meal in a cauldron above it. “And Khalid ate from it that night to terrify the apostate Arab tribes and others,” writes Muslim historian Ibn al-Kathir. “It was said that Malik’s hair created such a blaze as to thoroughly cook the meat.”

“Oh Omar, I will not sheathe a sword that Allah has drawn against the unbelievers!”

Often left out in modern histories is the profoundly religious nature of these early encounters. If the Arabs recited the Koran and chanted Islamic slogans, as all Muslim chroniclers report, the Roman camp was all but a Christian procession. After all, “Byzantium’s role as the Christian Empire was central to its morale. Careful religious preparations preceded a battle”—including priests reciting prayers over fighters and parading relics and crosses before the troops—all of “which had a profound impact upon the men’s mind.”12 Roman soldiers are regularly described as raising crucifixes aloft and shouting in defiance at the “Allahu Akbar”–yelling invaders. These were indeed holy wars, centuries before the crusades.

Vahan continued trying to reason with him; he asked if simply saying the words (of the shahada) would suffice, or if actions were also required. Khalid replied, “You must also pray, pay zakat, perform hajj [pilgrimage] at the sacred house [in Mecca], wage jihad against those who refuse Allah… befriend those who befriend Allah [Muslims] and oppose those who oppose Allah [non-Muslims].† If you refuse, there can only be war between us.… And you will face men who love death as you love life.”

The majority of descriptions of the invaders written by contemporary Christians portray them along the same lines as Sophronius: not as men—even uncompromising men on a religious mission, as Muslim sources written later claim—but as godless savages come to destroy all that is sacred.

In November 636, the Muslims were besieging the walls of Jerusalem. After several months of being holed up and reduced to starvation, the desperate and plague-infested city capitulated in the spring of 637.

Despite the popular claim that Islam bans forced conversion, the martyrdom of early Christians who refused to convert to Islam permeates both Muslim and Christian sources—it is still a very real phenomenon today—and was one of the chief reasons that premodern Christians saw only the spirit of Antichrist in Islam.†

In December 639, after rallying thousands of more Bedouins eager for plunder under the banner of Islam, Amr left Gaza for Egypt. As with Syria, when the Muslims reached the ancient land of the pharaohs, it had been profoundly Christian for centuries‡;

Egyptian missionaries were reportedly even first to bring the Gospel to distant regions of Europe, including Switzerland, Britain, and especially Ireland.*

According to Muslim and Coptic historians, the Arab invaders

also burned the Great Library of Alexandria. Amr sent a message to Caliph Omar inquiring what he should do with the tens of thousands of books and scrolls found within this massive building. Omar (in)famously responded: “If they agree with our Book [Koran], we do not need them; if they disagree, we do not want them. Burn them.” The amount of ink-stained papyri—which if preserved would have rewritten history as we know it—were reportedly so great that, serving as fuel, it kept the many bathhouses of Alexandria, now enjoyed by its conquerors, continuously lit for six months, says Baghdad chronicler Abdul Latif.54 Although most Western historians attribute the destruction of the great library to non-Muslims, the important point here is that Muslim histories and historians record it—meaning Muslims believe it happened—thus setting a precedent concerning how infidel books should be treated.

Heraclius’s successors repeatedly tried to wrest the city from the Muslims: they briefly succeeded in 645, only to lose it again in 646; a large invasion fleet sent to Egypt in 654 also ended in failure.

Even Amr, whom Muslim histories portray as dealing moderately with the conquered populace—he left churches alone after the initial burning—receives a different rendering in the chronicles of the Coptic patriarchate and John of Nikiû: “He was a lover of money”; “he doubled the taxes on the peasants”; “he perpetrated innumerable acts of violence”; “he had no mercy on the Egyptians, and did not observe the covenant they had made with him, for he was of a barbaric race”; and “he threatened death to any Copt who concealed treasure.”

Amr’s replacement increased the caliphate’s treasury double that of his predecessor prompting Uthman to boast how he had forced the “milk camels”—a reference to Egypt’s indigenous Christian population—“to yield more milk.”

“The yoke they [Arabs] laid on the Egyptians was heavier than the yoke which had been laid on Israel by Pharaoh.…

Modern-day Tunisia rests atop the ruins of Rome’s ancient rival, Carthage.

The New Testament canon as we know it was confirmed by the Council of Carthage in 397.

coastal cities dwelled the Berbers (from the Greek barbaros, or “barbarians”).

In short, the number of Berbers enslaved “amounted to a number never before heard of in any of the countries subject to the rule of Islam”

So it was that the Berbers, who for decades had resisted the Muslims—occasionally (though nominally) converting whenever expedient—finally and fully submitted to Islam.

They who were formerly massacred and enslaved on an epic scale would be taught, upon conversion to the creed that had dehumanized them for decades, to dehumanize the other, the infidel, and thus become the ones to massacre, enslave, and plunder—always under the aegis of righteousness.

As for the last vestiges of Christian power, in 698, Carthage fell to Islam, bringing a close to centuries of Roman rule in North Africa.

By 709, the whole of North Africa was under Muslim rule.

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.

Thus not because He loved them [Muslims] did the Lord God give them power to seize the land of the Christians, but because of the lawlessness of the Christians. The likes of it never had occurred nor may it occur in the entire generations of the earth. For why did men put on the clothes of adulterous women and prostitutes, adorn themselves as women and openly stand in the squares and markets of towns and change their natural practice for an unnatural one…? Likewise, women did the same things as the men had done. Father, son and brother had intercourse with one woman who touched every kinsman.… For this reason God delivered them into the hands of the barbarians, that is, because of their sin and stench. The women will pollute themselves through the men who already are polluted and the sons of Ishmael will cast lots [for them].