The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  Abu Ishaq referred to the Jews as “apes” because the Qur’an depicts Allah transforming Sabbath-breaking Jews into apes and pigs (2:63–65; 5:59–60; 7:166).

  The Muslims of Granada heeded Abu Ishaq’s call. On December 30, 1066, rioting Muslims, enraged by the humiliation of a Jew ruling over Muslims, murdered four thousand Jews in Granada. The maddened Muslim mob crucified Joseph ibn Naghrila and plundered the homes of the Jews.33

  The Almoravids and El Cid

  The Christians continued to advance in Spain. In a major defeat for Islamic al-Andalus, the forces of King Alfonso VI of Castile and León captured Toledo, the old capital of Visigothic Spain, in 1085. The leaders of the various taifas, alarmed, in 1086 called for help from the Almoravids, a Berber Muslim dynasty that had taken control of Morocco and its environs in the middle of the eleventh century.

  The Almoravids, fearsome in appearance for their practice of wearing veils over the lower half of their faces, which they did to protect themselves from the twin threats of desert sands and evil spirits, entered Spain swiftly. Their king, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, sent a messenger to Alfonso VI, offering him the standard Islamic choices for the People of the Book: conversion to Islam, submission to the hegemony of the Muslims, or war.34 Alfonso wrote back a contemptuous refusal; when Yusuf received the paper containing this message, he turned it over and wrote on the back, “What will happen, you shall see.”35

  What Alfonso saw was nothing that he wanted to see. The battle, at the village of Sagrajas north of Badajoz, was an unmitigated disaster for the Christians. Alfonso lost over half of his army. When it was over, the Muslims beheaded the Christian corpses and arranged their heads into piles; the muezzins then climbed atop the piles of heads to call the Muslims to prayer, displaying once again in the blood and gore of the Christians’ heads the victory and superiority of Islam.36

  Yusuf and the Almoravids had stopped the momentum of the Christians in Spain and ensured that Islamic al-Andalus would endure. But the whole situation was nonetheless unprecedented. The forces of jihad had never had this much trouble holding a territory they had conquered for Islam, and seldom, if ever, would again. Even as the Almoravids united the taifas under their rule and continued to wage jihad against the Christians, the Muslims were still quite often on the defensive. The Christians were determined not to let Spain be Islamized, and they kept pushing against the Muslim domains.

  Alfonso VI was thus determined even in defeat. In the wake of the disaster, he sent out appeals for help to Christian leaders all over Spain and France, warning them that the Almoravid advance deeply endangered Christianity in Spain, and asking them to come join him in the defense of Christendom. Alfonso sent one of these appeals to Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, a Castilian warrior with whom Alfonso had a long history.

  Rodrigo had been a Castilian commander under King Sancho II of Castile, the son of Fernando I, Ferdinand the Great. Fernando had been king of Castile and León; when he died, Sancho became king of Castile, and his brother Alfonso became king of León. (A third brother, Garcia, became king of Galicia.) Sancho, suspecting that Alfonso intended to make war upon his two brothers and unite their kingdoms under his rule, struck preemptively: his commander Rodrigo defeated Alfonso in battle, and Sancho became king of León as well as Castile.

  Soon afterward, however, Sancho was murdered. Since he had no children, his kingdoms passed into the possession of his eldest brother, who was none other than the one he had just warred against and deposed, Alfonso. Rodrigo and a group of other Castilian noblemen then forced Alfonso to swear, solemnly and repeatedly, that he had not been involved in Sancho’s murder. Alfonso had no choice but to comply, but his heart began to burn in bitter resentment toward those who had humiliated him—principally Rodrigo, whom he eventually exiled.

  Rodrigo was a Christian. He knew well what the warriors of jihad had in store for the Christians of Spain. But the Christian king whom he had served had exiled him. Whether out of necessity or a desire for revenge, or both, Rodrigo offered his services to Yusuf al-Mu’taman ibn Hud, the king of the Muslim taifa of Zaragoza. He fought so valiantly in the service of the Muslims that they began to call him El Sayyid (The Master), which in Spanish folklore became El Cid.

  By that name, El Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar has become one of the great heroes of Spanish history, and the central figure of the Cantar de Mio Cid, the renowned Spanish epic poem. For when he received Alfonso’s appeal, he returned and again took up the struggle against the Almoravids. He took the city of Valencia from the Muslims, and in 1097 defeated the jihadis decisively at Bairén, near Gandia in southeast Spain.

  When El Cid died in 1099, the Christians of Spain controlled two-thirds of the Iberian Peninsula. The momentum of the jihad had been decisively broken. And the impetus for more initiatives against the Muslims came continuously from the systematic mistreatment of the Christians who still lived in the Islamic domains. Even when they were not facing active persecution, if Christians and Jews didn’t abide by the restrictions placed upon them as dhimmis, they could in accordance with the Sharia be lawfully killed or sold into slavery.37

  Around 1100, the Muslim governing official and poet Ibn Abdun detailed the rules for dhimmis in Seville:

  A Muslim must not act as a masseur to a Jew or Christian; he must not clear their rubbish nor clean their latrines. In fact, the Jew and the Christian are more suited for such work, which are degrading tasks. A Muslim must not act as a guide or stableman for an animal owned by a Jew or Christian; he must not act as their donkey-driver or hold the stirrups for them. If it be noticed that a Muslim contravenes these prohibitions, he shall be rebuked.…

  It is forbidden to sell a coat that once belonged to a leper, to a Jew or Christian, unless the buyer is informed of its origin; likewise, if this garment once belonged to a debauched person.

