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

by Raymond Ibrahim

Ibrahim’s evidence reveals certain recurring themes about the interaction between Islam and the West—an entity rarely any more defined as Christendom—that are presently either often ignored or underappreciated.

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.

Muslim religious leaders and jihadists have characteristically seen Christianity as both antithetical to the Islamic world and inherently ripe for conquest or conversion. Westerners, in turn, have likewise over the centuries concluded that Islam was inconsistent with Christian values, and have seen tension and conflict rather than conciliation and peace as the more normal state of affairs. 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.

In his descriptions of these battlefield collisions, Ibrahim demonstrates an asymmetry that is not just culturally relative, but instead reveals absolute different notions of forbearance. 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—and such antithetical customs were apparent before, during, and after battle with obvious ramifications for eventual outcomes.

What was, will be; what was done before, will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun. —Ecclesiastes 1:9

“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.”

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.

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.”

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.

A word of warning: premodern men—kings or chroniclers, Muslims or Christians—were by today’s standards vociferously candid and spared no invective for what they deemed was the source of conflict—namely, the belief system of the other. Although their aspersions are usually seen as unnecessarily provocative hype and thus left out of polite histories, I have kept a fair amount in this book in the belief that they go a long way in explaining how each saw the other, and hence why they fought and died.

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.

have been commanded to wage war against mankind until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.… If they do so, their blood and property are protected. —Muhammad bin Abdullah, Prophet of Islam

I have been made victorious with terror. —Prophet of Islam

The message was simple and revolved around the concept of submission—Islam in Arabic—to Allah’s commandments (as delivered to and by Muhammad); whoever obeyed became a Muslim (“one who submits”).

Muhammad began to launch raids everywhere. 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.”4 His followers grew with every spoil-laden victory and were of two kinds: those vanquished by Muhammad, who chose Islam (submission) over slavery or death; and those impressed by Muhammad, who chose Islam (submission) in order to join his bandwagon and reap its rewards. All that both groups had to do was recite the shahada, Islam’s first pillar and proclamation of faith: “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” Whether they sincerely believed the words or not was an academic distinction. In saying them, they made submission (Islam) to Muhammad’s political authority and as such were good Muslims.

630, Muhammad’s following had so grown that he could march ten thousand armed Muslims onto Mecca, whence he had been ignominiously driven out eight years earlier. An ultimatum was sent to the longtime naysayers and scoffers: “Embrace Islam and you shall be safe. You have been surrounded on all sides. You are confronted by a hard case that is beyond your power.” 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!” Such is the bare-bones, hagiographic-free summary of Muhammad’s rise from obscurity to power.

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.

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

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.

Whatever the terms of surrender were, a bloodbath followed the Muslim entry into Alexandria. They immediately “destroyed its walls and burnt many churches with fire,” note the Coptic annals, including the ancient church founded by and containing the remains of Saint Mark, author of the eponymous Gospel, who also brought Christianity to Egypt around 50 AD.53 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,

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.

The restless Uqba went on to raid the entire Mediterranean coastline until he reached the Atlantic Ocean, whereupon he furiously rode his horse into the water while crying “Allahu Akbar”; slashing at the waves, he lamented: “If my course were not stopped by this sea, I would still ride on to the unknown kingdoms of the west, preaching the unity of Allah [tawhid], and putting to the sword the rebellious nations who worship any other god but him!”

By now, the classical, Hellenistic world—the once Roman, then Christian empire—was a shell of its former self. Even archeology attests to this: “The arrival of Islam upon the stage of history was marked by a torrent of violence and destruction throughout the Mediterranean world. The great Roman and Byzantine cities, whose ruins still dot the landscapes of North Africa and the Middle East, were brought to a rapid end in the seventh century. Everywhere archeologists have found evidence of massive destruction; and this corresponds precisely with what we know of Islam as an ideology.”88

The earliest Christian and Muslim answers were at once similar and dissimilar. Both agreed that God was on the side of Muslims—but for radically different reasons. Christians agreed with Patriarch Sophronius: just as God had often punished the ancient Hebrews whenever they fell astray by raising ruthless pagan conquerors against them, so these new invaders were God’s rod to chastise Christians for falling astray,* particularly, if the seventh-century Apocalypse is to be believed, for engaging in widespread acts of sexual immorality, including cross-dressing:

Just seventy-three years after Yarmuk, all ancient Christian lands between Greater Syria to the east and Mauretania (Morocco) to the west—approximately 3,700 miles—were forever conquered by Islam. 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.

