The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  Islamic tradition held that Muhammad himself had prophesied the Muslim conquest of Constantinople, as well as of Rome itself, which remains an object of jihadi desire to this day. The modern-day Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in writing about “signs of the victory of Islam,” referred to a hadith:

  The Prophet Muhammad was asked: “What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya [Rome]?” He answered: “The city of Hirqil [ruled by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius] will be conquered first”—that is, Constantinople—Romiyya is the city called today ‘Rome,’ the capital of Italy. The city of Hirqil [that is, Constantinople] was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered]. This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice—once from the South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens.”53

  When the slaughter and pillage was finished, Mehmet II ordered an Islamic scholar to mount the high pulpit of the Hagia Sophia and declare that there was no God but Allah, and Muhammad was his prophet. The magnificent old church was turned into a mosque; hundreds of other churches in Constantinople and elsewhere suffered the same fate. Millions of Christians joined the ranks of the dhimmis; others were enslaved, and many were killed. Mehmet went from the great cathedral-turned-mosque to the Sacred Palace, which had been considerably damaged and looted. As he walked through the ruined building, he recited a line from a Persian poem: “The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars; the owl calls the watches in Afrasiab’s towers.”54

  While the conquered city was still smoldering, Mehmet turned his mind away from war and looked for some relaxation. He sent a eunuch to the home of Lukas Notaras’ home, demanding that the megadux send him his fourteen-year-old son, renowned for his appearance, for the Sultan’s delectation. Notaras refused, whereupon the sultan, his evening spoiled, furiously ordered the boy killed, along with his brother-in-law and father. Notaras asked that the two young men be killed first, so that they wouldn’t lose heart seeing him killed and give in to the sultan’s immoral desires. Mehmet obliged him. Once all three were beheaded, Mehmet ordered that their heads be placed on his banquet table.55

  Jihad causes the Renaissance

  One consequence of the fall of Constantinople was the emigration of Greek intellectuals to Western Europe. Muslim territorial expansion at Byzantine expense led so many Greeks to seek refuge in the West that Western universities became filled with Platonists and Aristotelians to an unprecedented extent. This led to the rediscovery of classical philosophy and literature and to an intellectual and cultural flowering the like of which the world had never seen (and still hasn’t).

  The Jihad in Eastern Europe

  If the jihadis had had their way, however, those Greek refugees would not have been safe even in their new homes. Once Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire had fallen, the jihadis turned their sights again to the rest of Europe. First Mehmet cleared Asia Minor of any resistance to his rule. When his own mother, a Syrian Christian slave, pleaded with him not to attack the city of Trebizond, which had become a center of opposition to the Ottomans, Mehmet replied: “Mother, the sword of Islam is in my hand.”56

  The rulers of Europe knew this. Even though it had been a very long time coming, the fall of Constantinople was a profound shock to Western Europe. There were immediate calls for a new Crusade to wrest the great city from the warriors of jihad. In 1455, the new pope, Calixtus III, took a solemn oath at his consecration:

  I, Pope Calixtus III, promise and vow to the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to the Ever-Virgin Mother of God, to the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and to all the heavenly host, that I will do everything in my power, even if need be with the sacrifice of my life, aided by the counsel of my worthy brethren, to reconquer Constantinople, which in punishment for the sin of man has been taken and ruined by Mahomet II, the son of the devil and the enemy of our Crucified Redeemer.

  Further, I vow to deliver the Christians languishing in slavery, to exalt the true Faith, and to extirpate the diabolical sect of the reprobate and faithless Mahomet in the East. For there the light of faith is almost completely extinguished. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten. Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee. If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy, God and His holy Gospel help me. Amen.57

  A Crusader force assembled and defeated the jihadis at Belgrade in 1456, but that was as far as it was able to get. Constantinople was securely in the hands of Islam, and the warriors of jihad were advancing. In 1461, Mehmet brought the sword of Islam against the Wallachian prince Vlad Dracula, whose surname meant “son of the dragon,” after his father, who was known as The Dragon, or Dracul.

