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Universal Jihad: Radical
Universal Jihad: Radical Islam's Worldwide War on Liberal Democracies
On September 11, 2001, a war was brought to our shores by a band of men, bound by a militant ideology, in an act of mass murder. The response by the United States was a so-called \War on Terror,\ a reflex that has proved to be as ineffective as it has been costly.
We have spent more than a trillion dollars on invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. More than 5,000 American soldiers have died in the last eight years, and tens of thousands of American soldiers have been wounded.
What has this flood of blood and money bought us?
There has been no sustainable victory for the United States. There is no strategic victory; there is no political victory; there is no moral victory. And there is no peace. Islamic terrorism continues around the globe unabated.
The Obama administration lately wants to avoid any taint by the phrase \War on Terror,\ papering it over with ambiguity, calling it now an \Overseas Contingency Operation.\ It's still the same losing war, just as costly, just as ineffective.
The Bush and Obama administrations' \War on Terror\—by any name—has failed for one simple reason. It is because there is no such thing as a war on terror. Terrorism is a technique, a method, a weapon, a means to an end. Terrorism is not an enemy who can be named or identified, much less fought effectively. A \War on Terror\ is a war on shadows, a war on nothing and on no one. It is a fool's errand.
Yet there is a war raging. It is a war that was 1,400 years old before it was brought to our shores, a war that has laid waste to entire nations, cultures, and civilizations. The war is Universal Jihad: Radical Islam’s eternal, worldwide war on all infidel nations.
Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt were Christian nations before Christianity was supplanted by Radical Islam. Afghanistan was Buddhist, Iran was Zoroastrian, and Pakistan was Hindu before Radical Islam consumed their civilizations and cultures.
The long-running Israeli and Palestinian conflict is not some unique, stand-alone dispute over real estate or factionalism or any of the other wrong reasons given for it. It is simply another front in Universal Jihad's imperialistic war for the minds and souls of man. There has never been a lasting Mideast peace because Radical Islam has no interest in making peace with infidels—and every man, woman and child anywhere in the world who is not Muslim is branded as infidel.
The crisis in the Middle East never ends because Radical Islam never yields to another ideology. The problem is not Jews or Israel. The only thing keeping the conflict in endless, irresolvable foment is a universal supremacist ideology that demands the conquest of Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Chinese, the West and sub-Saharan Africa.
The doctrine of Universal Jihad has a clear global goal: the supremacy of Islam everywhere in the world. It demands theological, political, and cultural supremacy—Islamic Imperialism—over the entire world. There is no room for political pluralism. Its purpose, its mandate, its very reason for being, is conquest of the infidels and their nations—all of them—whether by conversion, domination, or death. In Literal Islam, there is no fourth choice.
Where Muslims are weak demographically and politically, they will propose truce. But we must understand the difference between truce and peace. Truce is a temporary ploy to buy time until one is stronger. Where Muslims are strong, they wage Universal Jihad. Jihad is the scriptural imperative of Literal Islam. Peace is lasting mutual respect. Muslims care not for peace, ever, with infidels, who are seen as inferiors.
For Universal Jihadists, therefore, any tactic, any means, any weapon is fully justified. So terrorism and mass murder are considered to be perfectly valid methods in attaining their theological and political goals. The Lockerbie mass murderer was given a hero's welcome recently in Libya because in Islam's Universal Jihad he is a war hero. The September 11, 2001, mass murder in the United States was a holy act, not only sanctioned but celebrated.
In Literal Islam, there is no valid law other than the Islamic law, Sharia. The constitutions of liberal democracies are the folly of fallible men and not worth the parchment and ink wasted on them. Universal Jihad is a war on the cornerstones of democratic principles: individual rights and freedoms. It is a declared war on the very existence of democracy and the freedom of mind in the world.
Islamic Imperialism is the greatest imperialist force the world has ever seen. Until recently, the Western Hemisphere had been largely isolated and protected from Universal Jihad by geographical and technological barriers. But all of that has changed.
The United States merely is among the latest nations to be targeted for attack and invasion by Universal Jihad. It is unreasonable to believe that the Universal Jihadists have brought their 1,400 hundred years of war to the West because of America's support of Israel. Universal Jihad predates the birth of the United States and of Israel by a thousand years. America is falling prey to the same overt and covert strategies and tactics that the Jihadists used to conquer much of the Middle East and parts of Europe. Terrorism is only one of those tactics.