Then and now, nothing so damned Muhammad in Christian eyes as much as his own biography, written and venerated by Muslims.* For instance, after proclaiming that Allah had permitted Muslims four wives and unlimited concubines (Koran 4:3), Muhammad later declared that Allah had delivered a new revelation (Koran 33:50–52) offering him, the prophet alone, a dispensation to sleep with and marry as many women as he wanted—prompting his child-bride Aisha to quip, “I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires.”†

articulated a number of arguments against Muhammad that remain at the heart of all Christian polemics against Islam today.* The only miracle Muhammad performed, they argued, was to invade, slaughter, and enslave those who refused to submit to him—a “miracle that even common robbers and highway bandits can perform.”

Perhaps most importantly, Muhammad’s denial of and war on all things distinctly Christian—the Trinity, the resurrection, and “the cross, which they abominate”—proved that he was Satan’s agent. Thus, “the false prophet,” “the hypocrite,” “the liar,” “the adulterer,” “the forerunner of Antichrist,” and “the Beast” became mainstream epithets for Muhammad among Christians for over a thousand years, beginning in the late seventh century.25 Indeed, for people who find any criticism of Islam “Islamophobic,” the sheer amount and vitriolic content of more than a millennium of Western writings on Muhammad may beggar belief.‡

Finally, the differences between Christ’s peace and Muhammad’s jihad were for the emperor those between light and darkness*: “You call ‘the Way of God’† these devastating raids which bring death and captivity to all peoples. Behold your religion and its recompense [death and destruction]. Behold your glory ye who pretend to live an angelic life.”65

What is certain is that Uthman was disaffected by reports of ongoing Arab oppression of fellow Berbers in Spain and Africa (though Muslim, Arabs still continued to look down on and mistreat the Berbers).* He cooled on the jihad against infidels—were his people not Muslim and still being treated as infidels?—and like Eudes entered the alliance with an eye to breaking free from his overlords in Cordoba. This would not do. In 731, Abdul Rahman al-Ghafiqi—a “warlike man” and survivor of Toulouse who bore a special grudge against Francia—became the new governor of Spain.36 He learned that Uthman had not only ceased raiding but had allied himself to the infidels. Denouncing him as a renegade, Abdul “angrily prepared an expedition for battle and fiercely pursued” Uthman deep into the mountains, where, knowing what was in store for him if captured, the apostate leapt over the precipice to his death.

So it was that in the year 732—precisely one hundred years after the death of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, a century which had seen the conquest of thousands of miles of formerly Christian lands—the scimitar of Islam found itself in the heart of Europe, facing that continent’s chief military power, the Franks.

the pope in Rome eagerly sought to unite Western Europe, which had been devoid of an emperor since 476. Another Frankish chief, another Charles—in fact, the grandson and namesake of Charles Martel—came to the rescue. On Christmas Day in the year 800 inside the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, Pope Leo III crowned Charles the Great, better known as Charlemagne (742–814), as the first Holy Roman Emperor. The shouts of acclamation that thundered in St. Peter’s “pronounced the union, so long in preparation, so mighty in its consequences, of the Roman and Teuton, of the memories of the civilization of the South with the fresh energies of the North,” wrote James Bryce (d. 1922), a British jurist and historian. “From that moment modern history begins.”

Posterity would celebrate Charlemagne for many things—from unifying the West to his love for scholastic learning—but it is his dealings with Islam that are germane here. As the defender of Christendom, he became the quintessential Christian warrior, a proto-crusader. Not content with keeping Muslims out of his domains, his exploits—and those of his descendants, including his son and successor Louis the Pious, who marched into Muslim Spain and established a buffer state in Catalonia—were celebrated in heroic epics and poems (the chansons de geste) and inspired generations of future crusaders.

