Bartle Bull‘Crusade and Jihad’ Review: Conquest and Conquerors Islam created a mighty empire—and historical narratives that assign the Muslim world to the status of perennial victimhood are infantilizing. Bartle Bull reviews “Crusade and Jihad” by William R. Polk.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/crusade-and-jihad-review-conquest-and-conquerors-1535311504
When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632, Islam had not expanded beyond the borders of the Arabian peninsula. His Islamic state grew swiftly in the following century, reaching farther than the empires of Alexander and Genghis Khan and sinking deeper roots. Islam was the only world religion to spread almost entirely by the sword, from North Africa to the northern tier of Sub-Saharan Africa, from the Levant to Mesopotamia and Iran, from Central Asia to India and western China. In foreign lands from the Ganges to the Pillars of Hercules, the invaders left an enduring faith. It was a peerless achievement.
By the time Muhammad died, he had conquered an area larger than Western Europe, but his Arabs were still stopped up in their sandy peninsula by the ancient and powerful empires to the north: Persia and Byzantium. Yet the coming imperial expansion was in the DNA of the system he left behind. Offensive jihad—warfare against the Unbeliever—was a primary obligation of his followers. Muhammad’s own daily example had the force of eternal law, and according to the holy traditions he had fought successfully as a military commander, personally killing, or ordering the killing of, numerous foes as he brought Jews, Christians and pagans under his rule.
Islam’s imperial success, then, was a success on the faith’s own terms. A glorious undertaking, in an old-fashioned martial way, it was triumphant for nigh on a millennium, with the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (d. 1566), the Ottoman sultan, the approximate pinnacle. The Islamic world subsequently grew weak and the West strong—to simplify somewhat—and the West soon enough became the imperialist side.
usade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North,” William R. Polk presents things a bit differently. In 1095, Pope Urban II called the First Crusade. Since then, Mr. Polk contends, a pattern of Western aggression has produced the generally illiberal and often violent condition of the Islamic world today.
Many facts in his book likely will be new to some readers. Various details emphasize European cruelty toward Muslim populations: In 1502 Vasco da Gama cut off the “hands, ears and noses of some eight hundred ‘Moorish’ seamen” of Calicut, for example. Other observations point out curious continuities across the years: During the U.S. fight to suppress the Moros (“moors”) of the southern Philippines, the Moros used suicide fighters called fidayin, just like Saddam Hussein’s suicidal fedayeen, as well as “improvised explosive devices.”
Unfortunately, the book is sometimes on factually shaky ground. The Dutch suppression of Java between 1825 and 1830 (Mr. Polk says it happened a decade later) most likely killed somewhat less than 200,000 natives—not, as the author states, 300,000. In Libya, we are told, Mussolini’s repression of the Senussi revolt of 1923-32 “killed about two-thirds of the population.” Again the truth is bad enough: The Italian campaign in eastern Libya (Cyrenaica) led to the death of perhaps a quarter of that region’s people while missing western Libya (with about 70% of the country’s population) more or less entirely.
The conduct in Islamic lands of the English, Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, French and others has indeed been frequently appalling. Mr. Polk’s case would be better served, however, if he mentioned that such conduct often occurred in lands Islam itself had conquered first—usually through great violence. The Muslim subjection of Iran took nine years (642-651) of bloody warfare. Tamerlane (d. 1405), the self-appointed “Sword of Islam,” left pyramids of skulls outside the wrecks of great cities. The “great Mughal Empire,” as Mr. Polk repeatedly calls Babur’s admittedly splendid 16th-century creation, likely saw at least two million killed in a single war (the Deccan campaign, in present-day southern India, of the fanatic emperor Aurangzeb). CONTINUE AT SITE
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