  At one point, Dracula’s forces invaded Ottoman territory and then retreated; when Mehmet’s forces entered the area in Targoviste in modern-day Romania, they encountered the horrifying sight of twenty thousand corpses impaled on stakes, Vlad Dracula’s favorite method of execution—which earned him the name Vlad the Impaler. Mehmet, appalled, pursued Dracula and finally drove him into exile; upon this victory, Mehmet’s commanders presented him with the gift of two thousand heads of Dracula’s men.58

  The jihadis proceeded on to Bosnia. King Stephen of Bosnia wrote to Pope Pius II that the sultan’s “insatiable thirst for domination knows no limits.” Mehmet, said Stephen, wanted not just Bosnia but Hungary and Venice, adding, “He also speaks frequently of Rome, which he dreams of attaining.”59 The renowned warrior Skanderbeg held out fiercely in Albania, such that when he died in 1467, Mehmet exulted: “At last Europe and Asia belong to me! Unhappy Christianity. It has lost both its sword and its buckler.”60

  Mehmet’s joy was a trifle premature. Venice fought fiercely against the Ottomans and dashed the sultan’s hopes of jihad conquest of Europe. He never got an opportunity to besiege Rome. But the warriors of jihad were patient.

  Before he died in 1481, only forty-nine years old, Mehmet enacted a law designed to ensure the ongoing stability of his domains: “For the welfare of the state, the one of my sons to whom God grants the Sultanate may lawfully put his brothers to death. This has the approval of a majority of jurists.”61

  II. DHIMMI OPPRESSION IN EGYPT AND NORTH AFRICA

  Egypt was outside Ottoman domains during this period, ruled by the Mamluks, a class of slave warriors, from around 1250. The Mamluks were determined to reassert the humiliations of the dhimma over the non-Muslims in their domains. The fourteenth-century Muslim historian Ibn Naqqash recorded that in 1301, the vizier of Gharb in North Africa undertook the pilgrimage to Mecca, and on his way stopped in Cairo to visit the Mamluk sultan al-Malik an-Nasir and several other high dignitaries, including the emir Rukn ad-Din Baybar al-Jashangir, “who offered him magnificent presents and received him with the greatest distinction.”62

  But amid all the pleasantness of the visit, the vizier had a complaint. He was not happy with what he had seen in Egypt, where the dhimmi Jews and Christians were “attired in the most elegant clothes” and “rode on mules, mares, and expensive horses.”63 Even worse, they were “considered worthy of being employed in the most important offices, thus gaining authority over the Muslims.”64

  In Gharb, by contrast, the Jews and Christians were “maintained with constraints of humiliation and degradation. Thus they were not permitted to ride on horseback, nor to be employed in the public administration.”65

  The emir Rukn and several others were impressed, and “unanimously declared,” according to Ibn Naqqash, “that if similar conditions were to prevail in Egypt this would greatly enhance the [Muslim] religion. Consequently, they assembled the Christians and Jews on Thursday, 20 Rajab, and informed them that they would no longer be employed either in the public admi
nistration or in the service of the emirs. They were to change their turbans: blue ones for the Christians, who were moreover to wear a special belt [zunnar] around their waists; and yellow turbans for the Jews.”66

  The Jewish and Christian leaders appealed and even offered substantial sums for the rescinding of these new decrees, but to no avail. And there was more. Ibn Naqqash continued: “The churches of Misr [old Cairo] and Cairo were closed and their portals were sealed after having been nailed up.”67 The new rules were swiftly enforced: “By the twenty-second of Rajab all the Jews were wearing yellow turbans and the Christians blue ones; and if they rode on horseback, they were obliged to ride with one of their legs bent under them. Next, the dhimmis were dismissed from the public administration and the functions that they occupied in the service of the emirs. They were then prohibited to ride horses or mules. Consequently, many of them were converted to Islam.”68

