by Emmet Scott
It is incumbent upon us to fight the enemy without inquiring as to whether we shall be under the command of a pious or depraved leader.
It is not prohibited to kill white non-Arabs who have been taken prisoner. But no one can be executed after having been granted the aman (protection). The promises made to them must not be broken. Women and children must not be executed and the killing of monks and rabbis must be avoided unless they have taken part in battle. Women also may be executed if they have participated in the fighting. The aman granted by the humblest Muslim must be recognized by other [Muslims]. Women and young children can also grant the aman when they are aware of its significance. However, according to another opinion, it is only valid if confirmed by the imam (spiritual leader). The imam will retain a fifth of the booty captured by the Muslims in the course of warfare and he will share the remaining four fifths among the soldiers of the army. Preferably, the apportioning will take place on enemy ground.[9]
Because the present study focuses primarily on Islam’s impact upon Europe and European thinking, it behoves us to look at Islam’s record in that part of Europe that came under Islamic domination: Spain. A native of that country, Ibn Khaldun, gave, several centuries later, a very similar account to the one quoted above of Islam's attitude to war:
In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. Therefore, caliphate and royal authority are united [in Islam], so that the person in charge can devote the available strength to both of them [religion and politics] at the same time.
The other groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty to them, save only for purposes of defense. It has thus come about that the person in charge of religious affairs [in other religious groups] is not concerned with power politics at all. [Among them] royal authority comes to those who have it, by accident and in some way that has nothing to do with religion. It comes to them as a necessary result of group feeling, which by its very nature seeks to obtain royal authority, as we have mentioned before, and not because they are under obligation to gain power over other nations, as is the case with Islam. They are merely required to establish their religion among their own [people].
This is why the Israelites after Moses and Joshua remained unconcerned with royal authority for about four hundred years. Their only concern was to establish their religion (1: 473)
Thereafter, there was dissensions among the Christians with regard to their religion and to Christology. They split into groups and sects, which secured the support of various Christian rulers against each other. At different times there appeared different sects. Finally, these sects crystallized into three groups, which constitute the [Christian] sects. Others have no significance. These are the Melchites, the Jacobites, and the Nestorians. We do not think that we should blacken the pages of this book with discussion of their dogmas of unbelief. In general, they are well known. All of them are unbelief. This is clearly stated in the noble Qur’an. [To] discuss or argue those things with them is not up to us. It is [for them to choose between] conversion to Islam, payment of the poll tax, or death.[10]
We need not repeat the assertion that the Caliphate of Cordoba was a haven of peace and tolerance in a Europe benighted by ignorance and violence. It is doubtful if there exists, in any other area of world history, such a radical untruth which has achieved such wide currency. In reality, from the very start, Islamic rule in Spain was marked by the appearance of a barbarism and savagery such as Europe had perhaps not experienced since pre-Christian times. Louis Bertrand mentions an incident early in the conquest of a type that was to become all-too characteristic: “After the capture of Seville and Toledo, when Mousa met his lieutenant Tarik, whom he accused of peculation, he received him with blows of a whip and ordered his head to be shaved. … Later, when booty was being divided, he wanted to deprive another of his lieutenants of an important prisoner, the Christian governor of Cordova. ‘It was I who made this man prisoner,’ cried the officer, who was called Moghit, flying into a passion; ‘they want to deprive me of him; very well, I will have his head cut off!’ And he did so on the spot.”[11] “Never,” says Bertrand, “were these brutal habits to disappear completely from Musulman Spain. From one end to the other, the history of the Spanish Caliphate is strewn with severed heads and crucified corpses.”
Bertrand describes some of the savage and inveterate feuding that characterized the first two or three years of Muslim rule. In his words, “the first part of this period, that of the Emirs dependent upon the Caliphate of Damascus … is nothing but a long series of intestinal struggles, slaughterings, massacres, and assassinations.
“It was anarchy in all its horror, fed by family hatreds and the rivalry of tribe against tribe – Arabs of the North against Arabs of the South, Yemenites against Kaishites, Syrians against Medinites. All these Asiatics had a common enemy in the nomad African, the Berber, the eternal spoiler of cities and the auxiliary of all invaders.”[12]
Executions, normally following torture, were most often by crucifixion. This was the fate even of the ninety year-old Abd el-Malik, who was beaten, slashed with swords and then crucified between a pig and a dog. “After that, Bertrand continues, “Yemenites and Kaishites … came to blows among themselves. The Kaishites, under the leadership of their chief, Somail, routed their adversaries in the plain of Secunda, the Roman town on the other side of the Guadalquiver opposite Cordova. The victorious Somail had the Yemenite chiefs beheaded in the square in front of the Cathedral of Saint Vincent, which as yet was only half turned into a mosque.