Demographic conquest has been Radical Islam’s most permanent form of conquest. The infiltration of both legal and illegal Universal Jihadists to Western Europe and North America is fundamentally altering the very fabric of Western civilization. Radical Islam is a State within a State, no matter what nation it enters.
Literal Islam views the world as being divided into two eternally opposing camps: Darul al-Harb (Land of Hostility, governed by the infidels) and Darul al-Islam (Land of Peace, ruled by Muslims). Any land that is not Islamic and not ruled by Muslims is considered Land of Hostility. Universal Jihadists have a theological obligation to conquer non-Muslim nations by any means and supplant the governments of men with Islamic theocracy.
What the Western mind has failed to grasp is that, in Islam, separation of church and state is categorically, scripturally, emphatically, and dogmatically impossible. That is why the inherent imperialism of Universal Jihad is a greater threat to liberal democracies than Nazism and Communism combined. Unlike Islamists, Nazis and Communists lacked a transcendent metaphysics and global demographic strength. Nazism was defeated within ten years of its rise to power in Germany, and Communism has collapsed because of its own internal contradictions; post-Communist Russia and post-Nazi Germany now have republican or constitutional forms of government.
Not so the nations and civilizations conquered by Universal Jihadists.
A thousand years ago, the Indian Hindus were in the same predicament as is the Western world today. Their epistemologies were too rational, their metaphysical views too abstract and embracive. Their concept of non-violence even against those who wanted to annihilate them and their way of life was their greatest flaw. It was a fatal flaw. The Western world's present approach is reminiscent of that of the ancient Hindus.
The current crisis between the West and the doctrine of Universal Jihad is epistemological; it is a war of rationalism and intellectual freedom against virulent theological dogma. But it is a war. It was declared 1,400 years ago. Now it has been brought to America's shores.
Universal Jihadists have been winning through eternal patience and a persistence engendered and empowered by their central belief that the world is meant to be governed by Islamic theocracy. What they lack in technology, they compensate for in demographic strength, geographic diversity, ideological clarity, and a fanaticism that is \business as usual.\
Compounding the threat is widespread ignorance among the rank and file. Of the purported 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, 90 percent do not speak Arabic. Yet Islam's most lionized theologians claim that the Quran cannot be translated into any other language. Thus, 90 percent of Muslims cling to the ragged edges of a dogma that they cannot hope to fully understand.
At stake is our intellectual and spiritual freedom, and the most cherished principles of democracy. To preserve them, we must win this war that is not of our making. The alternative is unconditional surrender. Universal Jihadists are the product of militant ideologies, and not vice versa. Unless and until we confront that ideology for what it is, logically and persistently, all of our efforts are, and will continue to be, futile.
American politicians of both parties have failed or refused to define the true nature of the enemy and its intentions. The enemy is not al-Qaida, the Taliban, Hamas, Islamic Brotherhood or any of the hundreds of Islamic fundamentalist groups from Algeria to the Middle East to South Asia to Indonesia. Each of those is merely a tentacle of the same voracious beast called Universal Jihad. The multitude of factions is just another strategy of Universal Jihadists to confuse and weaken the infidel by making him fight too many enemies on too many fronts. And it is working.
The only real enemy is Universal Jihad, in all of its manifestations. It is an existential crisis that threatens equally every non-Muslim nation, regardless of culture, heritage, philosophy, or form of government.
The current military campaign by the United States and an ever-shrinking handful of its allies in the \War on Terror\ (by any name) is beyond ineffective; it is suicidal. For eight long years it has squandered billions of dollars and thousands of innocent lives attacking the wrong enemies, while leaving the real seats of power of Universal Jihad unscathed, and even embracing them as \allies\ and trading partners.
The war in Afghanistan is escalating. The last two months have been the two deadliest months of U.S. involvement there. Yet Afghanistan is only a client state, a proxy, for Pakistan, one of the nations in the triumvirate that is the Empire of Universal Jihad. It is Pakistan’s clandestine agency, Inter Services Intelligence, that rules Pakistan and that created the Taliban and al-Qaida, using Saudi money. It is ISI that fosters neighboring Afghanistan’s chief exports of heroin and terrorism, and that supplies refuge for Universal Jihadists. Yet we embrace Pakistan as an “ally.”
