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

by Raymond Ibrahim

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. In turn, Western armies, while fragmented and marked by factions and political rivalries, still saw their common bond of Christianity as the only way to unite to fight off Islam.

If current Islamists reflect age-old antipathies—compare the messaging of the Islamic State, their zealotry intentionally patterned after the dogma of their predecessors—so too Western reactions to them are far from sudden outbreaks of prejudice and xenophobia, but rather the self-defensive mechanisms of nearly 1,400 years.

“We tend nowadays to forget that for approximately a thousand years, from the advent of Islam in the seventh century until the second siege of Vienna in 1683, Christian Europe was under constant threat from Islam, the double threat of conquest and conversion. Most of the new Muslim domains were wrested from Christendom. Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa were all Christian countries, no less, indeed rather more, than Spain and Sicily. All this left a deep sense of loss and a deep fear.”1

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. They talk of “Arab,” “Moorish,” “Ottoman,” or “Tatar”—rarely Islamic—invasions and conquests, even though the selfsame rationale—jihad—impelled those otherwise diverse peoples to assault the West.

However, unlike most military histories—which no matter how fascinating are ultimately academic—this one offers timely correctives: it sets the much distorted 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.

There was only one way to avoid the scimitar of Muhammad, captured in the following instructions he gave his followers: “Fight them [non-Muslims] until they testify that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger; if they do so, then their blood [lives] and possessions are denied you.”

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.

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.

WHEN THE ARABS INVADED ROMAN SYRIA IN 634, IT WAS MUCH larger than today and encompassed modern-day Israel, Jordan, and Palestinian territories. It was also profoundly Christian. Two of the original five apostolic sees—Antioch, where the followers of Jesus were first called “Christian,” and Jerusalem, where Christianity was born—were in Syria. Due, however, to a dispute over the nature of Christ that began at the Council of Chalcedon (451) and which was racked with theological intricacies unintelligible to today’s average Christian—some leading clergy on both sides now say the quarrel revolved around a semantic, not substantive point—the empire was divided.

it on account of some moral shortcomings. Khalid was sent to do jihad in Christian Syria, where his popularity caused him to become “the commander of the Muslims in every battle.”

By February 635, the walls of Damascus were breached by sword-waving Muslims crying triumphant Islamic slogans.9 There, in the ancient city where Saul of Tarsus had become the Apostle Paul, another Christian bloodbath ensued.

Christian fighters from every corner—Armenians, Georgians, Greeks, Christian Arabs, supposedly even Slavs and Franks—marched to and assembled in Antioch “in the spirit of a Christian crusade.”10 Standing before them, the emperor harangued them to fight, to “protect yourselves, your religion, and your women.”11

Often left out in modern histories is the profoundly religious nature of these early encounters.

If Vahan hoped that Jabla would be the Christian Arab steel to break the Muslim Arab steel, so too did the Muslims continue to harbor hopes of playing on Jabla’s ethnic kinship.

Equally infuriated, Jabla declared, “By Christ and the Cross, I will surely fight for Rome, even if against all my nearest kin!”

Things further came to a head—quite literally—when eight thousand Muslims marched before the Roman camp carrying the severed heads of four thousand Christian soldiers mounted atop their spears. These were the remains of five thousand reinforcements coming from Amman to join the main army at Yarmuk; the Muslims had ambushed and slaughtered them. Then, as resounding cries of “Allahu Akbar” filled the Muslim camp—and in keeping with Koran verses to “strike terror into the hearts of the infidels” by decapitating them (e.g., 8:12)—those Muslims standing behind the remaining one thousand Christian captives knocked them over and proceeded to hack their heads off before the eyes of their coreligionists, whom Arabic sources depict as looking on in “utter bewilderment.”

“The Muslims spent the night in prayer and recitation of the Quran, and reminded each other of the two blessings which awaited them: either victory and life or martyrdom and paradise.”26 No such titillation awaited the Christians; they were fighting for life, family, and faith.

Sure enough, whenever broken ranks of Muslim fighters fell back into camp, Arab women hurled stones at them, struck them—and their horses and camels—with poles, and taunted them with verse: “May Allah curse those who run from the enemy! Do you wish to give us to the Christians?… If you do not kill, then you are not our men.”

