A Relevant and Brief History of Islam

A few years back a Mr. Tom Scholl, who identified himself as a pastor of churches in Ohio and New York, as well as holding positions in several ecumenical organizations, wrote a 3-part article for our local newspaper, The Telegraph (Macon), entitled "What the Koran says about Christianity," which I found more than a little disappointing.

It could have been an apologia about the charitableness of Islam using selective passages from the Koran and at least a bit philanthropic to many associated elements of Christianity. But his very prejudicial apologia went further than the expected arguments of Koranic exhortations documenting that Jihad and terrorism were not promoted by the teachings of the Koran and Islam. The pastor went on to truncate and condemn the history of the Christian Crusades — the Crusades of the Middle Ages being recently targeted by liberal secularists as the real boogie man of religious wars. Condemning Christianity and defending Islam as a peaceful religion. Mr Scholl thus wrote: "Christians should be very familiar with misguided and/or violent followers of the faith. For hundreds of years, the Christian Crusades sent many thousands of warriors to kill huge numbers of Muslims and Jews." No reciprocal figures were mentioned for the Jihadists. 

Scholl then went on to mention the internecine Christian and political conflicts in Northern Ireland; racial hatred and black lynchings that reopen wounds that have nothing to do with Islam or the Crusades. Adding more pungent flavor into the brewing mix of hatred toward his own religion and culture, Mr. Scholl continued: "Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland planted bombs killing each other’s children. Not too many decades ago, church-going white men lynched blacks — grandsons and great grandsons of the slaves of Christian owners. Some Christian clergy fall prey to lust and greed."

And not even the witch hunters of Salem, Massachusetts are spared in his condemnation of Western history and his defense of the benignity of Islam. For good measure, they were thrown into the mix along with the old Jim Crow laws: "From witch burnings in Plymouth [sic; I suppose he meant Salem], Mass., to Jim Crow, to corrupt but 'religious' politicians today, the list seems endless. People claiming Christianity, without any sign of God in their lives, are found all over the world. When Jesus saw such hypocrisy in the Pharisees, he condemned them. Mohammed did, too, when he faced it."(1)

It was then I responded and further elaborated about this piece to answer the misguided pastor for I felt he might be misleading his flock, if he was still preaching. Mr. Scholl had picked and chosen what he wanted to believe about what the Koran ostensibly says about Jesus and Christianity. His intentions, I posit, were derived in part from good intentions, originating in fantasy, Freudian dreams, desiring wish-fulfillment. But I also detected a convoluted hatred of unresolved conflicts with his own religion, history and culture, as evinced in the above quotations. 

Unfortunately fantasy and make-believe, even if pronounced with good motives and intentions, can still be conducive to a dangerous soporific to lower our guard and lead us to error and destruction. The truth is that we are dealing with a militant and resurgent religion that has not been tempered by its own Renaissance, Reformation, or the Ages of Enlightenment and Reason — not since the golden age of Harun al-Rashid (AD 763-809) and the book of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

It only takes but a relatively small number of zealot terrorists to disrupt a country. The exuberant "Arab Spring" quickly became a dark "Islamic Winter" of the world's discontented and a nightmare for the vast majority of peaceful Muslim denizens under which it was proclaimed.

We must remain informed and vigilant for the fate of our Western civilization — which admittedly uses Judeo-Christian principles sometimes only as an inspiration, if not an adornment, and not as a practical guiding light. And yet Western civilization,  despite progressive multiculturalism, has proven historically to be best hope for the world at large, while its survival remains the most tenuous given the disparity in population growth. What follows is a brief history of Islam, based on chronicled facts and not fantastic tales of beneficence and kindness.

A Brief History of Islam

Mohammed (AD 570-632) was brought up by his famed uncle, his guardian, Abu Taleb. His grandfather was the Prince of Mecca, hereditary guardian of the Kaaba, who expelled the Christian Abyssinians from the port of Aden and the kingdom of Yemen and sent them back to Ethiopia. 

Mohammed married a rich widow from Mecca, Khadijah (Cadijah). She was the first to believe the message of the Prophet. After her death, Mohammed married his most beloved young wife, Ayesha (Aisha), daughter of his successor Abu Bakr. It is stated that she was nine years old when the marriage was consummated. Her father, Abu Bakr, a close friend and companion of the Prophet, was assigned by Mohammed to lead the prayer at the Mosque of Mohammed (at Medina) and became the First Caliph (AD 632-634) after the death of the Prophet. Like Mohammed, he died a natural death, according to tradition, he "caught a chill and died in his old age."

But the successors, following the acts of Mohammed, lived by the sword and died by the sword in the name of Islam. By the time of Mohammed and Abu Bakr, the Arabian peninsula had been conquered by the sword. Infidels submitted by the sword— either converting to Islam, paying tribute, or dying by the sword. Khalid (AD 592-642) the companion of Mohammed, the great Arab warrior and conqueror of Arabia, Persia, and the Holy Land was called "the Sword of Allah" and the "Scourge of the Infidel." As a conqueror, he was unmatched until the advent of the Mongols in the 13th century.