  No tax-officer or policeman, Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual; on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to accost them with the greeting “Peace be upon you [as-salam alayka]!” In effect, “Satan has gained the mastery over them, and caused them to forget God’s Remembrance. Those are Satan’s party; why, Satan’s party, surely they are the losers!” (Koran 58:20) A distinctive sign must be imposed upon them in order that they may be recognized and this will be for them a form of disgrace.

  The sound of bells must be prohibited in Muslim territories and reserved only for the lands of the infidels.…

  It would be preferable not to let Jewish or Christian physicians be able to heal Muslims.38

  If the dhimmis violated any of these provisions or any of the others that enforced and reminded them daily of their subjugation, they could be sold into slavery. In 1126, several thousand Christians were sent to Morocco to serve as slaves. Once again, the Muslim leadership was acting within the bounds of its right to kill or enslave dhimmis who violated the terms of their protection agreement.39

  Indeed, Umayyad Spain became a center of the Islamic slave trade. Muslim buyers could purchase sex-slave girls as young as eleven years old, as well as slave boys for sex as well, or slave boys raised to become slave soldiers. Also for sale were eunuchs, useful for guarding harems.40 Blonde slaves seized in jihad raids on Christian nations north of al-Andalus were especially prized, and fetched high prices. Slave traders would use makeup to whiten the faces and dye to lighten the hair of darker slaves, so that they could get more money for them.41

  A twelfth-century witness of the sale of sex slaves described the market:

  The merchant tells the slave girls to act in a coquettish manner with the old men and with the timid men among the potential buyers to make them crazy with desire. The merchant paints red the tips of the fingers of a white slave; he paints in gold those of a black slave; and he dresses them all in transparent clothes, the white female slaves in pink and the black ones in yellow and red.42


  If the girls did not cooperate, of course, they would be beaten or killed.

  The Andalusian slave market became particularly important in the eleventh century, when two of the other principal markets from which the Muslims drew slaves, Central Asia and southeastern Europe, dried up. The Slavs by this time had converted to Christianity and were no longer interested in selling their people as slaves to Islamic traders. In Central Asia, meanwhile, the Turks had converted to Islam. The primary market for slaves among Muslims was for non-Muslims, as enslaving fellow Muslims was considered a violation of the Qur’an’s requirement to be “merciful to one another” (48:29); hence Muslim slave traders had to look elsewhere for merchandise.43

  II. THE JIHAD IN INDIA

  Quiescence, Not Reform

  Outside of Spain, the jihad, at least against infidels, was relatively quiet during the tenth century, as the Abbasids struggled to hold on to their domains, battling not only the Qarmatians but the Shi’ite Fatimid caliphate that had been established in 909 and ultimately wrested much of North Africa and the Middle East from Abbasid control.

  That the jihad against unbelievers went through a period of relative quiet was not due to any reform in Islam, or to reconsideration or rejection of the exhortations in the Qur’an and the teachings of Muhammad to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. It wasn’t pursued as relentlessly as it had been in the seventh and eighth centuries solely because the various Muslim factions were preoccupied with infighting, such that they did not have the resources to carry the battle to the infidels the way they once had done. But the jihad would be taken up again as soon as any significant number of Muslims had the will, the unity, and sufficient resources to do so.

  The Jihad Against India

  At the beginning of the eleventh century, there arose a Muslim commander who was like Tariq ibn Ziyad in two important ways: he was full of zeal for Islam, and had the valor and ruthlessness to bring that zeal to jihad warfare. His name was Mahmud of Ghazni (971-1030), a native of Khurasan who revived the long-dormant jihad against India and greatly extended Islam’s presence on the subcontinent. For thirty years, Mahmud terrorized non-Muslims in what is today northeast Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northwest India.44

  In 994, Mahmud became governor of Khurasan. Bestowing upon himself the title of sultan (governmental power), Mahmud swiftly began to expand his domains—all in the name of Islam.45 Mahmud’s domains were nominally under the suzerainty of the Abbasid caliph; when Mahmud secured the caliph al-Qadir bi-’llah’s recognition in 999, he pledged annual jihad raids against India.46 He didn’t manage to invade that frequently, but he did lead seventeen large-scale jihad incursions into the subcontinent.47

  The thirteenth-century Muslim historian Minhaj al-Siraj Juzjani, author of the Tabaqat-i Nasiri, a history of Islam’s rise, noted that as Mahmud waged jihad in India, “he converted so many thousands of idol temples into masjids [mosques].”48 Mahmud broke the idols whenever he could, so as to demonstrate the power of Islam and the superiority of Allah to the gods of the people of India. When he defeated the Hindu ruler Raja Jaipal in 1001, he had Jaipal “paraded about in the streets so that his sons and chieftains might see him in that condition of shame, bonds and disgrace; and that the fear of Islam might fly abroad through the country of the infidels.”49