When news of defeat reached him, Heraclius, in dismay, knew not what to do other than quit Antioch—which fell to the Arabs in the following year—and head for Constantinople. During his northwestern march through Anatolia, he ordered all Roman garrisons stripped and fortifications broken so that his pursuers would only find barren country. (Such was the beginning of the creation of that desolate no-man’s-land that for centuries demarcated the frontier between Byzantium and its nemesis, Islam.37)

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. Writing around the time of Yarmuk, Maximus the Confessor (b. 580) said the invaders were “a barbarous people of the desert… wild and untamed beasts, whose form alone is human, [come to] devour civilized government.”40

Once there, he noticed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a massive complex built in the 330s by Constantine over the site of Christ’s crucifixion and burial. As the conquering caliph entered Christendom’s most sacred site—clad “in filthy garments of camel-hair and showing a devilish pretense,” to quote Theophanes—Sophronius, looking on, bitterly remarked, “Surely this is the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the Prophet standing in the holy place.”

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.†

As with Syria, when the Muslims reached the ancient land of the pharaohs, it had been profoundly Christian for centuries‡; it was home to some of Christendom’s earliest theological giants and church fathers,

city of Egypt, to the yoke of tribute.”64 According to eighth-century Muslim jurist Abu Yusuf, the second “rightly-guided” caliph* maintained that “Muslims eat them [Coptic Christians] as long as they live; if we perish, the children of our children eat their children.”

Egypt is also instructive in showing how and why heavily Christian lands became Islamic. Early Muslim chronicles make clear that centuries of persecution and financial fleecing saw more and more Copts proclaim the shahada, making Egypt what it is today, a Muslim-majority nation.

Egypt and Syria, when Islam invaded it, “North Africa was as firmly Christian as any other area of the empire. Cities and countryside were adorned with graceful churches.”72 It too had produced its share of great Christian theologians, chief among them Saint Augustine of Hippo (in modern-day Algeria), the father of Western theology. The New Testament canon as we know it was confirmed by the Council of Carthage in 397.

Subsequent Muslim rulers of North Africa continued to attack and enslave the Berbers en masse, so that one modern historian rightly observes that “the Islamic jihad looks uncomfortably like a giant slave trade.”

Although many of them remained indifferent to the Arabian religion, it mattered not; they had formally accepted Muslim authority, and would soon be invading Europe and terrorizing the Mediterranean for over a millennium in the name of Allah. 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.

While Muslims agreed that God—that is, Allah—empowered them against Christians because he was angry with the latter, his wrath was not due to any sin, but rather because they were Christians: because they believed in the Trinity, that is, because they committed the worst of all sins—shirk, polytheism—associating others with Allah.

The idea that Muslim fanaticism was responsible for the Arabs’ victories was also adopted by European writers. As late as 1963, Lieutenant-General Sir John Bagot Glubb maintained that “it was religious enthusiasm which provided the impetus for the Arab conquests.” He apparently knew what he spoke of: “I actually commanded, for thirty years, soldiers recruited from those very tribesmen who carried out the Great Arab conquests and who have remained unchanged for thirteen hundred years.”

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.

Put differently, because the Eastern Roman Empire failed to deal a decisive blow to the invaders and send them back to Arabia, the unity of the ancient Mediterranean was shattered and the course of world history forever altered. Little wonder some historians hold that “the battle of the Yarmuk had, without doubt, more important consequences than almost any other in all world history.”100

Concerning this first notable Christian victory over the hitherto unstoppable warriors of Allah, eminent Byzantine scholar George Ostrogorsky writes: “The Arab attack which Constantinople experienced then was the fiercest which had ever been launched by the infidels against a Christian stronghold, and the Byzantine capital was the last dam left to withstand the rising Muslim tide. The fact that it held saved not only the Byzantine Empire, but the whole of European civilization.”

Thus, writing around 650, John of Nikiû said that “Muslims”—the Copt is apparently one of the first non-Muslims to document that word—were not just “enemies of God” but adherents of “the detestable doctrine of the beast, that is, Mohammed.”18 The oldest parchment that alludes to a warlike prophet was written in 634, a mere two years after Muhammad’s death. It has a man asking a learned Jewish scribe what he knows about “the prophet who has appeared among the Saracens.”

