The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (22 page)

In Islamic theology, if any land has ever belonged to the House of Islam, it belongs forever—and Muslims must wage war to regain control over it. In 974, faced with a string of losses to the Byzantines, the Abbasid (Sunni) caliph in Baghdad declared jihad. This followed yearly jihad campaigns against the Byzantines launched by Saif al-Dawla, ruler of the Shi’ite Hamdanid dynasty in Aleppo from 944 to 967. Saif al-Dawla appealed to Muslims to fight the Byzantines on the pretext that they were taking lands that belonged to the House of Islam. This appeal was so successful that Muslim warriors from as far off as Central Asia joined the jihads.
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However, Sunni/Shi’ite disunity ultimately hampered Islamic jihad efforts, and in 1001 the Byzantine emperor Basil II concluded a ten-year truce with the Fatimid (Shi’ite) caliph.
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Basil, however, soon learned that to conclude such truces was futile. In 1004, the sixth Fatimid caliph, Abu ‘Ali al-Mansur al-Hakim (985–1021), turned violently against the faith of his Christian mother and uncles (two of whom were patriarchs), ordering the destruction of churches, the burning of crosses, and the seizure of church property. He moved against the Jews with similar ferocity. Over the next ten years, thirty thousand churches were destroyed, and untold numbers of Christians converted to Islam simply to save their lives. In 1009, al-Hakim gave his most spectacular anti-Christian order: He commanded that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem be destroyed, along with several other churches (including the Church of the Resurrection). The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, rebuilt by the Byzantines in the seventh century after the Persians burned an earlier version, marks the traditional site of Christ’s burial; it also served as a model for the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Al-Hakim commanded that the tomb within be cut down to the bedrock. He ordered Christians to wear heavy crosses around their necks (and for Jews, heavy blocks of wood in the shape of a calf). He piled on other humiliating decrees, culminating in the order that they accept Islam or leave his dominions.
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The erratic caliph ultimately relaxed his persecution of non-Muslims and even returned much of the property he had seized from the Church.
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A partial cause of al-Hakim’s changed attitude was probably his increasingly tenuous connection to Islamic orthodoxy. In 1021, he disappeared under mysterious circumstances; some of his followers proclaimed him divine and founded a sect based on this mystery and other esoteric teachings of a Muslim cleric, Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Darazi (after whom the Druze sect is named).
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Thanks to al-Hakim’s change of policy, which continued after his death, the Byzantines were allowed to rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 1027.
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Nevertheless, Christians were in a precarious position, and pilgrims remained under threat. In 1056, the Muslims expelled three hundred Christians from Jerusalem and forbade European Christians from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
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When the fierce and fanatical Seljuk Turks swept down from Central Asia, they enforced a new Islamic rigor, making life increasingly difficult for both native Christians and pilgrims (whose pilgrimages they blocked). After they crushed the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 and took the Byzantine emperor Romanus IV Diogenes prisoner, all of Asia Minor was open to them, and their advance was virtually unstoppable. In 1076, they conquered Syria; in 1077, Jerusalem. The Seljuk emir Atsiz bin Uwaq promised not to harm the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but once his men had entered the city, they murdered three thousand people.
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The Seljuks established the sultanate of Rum (Rome, referring to the New Rome, Constantinople) in Nicaea that same year, perilously close to Constantinople itself; from there they continued to threaten the Byzantines and harass the Christians all over their new domains.

The Christian empire of Byzantium, which before Islam’s wars of conquest had ruled over a vast expanse including southern Italy, North Africa, the Middle East, and Arabia, was reduced to little more than Greece. It looked as if its death at the hands of the Seljuks was imminent. The Church of Constantinople considered the popes schismatic and had squabbled with them for centuries, but the new emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081–1118), swallowed his pride and appealed for help. And that is how the First Crusade came about: It was a response to the Byzantine Emperor’s call for help.

PC Myth: The Crusades were an early example of the West’s predatory imperialism

Predatory imperialism? Hardly. Pope Urban II, who called for the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, was calling for a defensive action—one that was long overdue. As he explained, he was calling for the Crusade because without any defensive action, “the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked” by the Turks and other Muslim forces. After admonishing his flock to keep peace among themselves, he turned their attention to the East:

For your brethren who live in the east are in urgent need of your help, and you must hasten to give them the aid which has often been promised them. For, as the most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them and have conquered the territory of Romania [the Greek empire] as far west as the shore of the Mediterranean and the Hellespont, which is called the Arm of St. George. They have occupied more and more of the lands of those Christians, and have overcome them in seven battles. They have killed and captured many, and have destroyed the churches and devastated the empire. If you permit them to continue thus for awhile with impunity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them. On this account I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ’s heralds to publish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends…. Moreover, Christ commands it.
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Note that the pope says nothing about conversion or conquest. A call to “destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends” falls harshly on modern ears; however, it was not an exhortation for mass extermination, but one to remove Islamic rule from lands that had been Christian. Another summary of the pope’s speech at Clermont reports that Urban spoke of an “imminent peril threatening you and all the faithful which has brought us hither.”