In 846 Muslim fleets landed on the coast of Ostia, near Rome. Unable to breach the walls of the Eternal City, they sacked and despoiled the surrounding countryside, including, to the shock of Western Christendom, the venerated basilicas of St. Peter—where Charlemagne was crowned—and St. Paul, which were built by Constantine in the fourth century. The invaders vandalized the two holy shrines, desecrated the tombs of Christendom’s two most revered apostles, and stripped them of their treasures, including a large golden cross, a silver table earlier donated by Charlemagne, and numerous rich liturgical vessels and jeweled reliquaries.

None of this should take away from the relative importance of Tours. Whatever else was happening in the east, Charles’s victory heralded the end of Islam’s advance into Western Europe. Nor should its inspirational significance for posterity be overlooked. Even so, contemporary academics have dramatically downgraded the importance of Tours. After announcing that “the old drums-and-bugles approach will no longer do,” the authors of The Reader’s Companion to Military History say that “economics” and “changing attitudes… have altered our views of what once seemed to matter most.… The confrontation between Muslims and Christians at Poitiers-Tours in 732, once considered a watershed event, has been downgraded to a raid in force.”77 They argue that Muslims invaded France to plunder, not conquer it; and although European chroniclers stress the macro significance of Tours, modern naysayers argue that most of their Arab counterparts barely mentioned it, suggesting the battle was unimportant in Muslim eyes.

Nikephoros made no secret of his contempt for Islam and ordered his men to gather and burn any copies of the Koran they found.‡ After reconquering Tarsus, he ordered his herald to proclaim that those Muslims “who desire security of property, of their lives, and the lives of their children,” and “who desire just laws and fair treatment,” to accept Christian rule. “But those who want fornication, tyrannical laws and practices, extortion, [and the] confiscation of property,” must “go to the land of Islam.”

The Eastern Roman Empire’s victories against Islam reached such heights that a military treatise on fighting Muslims, long believed to have been written by Nikephoros himself (though more likely written jointly with or by his brother, General Leo Phokas), opens with an apologia: [The treatise might not offer] much application in the eastern regions at the present time. For Christ, our true God, has greatly cut back the power and strength of the offspring of Ishmael and has repelled their onslaughts. Nonetheless, in order that time, which leads us to forget what we once knew, might not completely blot out this useful knowledge, we think we ought to commit it to writing. If in the future, then, some situation should arise in which Christians need this knowledge, it will be readily available.17

he campaigns of Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimiskes once again made the Byzantine empire a great power in the east. Significantly, they were also consciously holy wars, the first since Heraclius’s war with the Persians. In previous wars with the Muslims the Byzantines had all too often been on the defensive, with the retaining of Christian territory their aim, not its expansion. However, both Nicephorus and John declared their wars to be for the glory of Christendom, aimed at rescuing the holy places and destroying Islam.

The Frank succeeded and returned to gratitude and honors. Adding insult to injury, the defenders catapulted a pig into the Muslim camp while shouting, “O sultan [Tughril], take that pig for your wife, and we will give you Manzikert as a dowry!”

Despite popular depictions of crusaders as prototypical European imperialists cynically exploiting faith, recent scholarship has proven the opposite,21 that every crusader “risked his life, social status, and all his possessions when he took the cross.”22 Nor was it “those with the least to lose who took up the cross, but rather those with the most.”23 Great lords of vast estates—not dispossessed “second sons,” as once believed—parted with their wealth and possessions upon taking the cross.

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. But that is another story. *

Though perhaps superfluous, it is briefly worth noting that both Christians and Muslims saw and disliked each other through distinctly ideological prisms. Like their Eastern coreligionists, many Spanish Christians believed that Muhammad was, to quote a seventh-century document, a “son of darkness.”39 “Inspired by a malign spirit, he invented an abominable sect consonant with carnal delights… of carnal men,” wrote another;40 Muslims “were ordered to rob, to make prisoner and to kill the adversaries of God [Allah] and their prophet, and to persecute and destroy them in every way.” Christians remained scandalized by Islamic sexuality, wondering “what will paradise be, but a tavern of unwearied gorging and a brothel of perpetual turpitude?”