  The sultan extended some of these rules to all of his domains. According to Ibn Naqqash, “The Sultan gave orders to all the provinces recently added to his states and in which there were houses owned by Jews and Christians, in order that all those that were higher than the surrounding Muslim abodes should be demolished to their height. Furthermore all the dhimmis who owned a shop near that of a Muslim, should lower their mastaba [ground floor] so that those of the Muslims would be higher. Moreover, he recommended vigilance in the observance of the distinctive badges [ghiyar] in accordance with ancient custom.”69

  As time went by, however, these laws were once again relaxed, as the complex realities of human relationships were always in tension with the cold statute. But since they were part of Islamic law, they could be reasserted more easily than they could be relaxed. In 1419, the Egyptian Mamluk sultan Malik Safyad-din summoned the Coptic pope Gabriel V to his presence. “While remaining standing,” recounted the fifteenth-century Muslim historian Ibn Taghribirdi, Gabriel “received reproaches and blows and was berated by the sultan on account of the humiliations to which the Muslims had been subjected by the prince of the Abyssinians,” although it was wildly implausible that a subjugated people would have dared to subject their overlords to such treatment. Nonetheless, Gabriel was “even threatened with death.”

  The real problem was that the Christians were no longer observing the dhimmi restrictions. Malik summoned the chief of the Cairo police and reprimanded him for the “contempt” the Christians had toward the laws requiring that they wear distinctive dress. But attire was the least of the Christians’ problems. Ibn Taghribirdi continued:

  After a long discussion between the doctors of the Law and the sultan on this subject, it was decided that none of these infidels would be employed in government offices, nor by the emirs; neither would they escape the measures taken to maintain them in a state of humiliation. Thereupon the sultan summoned Al-Akram Fada’il, the Christian, the vizier’s secretary, who had been imprisoned for several days; he was beaten, stripped of his clothes, and ignominiously paraded through the streets of Cairo in the company of the chief of police, who proclaimed, “This is the reward for Christians employed in government offices!” After all this, he was thrown back into prison.

  So thoroughly did the sultan carry out these measures, that nowhere in Egypt was a Christian to be found employed in the administration. These infidels, as well as the Jews, were obliged to remain at home, decrease the volume of their turbans, and shorten their sleeves. All were prevented from riding on donkeys, with the result that when the [common] people saw a mounted Christian, they attacked him and confiscated his donkey and all that he had.…

  Thus the edict issued by this prince is tantamount to a second conquest of Egypt; in this manner was Islam exalted and infidelity humiliated, and nothing is more praiseworthy in the eyes of Allah.70

  The humiliation was most vividly enforced during the payment of the jizya. In the latter half of the fifteenth century, the Berber Islamic scholar Muhammad al-Maghili, who was responsible for the expulsion of the Jews from the city of Tlemcen and the destruction of the synagogue there, reiterated the manner in which the dhimmis were to make their payments:

  On the day of payment they shall be assembled in a public place like the suq. They should be standing there waiting in the lowest and dirtiest place. The acting officials representing the Law shall be placed above them and shall adopt a threatening attitude so that it seems to them, as well as to the others, that our object is to degrade them by pretending to take their possessions. They will realize that we are doing them a favor [again] in accepting from them the jizya and letting them [thus] go free. Then they shall be dragged one by one [to the official responsible] for the exacting of payment. When paying, the dhimmi will receive a blow and will be thrust aside so that he will think that he has escaped the sword through this [insult]. This is the way that the friends of the Lord, of the first and last generations will act toward their infidel enemies, for might belongs to Allah, to His Prophet, and to the Believers.71

  Thus it was throughout history in the various Islamic domains: periods of relaxation of the dhimmi laws would be followed by periods of their reassertion, often in the context of revivalist movements that blamed the troubles of the Muslims on the prosperity of the dhimmis, and on Allah’s anger that they had not been put in their place.