The Seats of the Empire of Universal Jihad are Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan. These are Command Central. These are the declared enemies of democracy and of fundamental human rights and freedoms across the globe. Unless and until they are recognized, named, and treated as such, Universal Jihad will continue to ravage every non-Islamic nation and culture.
The non-Islamic world can win the war being waged against humanity and democracy by Universal Jihadists, and win it decisively. We can find a lasting and comprehensive solution to the greatest imperialistic threat global civilization has ever seen. We have billions of willing allies throughout the world. But our success, our victory is predicated upon knowing and naming the real enemy, knowing the scope and reality of the threat, and taking decisive and directed action.
I maintain:
• War against Universal Jihadists can be won globally in less than five years.
• It can be won for less than one billion dollars.
• It can be won without further loss of American lives or of those of its allies.
The first requisite is to acknowledge that it is an ideological war. The totalitarian Islamic theocracy is aligned against fundamental human rights and freedoms and against every democracy in the world.
It is also necessary to recognize that the real causes of poverty, illiteracy and misery prevalent in Islamic nations are over-population, suppression of intellectual freedom, hostility to critical thinking, and dictatorial theocracy. Colonialism or Zionist or Anglo-American conspiracies are not the causes.
The conflict between Universal Jihadists and the West is philosophical. Strength is necessary to bring and maintain order, but force alone can never prevail. Reason, empiricism, and scientific method are our greatest weapons against the religious fanaticism of Literal Islam's militant theocracy.
Non-Islamic nations must correctly classify the doctrine of Universal Jihad as a subversive paramilitary political movement whose core ideology of record demands the overthrow of existing forms of governments. Civilized nations recognize that internal subversion, in times of war, constitutes treason.
And Universal Jihad is a declared war. It is a war of exclusionist Islamic theology against pluralistic democratic traditions. The two are mutually exclusive. Islam's Sharia is the antithesis of individual intellectual and spiritual freedom. It stands in direct opposition to the very existence of any constitutional democracy, and to the very right to existence of any other religion or belief.
Therefore, in order to prevail, the non-Islamic world must do the following:
• Build a global united alliance of nations against Universal Jihad. Jew and Gentile, Saxon and Slav, Hindu and Buddhist, Norwegian and Nigerian—all have been victimized by Jihad. Never has any barbaric imperialism so universally threatened mankind without regard to national or ethnic or philosophical or geopolitical boundaries. Whatever our differences, in this war we are allies unified by a common ruthless enemy who will not rest until we and our cultures and nations have been conquered through conversion, domination or death. United, we cannot be overcome.
• Systematically deport all advocates of Literal Islam’s Universal Jihad from every non-Islamic nation—which, by their own definition, is Darul al-Harb (Land of Hostility, governed by the infidels). The claims and requirements of Literal Islam’s mandated theocracy call for overthrow of American and all other democratic forms of government in a declared war, and supporters of Universal Jihad have committed and condoned acts of war on our soil against our people and our nations. That is treason.
• As a united alliance of nations against Universal Jihad, cut off all trade and diplomatic ties to the Empire of Universal Jihad: Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Enforce these sanctions until their governments publicly and formally renounce and disavow Universal Jihad by official proclamation.
• As a united alliance of nations against Universal Jihad, use the combined resources of all affected nations to demilitarize, secularize and democratize the Empire of Universal Jihad.
• As a united alliance of nations against Universal Jihad, demand and exact compensation from the Empire of Universal Jihad for having supported global terrorism for at least the past half-century.
If any of these steps to victory seem draconian or undemocratic, pause to reflect that they are far more humane and civilized than the strategies and tactics of Literal Islam and its 1,400-years war that has decimated entire civilizations and murdered countless millions. These steps are far more humane and civilized than dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations. These are not some \Modest Proposals\ in the tradition of Swift. These are sober, attainable and necessary steps that must be taken if the rationality and freedoms gained by mankind over thousands of years of social evolution stand any chance of surviving the Universal Jihadists’ onslaught of barbarism and mass murder aimed at ruling the world.