From the confines of Jerusalem and from the city of Constantinople a grievous report has gone forth and has repeatedly been brought to our ears; namely, that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race wholly alienated from God, “a generation that set not their heart aright and whose spirit was not steadfast with God,” violently invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by pillage and fire. They have led away a part of the captives into their own country, and a part have they have killed by cruel tortures. They have either destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of their own religion. They destroy the altars, after having defiled them with their uncleanness…. The kingdom of the Greeks is now dismembered by them and has been deprived of territory so vast in extent that it could be traversed in two months’ time…. This royal city, however, situated at the center of the earth, is now held captive by the enemies of Christ and is subjected, by those who do not know God, to the worship the heathen. She seeks, therefore, and desires to be liberated and ceases not to implore you to come to her aid. From you especially she asks succor, because as we have already said, God has conferred upon you above all other nations great glory in arms.
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Just Like Today: Defenders of Islam?

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n Islamic law, jihad is obligatory whenever a Muslim territory is attacked: “When non-Muslims invade a Muslim country or near to one,…jihad is personally obligatory upon the inhabitants of that country, who must repel the non-Muslims with whatever they can.”
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The call to jihad has occurred throughout the history of Islam. When the Hamdanid ruler Seyf al-Dawla waged annual jihad campaigns against the Byzantines in the mid-tenth century, Muslims came from far and wide to participate. They came because, in their view, the Byzantines were waging aggressive wars to seize Muslim lands. Later, during the First Crusade, a poet exhorted Muslims to respond: “Do you not owe an obligation to God and Islam, defending thereby young men and old? Respond to God! Woe to you! Respond!”
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The venerable Islamic jurist most beloved of today’s jihadists, Ibn Taymiyya (Taqi al-Din Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya, 1263–1328) considered jihad an absolute: “If the enemy wants to attack the Muslims, then repelling him becomes a duty for all those under attack and for the others in order to help them.”
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Some other examples of calls to jihad during the last hundred years: In 1914, the Ottoman caliph Sultan Mehmet V issued a
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(religious ruling) calling for jihad at the outbreak of World War I; in 2003, a Chechen jihadist group announced: “When the enemy entered a territory, a city or a village where Muslims are living, then everybody is obligated to go to war;”
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in 2003, the Islamic Center for Research at Al-Azhar University in Cairo issued a declaration: “It is in accordance with logic and with Islamic religious law that if the enemy raids the land of the Muslims, Jihad becomes an individual’s commandment, applying to every Muslim man and woman, because our Muslim nation will be subject to a new Crusader invasion targeting the land, honor, belief, and homeland;”
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and when Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, the notorious London-based jihadist imam, said in late 2002, “when the enemy enters Muslim land, such as Palestine, Chechnya, Kosova [sic] or Kashmir,” “all Muslims living within travelling distance of the aggression” must fight, with all possible support from Muslims worldwide.
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Just Like Today: Jihadists from all over

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s they have done throughout history, Muslim warriors travel long distances in order to participate in the latest jihads. In the 1990s, the Balkans became a favored destination for veterans of the jihad wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya. A prominent jihad commander in Bosnia, Abu Abdel Aziz, explained that he went there after meeting with several Islamic authorities in Saudi Arabia. They “all support,” he said, “the religious dictum that ‘the fighting in Bosnia is a fight to make the word of Allah supreme and protect the chastity of Muslims.’ It is because Allah said (in his holy book), ‘Yet, if they ask you for succor against religious persecution, it is your duty to give [them] this succor.’ (Lit. ‘to succor them in religion,’ Qur’an, al-Anfal, 8:72). It is then our (religious) duty to defend our Muslim brethren wherever they are, as long as they are persecuted because they are Muslims and not for any other reason.”
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Before, during, and after the 2003 war in Iraq, jihadists streamed into that country from all over the world—including some unexpected places; a German security official noted in late 2003 that “since the end of the war, there has been a large movement of people motivated by Islamic extremism from Germany and the rest of Europe toward Iraq.”
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The pope’s call invoked the Muslim destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher: “Let the holy sepulcher of our Lord and Saviour, which is possessed by unclean nations, especially arouse you, and the holy places which are now treated with ignominy and irreverently polluted with the filth of the unclean.”
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The Crusades came together as pilgrimages: Christians from Europe made their way to the Holy Land for religious purposes, with the intention to defend themselves if their way was blocked and they were attacked. Many took religious vows. Particularly at the outset, many soldiers left for the Holy Land—and most of the participants in this “People’s Crusade” were unceremoniously massacred by the Turks in Western Asia Minor in August 1096.

PC Myth: The Crusades were fought by Westerners greedy for gain

Of course, not every Crusader’s motives were pure. More than once, many fell from the high ideals of Christian pilgrims. But the PC dogma that the Crusades were unprovoked, imperialist actions against a peaceful, indigenous Muslim population is simply historically inaccurate and reflects distaste for Western civilization rather than genuine historical research.

Pope Urban didn’t envision the Crusades as a chance for gain. He decreed that lands recovered from the Muslims would belong to Alexius Comnenus and the Byzantine Empire. The pope saw the Crusades as an act of sacrifice rather than profit. 28 Crusading was, in fact, prohibitively expensive. Crusaders sold their property to raise money for their long journey to the Holy Land, and did so knowing they might not return.

A typical example of a Crusader was Godfrey of Bouillon, the Duke of Lower Lorraine, and one of the more prominent European lords who “took the cross” (as joining the Crusade was known). He sold off many properties in order to finance his trip, but he clearly planned to come home, rather than settle in the Middle East, because he did not give up his title or all his holdings.
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