“Seventy heads had already fallen when one of the chiefs in alliance with Somail protested against this horrible butchery, not in the name of humanity, but in the name of Musulman solidarity. Somail, nevertheless, went on with his executions until his ally, indignant at his excessive cruelty, threatened to turn against him.”[13]
Again, “Nothing emerges from this perpetual killing but the savagery, the brutality, and the cruelty of the new-comers. Under their domination … Spain got used to being ridden over and devastated periodically, in a way that soon became as regular as the alteration of the seasons.”[14] This pattern, set at the beginning, continued throughout the Muslim period. The savagery inflicted upon fellow Muslims was but a pale reflection of the atrocities committed against the Christian unbelievers in the North, whose territory was raided twice a year by every Muslim ruler.[15] And to top all of this, Islamic Spain became the hub of a vast new slave-trade. Hundreds of thousands of European slaves, both from Christian territories and from the lands of the pagan Slavs, were imported into the Caliphate, there to be used (if female) as concubines or to be castrated (if male) and made into harem guards or the personal body-guards of the caliph. According to Bertrand, “This army of Slavs [eunuchs] … was the main instrument of the Caliph’s authority. His power was a military dictatorship. He maintained himself only thanks to these foreigners.”[16]
In such circumstances, the historian can surely be permitted a wry smile at the popular politically-correct definition of Islam as a “religion of peace.” Indeed, insofar as the primary injunction of Islam is not to covert unbelievers but to establish political control through force or the threat of force (followed by the application of Shariah Law), it is evident that Islam is not even a religion in the normal sense of the word. It displays in fact all the characteristics of a totalitarian political ideology. There are, it is true, religious features, such as the promise of Paradise to believers; but then again the great totalitarian ideologies of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – anarchism, socialism and fascism – also displayed decided religious features. And the fact that it is a political ideology rather than a religion explains the “egalitarianism” which some moderns have noted and praised in Islam.[17] Almost all totalitarian ideologies are egal
itarian to a greater or lesser degree. That does not however make them progressive or humanitarian. Stalin's Soviet Union, one of the most brutal regimes ever to appear in history, was also one of the most egalitarian: In the Soviet Union a young man or woman of peasant or proletarian background could easily reach the highest offices in the land by merit – or by doing what the regime required. And the “egalitarianism” of Islam, like that of many other extremist ideologies, was not extended to everyone. Three groups were excluded: women, slaves, and non-believers.
It should be noted too that, like anarchism, socialism and fascism, Islam seeks, through political means, to return the world to an imagined age of primeval innocence and pristine morality. Islam, it is claimed, was the way of Adam and Eve before the fall of mankind and its corruption. (Compare with anarchist/socialist ideas of human alienation caused by the development of private property, etc.) Thus Muslims insist that one does not “convert” to Islam, one “reverts” to it.
As regards those groups outside the egalitarian fold, the treatment of one of these, non-believers, has given rise to a whole mythology in recent years. It is said, for example, that after the Arab conquests of the seventh century the Christians and Jews of the Middle East and North Africa were permitted to live unmolested and to worship freely. And this life, enjoyed by Christians and Jews under the mantle of the Islamic polity, was superior to that of Christians and Jews in Europe at the time. In short, Islam’s boundaries may have been bloody, but her innards were peaceful and enlightened.
Is this correct?
Although Islam or Islamic power was spread by the sword, it is true that followers of two other religions, specifically “Religions of the Book” (i.e., those of a biblical origin, namely Judaism and Christianity), were permitted to continue the practice of their faiths. Other faiths, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, which had no biblical roots, fared much less well. Nonetheless, in all of the lands conquered by the Muslims it was possible, for centuries afterward, to find sizable Jewish and Christian communities, and these groups were accorded what was known as dhimmi, or “protected” status. Jews and Christians must pay a poll tax, named a jizya, from which Muslims were exempt. Aside from this, Jews and Christians were almost equal to Muslims before the law.
That at least is the story told in publication after publication. Along with it we find, in the thinking of many modern historians and even theologians, the idea that Islam was a kindred faith; one of the three “Arbahamic” traditions. Such writers are wont to remind their readers that Islam has biblical roots and that the prophets of the Old Testament are honored in the Qur’an. We are reminded too that Islam regarded Jesus as a prophet.
There is no question that Islam does have biblical roots: Characters and events of the Bible – almost exclusively the Old Testament – are found throughout the Qur’an. And it is equally true that Judaism, to begin with at least, was regarded by Muslims in a fraternal light; though this changed radically in the first half of the eighth century – a fact to be examined briefly in the Appendix to the present volume. After that time the Jews were viewed as treacherous apostates who murdered and rejected the prophets of God. As such, they were periodically persecuted and subject to violent attack.