To survive at all and preserve our cherished rights and freedoms, our cultures, our religions, our civilizations, we must declare an ideological war against Universal Jihadists. We must do so now. They long ago declared war on us.
Vijay Kumar
________________________________________
I am keen reader of your
I am keen reader of your articles everyday and i have realised my freedom from your knowledges. Now i do just like you to educate many muslims like me to come out of this evil cult and i have already convinced many by showing them Truth.
Now just recently i was having agruments with 1 muslim and i was suceeding to show him freedom but he brought me below discovery of Quraan. So please kindly e-mail me about how should i make his below claim wrong because it is wrong but i dont know how to convince him, pls help.
Thank you, my e-mail : freedom0071@live.com
Check this out,
Very interesting findings by
Dr Tariq Al Swaidan
This might grasp your attention:
Dr Tarig Al Swaidan discovered some verses in the
Holy Qur'an
mentions one thing is equal to another,
i.e. men are equal to women.
Although this makes sense grammatically,
the astonishing fact is that the number of
times the word man appears in
the Holy Qur'an
is 24 and number of times the word
woman appears is also 24,
therefore not only is this phrase correct in
the grammatical sense but also true mathematically,
i.e. 24 = 24.
Upon further analysis of various verses,
he discovered that this is consistent throughout the whole
Holy Qur'an
where it says one thing is like another.
See below for astonishing result of
the words mentioned number of times in Arabic
Holy Qur'an
Dunia (one name for life) 115 .
Aakhirat (one name for the life after this world) 115
Malaika (Angels) 88 . Shayteen (Satan) 88
Life 145 Death 145
Benefit 50 Corrupt 50
People 50 Messengers 50
Eblees (king of devils) 11 . Seek refuge from Eblees 11
Museebah (calamity) 75 . Thanks ! 75
Spending (Sadaqah) 73 . Satisfaction 73
People who are mislead 17 Dead people 17
Muslimeen 41 J Jihad 41
Gold 8 Easy life 8
Magic 60 Fitnah (dissuasion, misleading) ! 60
Zakat (Taxes Muslims pay to the poor) 32
Barakah (Increasing or blessings of wealth) 32
Mind 49 Noor 49
Tongue 25 Sermon 25
Desite 8 Fear 8
Speaking publicly 18 Publicising 18
Hardship 114 .... Patience 114
Muhammed 4 Sharee'ah ( Muhammed's teachings) 4
Man 24 . Woman 24
And amazingly enough have a look how many times
the following words appear:
Salat 5, Month 12 , Day 365,
Sea 32, Land 13
Sea + land = 32 + 13 = 45
Sea = 32/45*100q.=71.11111111%
Land = 13/45*100 = 28.88888889%
Sea + land 100.00%
Modern science has only recently proved that water covers
71.111% of the planet , while land covers 28.889%.
Is this a coincidence? Question:
Who taught Prophet Muhammed (PBUH) all this?
Reply automatically comes in mind
ALMIGHTY ALLAH
taught him.
The Holy Qur'an
also tells us this.
Ayat 87 of Suraa (Chapter)
Al-Anbia !para 17 :
LA ILAHA ILA ANTA
SUBHANAKA INI KUNTU MINA ZALIMEEN.
For the next 60 seconds,
stop whatever you are doing,
PLEASE SEND THIS TO ALL PEOPLE YOU KNOW.
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VIOLENT ANTI-SEMITISM: WAS
VIOLENT ANTI-SEMITISM: WAS ISLAM EUROPE’S STUDENT OR TEACHER?
John J. O’Neill
(Note: The author of the following article contends that Islam had a far greater impact on European history than has hitherto been imagined; but it was entirely negative. In the present paper he will argue that among the most corrosive ideas Islam bequeathed to Europe was a new and violent strain of anti-Semitism).
The first mass murder of Jews to be carried out in Europe occurred in Spain; in Cordoba in 1011 and in Granada in 1066. (See Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi, p. 61. Also, Bernard Lewis, The Jews and Islam p. 54) But these pogroms were not the work of Christian fanatics: They were carried out by Muslim mobs. Thirty years after the Granada slaughter, at the start of the First Crusade, Christian mobs on the Rhineland carried out similar attacks.