  Mahmud of Ghazni made an immense effort to conquer Gujarat, according to Zakariya ibn Muhammad, another thirteenth-century Muslim historian, because he hoped that if he was able to destroy Gujarat utterly, its inhabitants would be shocked and demoralized into submission, and would convert to Islam en masse.50 The people of Gujarat, however, did not submit but resisted, and fifty thousand were killed.51 Entering one Hindu temple in Gujarat, Mahmud was overcome with anger at seeing the idols; raising his battle-axe, he hit one with full force, breaking it into pieces. The pieces were carried to Ghazni and placed at the threshold of the mosque as a sign of the victory of Islam over the idols and the superiority of Allah to them.52

  Mahmud proceeded with a massive army of jihadis to Thanessar in Hindustan, where he had heard that there was a magnificent temple in which was placed an idol, Jagarsom, that people from all over the region venerated. Anandapala, the Hindu ruler of the Shahi dynasty in modern-day eastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, heard of Mahmud’s advance and sought to make peace, sending an envoy to Mahmud offering the Sultan fifty elephants if he would abandon the jihad against Jagarsom. Mahmud ignored the offer, but when he and his men arrived in Thanessar, they found the city entirely empty of people.

  Nonetheless, there was plenty to plunder. The Muslims roamed the empty streets, seizing and destroying all the idols from the temples. They transported Jagarsom to Ghazni, where Mahmud ordered that the now broken idol be set in front of the mosque, so that the Muslims would trample upon its pieces on their way in and out for prayer.53

  The Kitab i Yamini, an eleventh-century account of Mahmud of Ghazni’s reign up to 1020 by the Muslim historian Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Utbi, contains another account of Mahmud’s attacking Thanessar, apparently during one of his other invasions of India. Al-Utbi recorded that the leader of Thanessar “was obstinate in his infidelity and denial of God. So the Sultan marched against him with his valiant warriors, for the purpose of planting the standards of Islam and extirpating idolatry.”54

  Mahmud and his jihadis showed no mercy: “The blood of the infidels flowed so copiously that the stream was discoloured, notwithstanding its purity, and people were unable to drink it.”55 Al-Utbi was sure this was a sign of the divine favor upon the Muslims: “The victory was gained by God’s grace, who has established Islam forever as the best of religions, notwithstanding that idolaters revolt against it.”56

  The same historian boasted that Mahmud “purified Hind from idolatry, and raised mosques therein,” but the Sultan wasn’t finished. In 1013, he marched with a large jihadi army toward Lahore, the capital of Hindustan, where he found a Buddhist temple. Inside the temple was a stone bearing an inscription saying, according to al-Utbi, “that the temple had been founded fifty thousand years ago.” Mahmud of Ghazni “was surprised at the ignorance of these people, because those who believe in the true faith represent that only seven thousand years have elapsed since the creation of the world.”57

  Mahmud and his men went on to Nandana, the capital of the Kabul Shahi kingdom under King Anandapal. Here again, the jihadis slaughtered the population indiscriminately and destroyed the temples. Al-Utbi recounted: “The Sultan returned in the rear of immense booty, and slaves were so plentiful that they became very cheap and men of respectability in their native land were degraded by becoming slaves of common shopkeepers. But such is the goodness of Allah, who bestows honour on his own religion and degrades infidelity.”58

  Five years later, Mahmud entered Hindustan again and marched toward the fortress of Mahaban. Al-Utbi said that “the infidels…deserted the fort and tried to cross the foaming river…but many of them were slain, taken or drowned.… Nearly fifty thousand men were killed.”59

  Then at Mathura, al-Utbi added, “the Sultan gave orders that all the temples should be burnt with naptha and fire, and levelled with the ground.”60 At Kanauj, the Muslim historian continued, “there were nearly ten thousand temples.… Many of the inhabitants of the place fled in consequence of witnessing the fate of their deaf and dumb idols. Those who did not fly were put to death. The Sultan gave his soldiers leave to plunder and take prisoners.”61 Then, at Shrawa, “the Muslims paid no regard to the booty till they had satiated themselves with the slaughter of the infidels and worshippers of sun and fire. The friends of Allah searched the bodies of the slain for three days in order to obtain booty.… The booty amounted in gold and silver, rubies and pearls nearly to three thousand dirhams, and the number of prisoners may be conceived from the fact that each was sold for two to ten dirhams. They were afterwards taken to Ghazni and merchants came from distant cities to purchase them, so that the co
untries of Mawaraun-Nahr, Iraq and Khurasan were filled with them, and the fair and the dark, the rich and the poor, were commingled in one common slavery.”62

  Al-Utbi concluded with satisfaction that Mahmud of Ghazni “demolished idol temples and established Islam. He captured…cities, killed the polluted wretches, destroying the idolaters, and gratifying Muslims. He then returned home and promulgated accounts of the victories he obtained for Islam.” Mahmud repeated the vow he had made to the Abbasid caliph that “every year he would undertake a holy war against Hind.”63