  III. THE RAVAGING OF INDIA

  Despoiling India for the Abbasids

  By the dawn of the fourteenth century, the warriors of jihad had managed to destroy virtually all of the renowned Hindu temples within their domains in India and had plundered the treasures of those temples for their own personal enrichment and the endowment of the mosques they constructed.72 Taxes were high and raids frequent. Consequently, the Muslim rulers of India had at their disposal almost unimaginable wealth. In 1343, therefore, when the Delhi sultan Muhammad ibn Tughlaq attempted to shore up the legitimacy of his rule by attaching it to the authority of the Abbasid caliphate—even though by this time the Abbasid caliph al-Hakim was almost powerless, exiled from Baghdad, and residing in virtual impotence in Cairo—he was able to send al-Hakim extraordinary gifts. The Muslim court historian Ziyauddin Barani remarked drily: “So great was the faith of the Sultan in the Abbasid Khalifas that he would have sent all his treasures in Delhi to Egypt, had it not been for the fear of robbers.”73

  When an emissary of the Abbasids visited Delhi, Muhammad ibn Tughlaq showered him with gifts as well, including a million tankahs, which was equivalent to four hundred thousand dinars, as well as land, gold, silver, sex slaves, and robes that had in place of buttons “pearls as large as big hazel nuts.”74 The emissary was able to witness the brutal efficiency of the Delhi sultan’s rule, for executions were carried out right in front of the palace, and were so frequent that the entrances to the palaces were often blocked by corpses.75

  Muhammad ibn Tughlaq amassed all of this wealth at the expense of his Hindu subjects. At one point, recounts a contemporary historian, Muhammad ibn Tughlaq “led forth his army to ravage Hindostan. He laid the country waste from Kanauj to Dalmau [on the Ganges, in the Rai Baréli District, Oudh], and every person that fell into his hands he slew. Many of the inhabitants fled and took refuge in the jungles, but the Sultan had the jungles surrounded, and every individual that was captured was killed.”76

  Muhammad’s successor, Firuz Shah Tughlaq, exulted that “the greatest and best of honours that I obtained through God’s mercy was, that by my obedience and piety, and friendliness and submission to the Khalifa, the representative of the holy Prophet, my authority was confirmed, for it is by his [the caliph’s] sanction that the power of the kings is assured, and no king is secure until he has submitted himself to the Khalifa, and has received a confirmation from the sacred throne.”77

  Bringing Islam to the Hindus

  Secure in this legitimacy, Firuz Shah Tughlaq resumed the jihad against the Hindus, targeting in 1360 one of the few remaining grand Hindu temples, the temple of Jagannath at Puri in southe
astern India. According to Barani’s Tarikh-e Firuz Shahi (History of Firuz Shah):

  Allah who is the only true God and has no other emanation, endowed the king of Islam with the strength to destroy this ancient shrine on the eastern sea-coast and to plunge it into he sea, and after its destruction he [Firuz Shah] ordered the image of Jagannath to be perforated, and disgraced it by casting it down on the ground. They dug out other idols which were worshipped by the polytheists in the kingdom of Jajnagar and overthrew them as they did the image of Jagannath, for being laid in front of the mosques along the path of the Sunnis and the way of the musallis [Muslim congregation for namaz (prayers)] and stretched them in front of the portals of every mosque, so that the body and sides of the images might be trampled at the time of ascent and descent, entrance and exit, by the shoes on the feet of the Muslims.78

  The jihadis were merciless. After this, Barani recounted, they proceeded to a nearby island, where “nearly 100,000 men of Jajnagar had taken refuge with their women, children, kinsmen and relations.”79 But the Muslims transformed “the island into a basin of blood by the massacre of the unbelievers.… Women with babies and pregnant ladies were haltered, manacled, fettered and enchained, and pressed as slaves into service at the house of every soldier.”80 At Nagarkot, Firuz Shah Tughlaq “broke the idols of Jvalamukhi, mixed their fragments with the flesh of cows and hung them in nosebags round the necks of the Brahmins. He sent the principal idol as trophy to Medina.”81