The Second Caliph, Umar al-Khattab (AD 586-644), conqueror of the Persian Sassanid Empire, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and two-thirds of the Christian Byzantine Empire, died by the sword, stabbed to death by a captive Persian who preferred his own Persian religion Zoroastrianism.

The Third Caliph was Uthman (AD 579-656). Under his watch, parts of North Africa, including Morocco as well as Armenia, Azerbaijan and Afghanistan, were conquered. He was assassinated, beaten to death, in the Islamic struggle for power. Although the Umayyads had fought against Uthman, after the latter's death, they rallied to avenge him as an expediency to gain power. Attaining the Caliphate, the Umayyads, under the prudent Caliph Muawiyah, moved the throne first to Damascus and latter Baghdad. His successors in Damascus and  Baghdad were neither statesmen nor holy saints, but they were the temporal as well as the spiritual heads of the Faith. 

We next come to Ali (AD 624-680), son of Abu Taleb. He was Mohammed's young cousin, the first male figure to believe the Prophet, and he married Mohammed's surviving and most beloved daughter, Fatima (AD 605-633). Fatima became the "leader of all women in this world and Paradise." Ali became the Fourth Caliph, but in the relentless and bloody power struggle that later became Shia (Shiite) vs. Sunni, he was assassinated in the Great Mosque of Kufa, Iraq, becoming the First of the Twelve Imams, the Infallible, of the Shia religion, as well as the Fourth Caliph of the Sunni sect. 

Ali's sons were Hasan (AD 624-680) and Hussein (Husayn; AD 626-680). They were the Second and Third Imams of the Shia sect. Hasan was poisoned by his wife on orders of the Sunni Caliph Muawiyah. Hussein was killed in the internecine religious feuds and beheaded at the Battle of Karbala. Iran and Iraq, where much of this bloodshed took place, became sanctuaries of the Shia religious sect of Islam.

Ayesha was to ally herself with the Umayyads, led by Muawiyah, a son of Abu Sophian, former and bitter enemy of Mohammed at Mecca, who after his defeat by the Prophet had reluctantly embraced Islam. Ayesha was an implacable enemy of Ali and his descendants with Fatima. Ayesha died at the famous Battle of the Camels with the Arabian chieftains who had rebelled against Uthman, who had then supported Ali and Hasan.(2) 

The 4th through 11th Imams venerated by the Shia sect were all poisoned in the interminable political struggles and religious feuds that followed in the next two centuries. So, all of the Shia Imams were assassinated except for the 12th and Last Imam, who is considered the Mahdi. 

In the 19th century, a Mahdi, Mohammed Ahmad, rose against the British, seizing Khartoum and causing great bloodshed in the Sudan. General George Gordon Pasha died in Khartoum trying to lead an evacuation of the city (1885). The British waited for the right time and at the Battle of Omdurman (1898), under General (later Field Marshall) "Lord Kitchener of Khartoum" exacted their revenge, but I am digressing... The expectation (and hope)  is that the last Imam lives in "occultation" until his return is willed by Allah, and his return is awaited by the Shia faithful. 

Incidentally, the Crusades were a circumscribed picnic compared to the Islamic conquests of the 7th through the 17th centuries, until the Islamic momentum was stopped in the West at the Battle of Tours (AD 732) by Charles Martel, “The Hammer,” when the Moorish onslaught was finally stopped in France. It took Spain until 1492, another seven centuries, to expel the Moors from the Iberian peninsula, "La Reconquista." By the time that the Christians had been rallied by Pope Urban II for the First Crusade (1095), the sword of Islam had conquered nearly two-thirds of the Christian world, and under the Ottoman Turks in the 15th and 16th centuries, they would conquer, by blood and scimitar, more Christian lands, including Asia Minor and Constantinople in 1453, “the second Rome.” The Conquest of India was particularly brutal.(3)

Incidentally, the First Crusade was convened by the pope so that Christians would be allowed to enter and worship at Jerusalem again, not to conquer territories for loot or for European culture aggrandizement. Christians had been allowed to worship in Jerusalem for centuries.(2)

The Three Jihads — in Summation

But to recapitulate, let's say that much has been said and criticized both by progressive scholars as well as the popular culture, especially in cinema about the evils of the Christian Crusades by those bent on deriding Western civilization, not excepting Mr. Scholl himself, who for a time served in the Editorial Board of the cited paper. But we hear nothing of the history of Islamic Jihad. So, let’s now chronicle the three major Jihads:

The First Jihad, much of which I have already related, commenced in A.D. 622 in Arabia headed by Mohammed himself and ended at about A.D. 750. In the mid-8th century A.D., the victors thus satiated after such an incredible feat and magnificent triumph, rested. It was an unparalleled triumph of conquest based on religious zealotry. As previously mentioned, the Islamic conquest in Europe was only stopped by the triumph of Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in France in A.D. 732. 