Islam’s relationship with Christianity is and always has been fraught. Contrary to popular belief, it is not true that Muslims honored Christ, for they did not believe that Jesus was the Christ, or the Son of God. They did and do however honor Jesus (Isha); but the Jesus of Islamic tradition has nothing in common with the figure encountered in the New Testament. According to Islam, Jesus taught pure Islam – including all that Islam espouses, such as polygamy, the death penalty for adultery and apostasy, spreading the faith by violent struggle, etc – and the Jesus of the Gospels, they say, is a fabrication invented by Christian propagandists in the late first century, or thereabouts. Furthermore, Jesus did not die on the cross – a lookalike took his place – and he did not rise from the dead.[18]
It is evident from this alone that, whatever politically-correct historians and theologians might say, Islam has almost nothing in common with Christianity. It is equally clear that, given the profound doctrinal and theological differences, its relationship with the followers of the latter faith must always have been strained, to say the least. And, as we shall see, the notion that the “Peoples of the Book,” the Jews and Christians, enjoyed some kind of favored status in Islamic societies is little more than a cruel fiction. As Bat Ye'or has explained at length in a series of works devoted to the subject, the dhimmi Jews and Christians under Sharia Law were subject to a whole series of degrading and oppressive laws which made life all but intolerable. Aside from paying the jizya tax, the dhimmis were also forbidden to build new churches, to ring church bells, display the cross, ride a horse, build a house larger than that of Muslim neighbors and were compelled to wear a special type of clothing for easy identification – a custom copied by the Nazis with regard to the Jews in the 1930s and '40s. Furthermore, a Christian or Jew was not in law the equal of a Muslim: A Muslim's word always took precedence over that of a dhimmi. This in effect meant that the Christian or Jew lived in perpetual fear of the predatory attentions of Muslim neighbors. Any dispute whatsoever, be it over a goat or a chicken, could rapidly escalate into a life or death issue for the dhimmi. The Muslim had only to claim that the dhimmi had insulted Islam to have the latter put on trial for his life. As Bat Ye'or pointed out, the accuser needed two other Muslim witnesses to substantiate the charge of blasphemy, but these were invariably forthcoming, and the dhimmi found himself sentenced to death.
The result of such a pernicious system was inevitable: Christians and Jews learned quickly not to enter into dispute with Muslim neighbors, allowing the latter to exercise a petty tyranny over them.
Such humiliations, we are told, provoked many revolts in Spain during the eighth and ninth centuries, and these were punished by massacres. Insurrections erupted in Saragossa in 781 and 881, Cordoba (805, 818), Merida (805-813, 828 and the following year, and in 868), and again in Toledo (811-819). Many of the insurgents were said to have been crucified, as prescribed in the Qur’an (5:33):
“The revolt in Cordova of 818 was crushed by three days of massacres and pillage, with 300 notables crucified and 20,000 families expelled. Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later. Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousands of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women.”[19]
It is of course true, as we shall see, that we should be very cautious about all reports emanating from the Dark Age centuries (roughly mid-seventh to mid-tenth). There are very good grounds for believing that almost all the documentary material relating to this epoch is the product of forgery perpetrated later in the Middle Ages. The likelihood is that much of what passes for eighth and ninth century “history” is simply the history of the tenth century backdated by a couple of hundred years. Nonetheless, there are very good grounds for believing that conditions in Spain during and immediately after the initial Muslim invasion of Spain were indeed savage. Furthermore, during the tenth and eleventh centuries, which are certainly within the period from which we have accurate and truthful documentation, the evidence of Islamic brutality is not difficult to find. Between 1011 and 1013 hundreds of Jews
were massacred by Muslim mobs in Cordoba, whilst in Granada, up to five thousand Jews perished in a pogrom in 1066. The Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa wreaked enormous destruction on the Jewish and Christian populations of both regions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Suspicious of the sincerity of Jewish converts to Islam, the Almohads empowered Muslim “inquisitors” (antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) to remove children from such families and place them in the care of Muslims. A prominent Andalusian jurist, Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 1064), wrote that Allah has established the infidels’ ownership of their property merely to provide booty for Muslims.[20]
None of this sounds like the attitude or behavior of a tolerant or enlightened faith. If the Muslims tolerated the existence of Christians within their territories, it was only as an exploitable resource, much in the same way humans tolerate the existence of large numbers of farm animals throughout the countryside. So appalling were conditions for Christians and Jews under Islam that, in the course of centuries, they shrank to vanishing-point throughout the Near East and North Africa. It is also worth remembering that a victor is more inclined to be, and can afford to be, magnanimous. We need not repeat here the calamities suffered by Christians at the hands of Muslims during the century and a half after Muhammad’s death, and how a caliphate was founded on the ruins of Christian kingdoms from Syria and Egypt to Spain and the Pyrenees. It is not too difficult to imagine the overwhelming sense of gloom felt by Christians as they observed these events unfold, and the growing sense of terror that the faith of Christ was about to be extinguished even in the heart of Europe. And whilst it is true that most of the conquered Christians were permitted to retain their faith and its practice, the massacre and enslavement of the conquered populations, very often on the slightest pretext, was common.