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At the height of Western dominance over Islam in the early twentieth century, the European historian Hilaire Belloc (b. 1870) made a remarkably prescient observation that may have seemed exaggerated at the time:
Millions of modern people of the white civilization — that is, the civilization of Europe and America — have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past” (from Belloc’s The Great Heresies, emphasis added).
Anyone who doubts that Islam has been “the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had,” should familiarize themselves with that civilization’s long militant history vis-à-vis the West.
According to Islamic history, in 628, Muhammed, the Arabic founder of Islam, called on the Byzantine Emperor, Heraclius — the symbolic head of Christendom — to recant Christianity and embrace Islam. The emperor refused, jihad was declared, and the Arabs invaded Christian Syria, defeating the imperial army at the pivotal Battle of Yarmuk in 636 (see my MA thesis on this battle, which one prominent historian described as the world’s “most consequential”).
This victory enabled the Muslims to swarm in all directions, so that, less than a century later, they had conquered the greater, older, and richer part of Christendom, including Syria, Egypt, and North Africa.
Their drive into Europe from the east was repeatedly frustrated by the Walls of Constantinople; after the spectacularly failed siege of 717-718, many centuries would pass before any Muslim power thought to capture the imperial city. The Arabs did manage to invade Europe proper and conquered Spain but were stopped at the Battle of Tours in 732 and eventually driven back south of the Pyrenees.
For more than two centuries thereafter, Europe continued to be pummeled by land and sea — untold thousands of Christians were enslaved and every Mediterranean island sacked — in the ongoing Muslim quest for booty and slaves, as what historians have dubbed “the Dark Ages” descended on the continent.
The vicissitudes of war ebbed and flowed — the Eastern Roman Empire (“Byzantium”) made a major comeback against Islam in the tenth century — though the border largely remained the same. This changed when the Turks, under the leadership of the Seljuk tribe, became the new standard bearers of jihad. They nearly annihilated eastern Anatolia, along with Armenia and Georgia, in the eleventh century and, after the Battle of Manzikert, 1071, overran Asia Minor.
By now, however, Western Europe’s military might had so matured that when the Pope called on the knights of Christendom to come to the aid of the Christian East, the First Crusade was born. Western Christians, led by the Franks, marched into the beast’s lair, defeated their adversaries in several encounters and managed to establish a firm presence in the Levant, including in Jerusalem, which they recaptured in 1099 — only to lose it less than one hundred years later, in 1187, after the fateful Battle of Hattin. By 1297, the Crusader presence was eliminated from the Middle East.
Continue reading The long and bloody history between Islam and the West