Jesus Christ never ordered that anyone should be killed or forced to accept his religion.”

Alfonso ordered a church built on the field of battle to honor the fallen; the miraculous cross of victory was displayed in it. The tapestry covering the entrance of the caliph’s tent was sent as a trophy to the monastery of Las Huelgas, where it still hangs as a reminder of when Christian kings met and defeated the combined forces of Muhammad.

After a decade of military campaigns and sieges, Granada finally surrendered on January 2, 1492. “After so much labor, expense, death, and shedding of blood,” the monarchs announced, “this kingdom of Granada which was occupied for over seven hundred and eighty years by the infidels” had been liberated.128 “Church bells pealed across Europe in celebration when Granada fell. That door through which Islam had entered Europe through the West was finally shut after a span of over seven hundred years.”

For centuries thereafter, the liberation of Spain was celebrated by parading an effigy of Islam’s prophet—the “Mahoma”—before it exploded in fireworks. Although Vatican II formally banned the ritual, it continues to this day in smaller villages.

When it surrendered in 1492, Granada’s nearly half-million Muslim population had nowhere else to go—except the deserts of Africa—and so chose to remain. Although they were initially granted lenient terms, including the right to travel abroad and practice Islam freely, these mudejares proved far from “tamed.” They launched many hard-to-quell uprisings—several “involving the stoning, dismembering, beheading, impaling, and burning alive of Christians”130—and regularly colluded with foreign, mostly Muslim, powers (first North Africans, later Ottoman Turks) in an effort to subvert Spain back to Islam.† A final “Muslim uprising in 1499, and the crushing of this revolt in 1501, led to an edict that Muslims had to convert to Christianity or leave the peninsula.”131 Contrary to popular belief, the motivation was less religious and more political; it was less about making Muslims “good Christians” and more about making them “good citizens.”

Christians initially tried to reason with the Moriscos; they reminded them how they became Muslim in the first place: “Your ancestor was a Christian, although he made himself a Muslim” to avoid persecution or elevate his social status; so now “you also must become a Christian.”136 When that failed, Korans were confiscated and burned; then Arabic, the language of Islam, was banned. When that too failed, more extreme measures were taken; it reached the point that a Morisco could “not even possess a pocketknife for eating with that did not have a rounded point, lest he savage a Christian with it.”137 A Muslim chronicler summarizes these times: “Such of the Muslims as still remained in Andalus, although Christians in appearance, were not so in their hearts; for they worshipped Allah in secret.… The Christians watched over them with the greatest vigilance, and many were discovered and burnt.”138 Such are the origins of the Spanish Inquisition.

In the end, if Muslims could never be loyal to infidel authority—constantly colluding and subverting, including with foreign Muslims—and if conversion to Christianity was no solution due to the dispensation of taqiyya, then only one solution remained: between 1609 and 1614, all Moriscos were expelled from the Peninsula to Africa, at which point the nearly one-thousand-year-old war for Spain was truly at an end.

When already-enslaved Christians were not enough to satisfy the sultan’s war-making needs, he instituted the devshirme. From the late fourteenth century on, all subject Christian families from the Balkan region—Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, Macedonians, and others—were compelled, on pain of death, to make an annual “blood tribute,” payable in their own flesh, that is, their sons, some as young as eight.* It was collected variously. Sometimes Ottoman officials would go door to door, other times fathers were ordered to bring their sons to the public squares. After the boys were examined, the very best—the handsomest and halest—were hauled off, often torn from the grips of their hysterical mothers.† Any father who dared offer resistance was executed on the spot, and armed revolts against the levy-collectors were not unknown.‡ Many parents did what they could to prevent the snatching of their sons’ bodies—which could further “end up as victims of Turkish pederasty,”26 or the “Turkish Disease”—and souls.§ Some parents mutilated their boys in ways that would make them useless to their new masters. Sometimes “the children ran away on their own initiative, but when they heard that the authorities had arrested their parents and were torturing them to death, returned and gave themselves up.” In one instance, “a young Athenian who returned from hiding in order to save his father’s life… chose to die himself rather than abjure his faith.”