The Second Jihad (1071-1683) resumed the wars of Islamic conquest over Christendom as well as India. This time it was the Seljuk Turks who invaded Europe, defeated the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert in Armenia in 1071, and shamefully captured the Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes (1068-1071), who was later executed in Constantinople for his heinous defeat and surrender.  The Turkish army resumed its advance in the Balkans, and at the Battle of Kosovo inflicted another defeat on the allied Christian armies. Much of the Balkans were conquered. In India, Persians, Afghans, Turks, and Mongol descendants, all having converted to Islam, ravaged the land, destroyed Hindu temples, and conquered much of the Northern Indian subcontinent. 

But on the Iberian peninsula, the Spanish armies of the Christian kingdoms began their slow Reconquista as noted. In Asia Minor, Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans led by Sultan Mehmed II, "The Conqueror," in 1453. 

In his book Jihad in the West: The Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries, historian Paul Fregosi graphically described what happened after the savage capture of Constantinople by Mehmed II in 1453 and his Ottoman Turks: 

Several thousand of the survivors had taken refuge in the cathedral: nobles, servants, ordinary citizens, their wives and children, priests and nuns. They locked the huge doors, prayed, and waited. Mahomet [Medmed] had given the troops free quarter. They raped, of course, the nuns being the first victims, and slaughtered. 

At least four thousand were killed before Mahomet stopped the massacre at noon. He ordered a muezzin [the Muslim leader who issues the call to prayer] to climb into the pulpit of St. Sophia and dedicate the building to Allah. It has remained a mosque ever since.

Fregosi further related the fate of most survivors, slavery:

Fifty thousand of the inhabitants, more than half the population, were rounded up and taken away as slaves. For months afterward, slaves were the cheapest commodity in the markets of Turkey. Mahomet asked that the body of the dead emperor be brought to him. Some Turkish soldiers found it in a pile of corpses and recognized Constantine XI by the golden eagles embroidered on his boots. The sultan ordered his head to be cut off and placed between the horse's legs under the equestrian bronze statue of the emperor Justinian. The head was later embalmed and sent around the chief cities of the Ottoman empire for the delectation of the citizens.

Death and enslavement were not the only price paid by the defeated. Confessions by torture and beheadings were also exacted without any sentiment of compassion. Fregosi further noted:

Next, Mahomet ordered the Grand Duke Notaras, who had survived, to be brought before him, and asked him for the names and addresses of all the leading nobles, officials, and citizens, which Notaras gave him. He had them all arrested and decapitated. He sadistically bought from their owners [Muslim commanders] high-ranking prisoners who had been enslaved, for the pleasure of having them beheaded in front of him.(4) 

In the West, the Reconquista was completely accomplished with the fall of Granada in 1492 to the Most Catholic Monarchs, Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand II of Aragon. In the East, on the other side of the geographical crescent, the Ottoman Turks were finally defeated, and the Islamic wave began to recede almost a millennium after the First Jihad. The blow to the Turks took place at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, fought on the Christian side by the alliance of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold, Pope Innocent IX, young Eugene of Savoy, and the great King of Poland, Jan Sobieski III. The re-conquest of the Balkans that followed was led by the indomitable and ever-present Prince Eugene of Savoy, who inflicted the final defeat upon the Ottomans at the Battle of Belgrade in 1717.

During the 19th century, the empire of the Ottoman Turks became known as the “Sick man of Europe,” and the territories of the Sublime Porte would have been easy pickings for the expansionism of the Russian empire of the Czars had it not been for France and England, which supported Turkey as the key to access to the Black Sea and the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe. Thus, Ottoman Turkey, the sword of militant Islam in the last Jihad, was sustained geopolitically by the Western powers. 

Conclusion

Christianity is the most populous religion in the world with 2.4 billion adherents. But despite the military setbacks of years past, Islam has grown and is growing very rapidly. It is the second largest and most rapidly expanding religion with nearly 2 billion Moslems worldwide, and it is set to double its number in the next 20 years. I am told though that in Africa, where Islam has taken a heavy toll on the recalcitrant Christian and Animist populations, Islam is on the decline and cannot sustain itself. That is to be seen.

The Third Jihad began, as you might have guested, with 9-11 and remains in progress. It is of interest that that date coincides with the defeat of Islam at the Battle of Vienna in 1683. Perhaps a message, announcing the Third Jihad, was sent to Christendom on that date. The readers can now draw their own conclusions about what the future may hold, the relative benignity or militancy of Islam, and to whether or not Western civilization should be defended. I think it should.(5)

References

1. Tom Scholl, “What the Koran says about Christianity: Part 2.” The Macon Telegraph, February 12, 2012.

2. The Islamic invasions from the 7th Century AD, through the Medieval period, up to the 15th Century AD is discussed in Will Durant’s The History of Civilization (Volume 4) — “The Age of Faith,” in the subchapters, “The Arab Conquest” and “The Sword of Islam,” pages 151-205.

3. The conquest of India was protracted and brutal, and it is discussed graphically by Will Durant in his masterpiece, The History of Civilization (Volume 1; 1935) — Our Oriental Heritage in the subchapter “The Moslem Conquest,” pages 459-476. 

4. Paul Fregosi, Jihad in the West: the Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998) p. 256-257.

5. Miguel A. Faria, Jr. A. Contrasting Ideals and Ends in the American and French Revolutions (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2024) p. 345-386.