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

by Raymond Ibrahim

demonstrates once and for all that Muslim hostility for the West is not an aberration but a continuation of Islamic history.

Muhammad “employ[ed] even the vices of mankind as the instruments of their salvation,” and the “use of fraud and perfidy, of cruelty and injustice, were often subservient to the propagation of the faith.”

As one researcher summarizes, non-Muslims are described in the Koran as “vile animals and beasts, the worst of creatures and demons; perverted transgressors and partners of Satan to be fought until religion is Allah’s alone. They are to be beheaded; terrorized, annihilated, crucified, punished, and expelled, and plotted against by deceit.”

You ride horses not your own and wear clothes not your own. You pleasure yourselves with the young white girls of Rome and enslave them. You eat food not your own, and fill your hands with gold, silver, and valuable goods [not your own]. Now we find you with all our possessions and the plunder you took from our coreligionists—and we leave it all to you, neither asking for its return nor rebuking you. All we ask is that you leave our lands. But if you refuse, we will annihilate you!

The earliest Janissaries—or yeniçeri, meaning “new soldier”—consisted of enslaved Christians who were taken as the sultan’s share of human booty, converted to Islam and indoctrinated in jihad, and then set loose on their former Christian kin (thereby perpetuating the cycle of conquest, enslavement, and conversion, always to Christendom’s demographic loss and Islam’s demographic gain).

“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”†

“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.”

“Had the Saracens captured Constantinople in the seventh century rather than the fifteenth, all Europe—and America—might be Muslim today.”169

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.‡

while the Muslim fighters “ravish’d the young maids and women, and cut off the heads of the old men and women.”98

“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.”

Moreover, whereas the European transatlantic African slave trade was fueled by a racial bias, the Muslim slave trade of Europeans—which in the sixteenth century far exceeded the former—was fueled by that old sadistic contempt for infidels.

Any European rebuffing the homosexual advances of their masters—“male slaves were often used for sexual purposes”130—were especially brutalized by their disgraced would-be rapists:*

They would seize a [Bulgarian] woman, strip her carefully to her chemise, laying aside articles of clothing that were valuable, with any ornaments and jewels she might have about her. Then as many of them as cared would violate her, and the last man would kill her or not as the humor took him.…

Every Muslim who is well aware of the history of Islam, knows that jihad against infidels is an integral part of Islam, and those who read history would know.

Millions of modern people of the white civilization—that is, the civilization of Europe and America—have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a

When Muslim men sexually assault Western women while saying things like “You white women are good at it,” or “German women are there for sex,” or “All Australian women are sluts and deserve to be raped,”5 very few understand that they are drawing on a long tradition of seeing pale infidels as the epitome of promiscuity, as recounted in the preceding history.

Islam did not change, but the West did: Muslims still venerate their heritage and religion—

In short, if Islam is terrorizing the West today, that is not because it can, but because the West allows it to. For no matter how diminished, a still swinging Scimitar will always overcome a strong but sheathed Sword.

When in 2006 Pope Benedict passingly quoted Manuel’s observation that Muhammad brought “things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached,” Muslim riots erupted, churches were burned, and an Italian nun was murdered in Somalia.

The Cathedral of Otranto, Italy, houses the remains of 800 Christians ritually beheaded (their archbishop was sawed in half) for refusing to renounce Christ for Muhammad following an Ottoman invasion in 1480. Photograph by Laurent Massoptier.