In a last-ditch effort, Constantinople sought to spare itself by offering the caliph a large tribute in gold. It would not do; nothing less than total capitulation to Islam would suffice this time.

Citing his background as a “fellow Arab” and his grievances against the court of Constantinople, Konon indicated a willingness to betray the Byzantines, and a bargain was soon struck: Maslama would allow Konon to reach Constantinople and militarily support him in a bid to become emperor; in return the Byzantine general would open the city’s gates to him. Maslama instantly dispatched emissaries to inform the people of Constantinople that the only way the Muslim army would “leave you, your country, your religion, and your churches in peace” is if they accepted his new vassal as “king.”

Of the 2,560 ships retreating back to Damascus and Alexandria, only ten reportedly survived—and of these, half were captured by the Romans, leaving only five to reach and tell the tale to the caliph. In all, of the original 200,000 Muslims who set out to conquer the Christian capital, plus the additional spring reinforcements, only some 30,000 eventually made it back by land.†

Constantinople’s unexpected salvation—particularly in the context of nemesis-like sea-storms and volcanoes that pursued and swallowed up the fleeing infidels—led to the popular belief that divine providence had intervened on behalf of Christendom, saving it from “the insatiable and utterly perverse Arabs,” in the words of contemporaries.

In the words of the chronicler Bar Hebraeus: “And because of the disgrace which came upon the Arabs through their withdrawal from Constantinople, great hatred against the Christians sprang in the heart of Omar and he afflicted them severely.”

Such letters issued by newly made caliphs calling on infidel kings to renounce their beliefs and submit to Islam are common and follow the pattern of Muhammad’s missives to Heraclius and others. Leo responded with his own letter, “the first known Byzantine text which refutes Islam, and it shows knowledge of the subject much wider than that of other contemporary polemicists.”60 In it, Leo, “who was as zealous in his Christian faith as Omar was in his, refuted Islam on the basis of the Christian Gospel as well as on the basis of the Koran.”

These prototypical “lone wolf” jihadis made clear in both their writings and actions that individual Muslims could not wait for or depend on an imam to proclaim a jihad on infidels—an idea still very much alive today. Muhammad had said, “Every community has its monasticism (rahbaniya), and the monasticism of my community is jihad in the path of Allah;” as such, these warrior monks preceded the crusading military orders by centuries.

The Second Siege of Constantinople was a long time coming, had the full backing of the caliphate, and was laden with prophetic predictions. That the Eastern Orthodox Christian kingdom was able to repulse the hitherto unstoppable forces of Islam is one of Western history’s most decisive moments.

Nor should the architect of this victory be forgotten: “By his successful resistance Leo saved not only the Byzantine Empire and the eastern Christian world, but also all of western civilization,” says historian A. A. Vasiliev.

It appears that the westernmost people of Europe saw Islam’s newest converts, the Berbers, much the same way as the easternmost people of Europe saw Islam’s original converts, the Arabs: unfavorably.

Once released, the horrified Christians fled and “informed the people of Andalus that the Moslems feed on human flesh,” creating panic across the countryside.

The conquerors of Spain were not the first to be treated thus; many of Islam’s earliest heroes ended ignominiously—not at the hands of their infidel enemies but of resentful caliphs.

Worse, and as Charles had predicted, the Muslims’ gain was now their bane: having plundered numerous towns and churches on their northern drive, they were overwhelmed with booty. Nor did any one contingent or tribe trust leaving their share to the protection of another.

This sacrilege prompted Pope Leo IV (d. 855) to erect strong walls and fortifications along the right bank of the Tiber to protect the basilicas and other churches from further Muslim raids.66 Anticipating the crusades by over two centuries—and for the same reasons—he also decreed that any Christian who died fighting Muslim marauders would earn heaven, so bad was the devastation.

For this was the first great age of Muslim piracy. Having gone as far as they could on land, Muslims from Spain and all throughout the North African coast spent their energy invading the Mediterranean islands. Though some had already been raided in previous centuries, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Crete, Cyprus, Malta, Sardinia, and Sicily were utterly devastated and occupied during the ninth.* Mass slaughter and/or slavery, the imposition of jizya, and the destruction of churches all but depopulated these tiny Christian islands.