From these two bare facts we may deduce the following: The source of anti-Semitism in Europe is to be sought in Spain; and the rise of anti-Semitism in other areas of Europe is intimately connected with the clash between Islam and Christianity.
Neither of the above statements is well-known or widely accepted. On the contrary, popular opinion holds by an entirely different narrative. According to this, Christianity was inherently anti-Semitic: Christians, it is believed, blamed Jews for the murder of Christ; and as soon as it became the dominant faith of the Roman Empire – after the time of Constantine – Christianity began to systematically persecute the Jews. In this view of things, anti-Semitism is a peculiarly Christian phenomenon, and if it is found in other places, such as Islam, it must have been learned from Christianity.
The above statement, as I demonstrate in my recently-published book, Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization, is little more than a caricature: Christianity did not teach anti-Semitism to the Muslims; they had, from the very beginning, their own and peculiarly violent strain of the malaise. And indeed there are good grounds for believing that the murderous anti-Semitism which appeared in Europe for the first time at the beginning of the Crusades had much to do with the influence of Islam.
Anti-Semitism, or hatred of the Jews, in fact preceded both the rise of Christianity and Islam. Relations between Gentiles and Jews were fraught and volatile as far back as Hellenistic times, and the antagonism between Jews and Gentiles in Egypt, for example, during the second and first centuries BC led to a lively and polemical debate amongst authors such as Apion, Manetho and Josephus. In the early years of the Roman Empire, the attempts of the Jews to free themselves from Imperial rule led to a series of bloody uprisings which were suppressed with great ferocity. The Roman authorities, as a rule, were exasperated by the Jews, but tolerated what they saw as their peculiar customs, and granted them certain unusual privileges, such as an exemption from the requirement of offering sacrifice to the Emperor.
From the very beginning, of course, the Jews, or rather, the Jewish authorities, were deeply antagonistic towards Christianity; a faith they looked upon as little more than a dangerous heresy. There is evidence that they would, as Gibbon puts it “gladly have extinguished the dangerous heresy [Christianity] in the blood of its adherents.” (Ch. 16) It is pointless to go through the various animosities that existed at this time between the two groups, yet there is clear evidence that, well into the third century, Jewish religious leaders agitated in favor of persecuting Christians, and harbored much hatred towards them. This needs to be said, for early Christian writers are frequently attacked for their animosity towards the Jews. There currently exists on the internet, for example, a website named “Religious Tolerance” which, in a page titled “Anti-Judaism: 70 to 1200 CE”, lists a series of anti-Jewish pronouncements by early Christian writers such as Saint John Chrysostom, Saint Hilary of Poitiers, Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome. Now, there is no question that these men, and many others beside, did make statements which nowadays would be regarded as straightforwardly anti-Semitic, in a religious sense. Yet these are theological opinions of individuals, not imperial policy. Furthermore, it should be stressed that John Chrysostom’s attack, which he launched when he was a priest in Antioch (386), was designed to put an end to the practice among Christians of going to synagogues and participating in their services. As Robert Spencer rightly notes, “the fact that Christian attendance in synagogues was widespread in late fourth-century Antioch indicates that neither anti-Semitism nor anti-Judaism were dominant among Christians at the time, many of whom understood that there was a bond between Christianity and Judaism.” (Religion of Peace? p. 113) We note too that what John Chrysostom and the rest said about the Jews was mild in comparison with the attacks they made against heretics such as Manicheans and Donatists; and Jewish writers of the time were equally vociferous in their condemnation of Christians; and whilst Christians had suffered death – often on a large scale – simply for being Christian, Jews had not.
In view of the fraught history of relationships between Jews and Christians, it is remarkable that, when the Empire became Christian, there was little or no retaliation against the Jews. It is true that several Emperors, most notably Justinian, did pass anti-Jewish edicts. None of these however were severe, and rarely went beyond restrictions placed on the building of new synagogues and (in the case of Justinian) refusing to allow the Jews to celebrate Passover before the Christian Easter. Hardly draconian! And it needs to be stated that even these measures were elicited more by political than religious considerations. Since the time of the pagan Emperors, the Jews of Palestine and the eastern Mediterranean had consistently sided with the Persians in their perennial wars with the Romans. It happened again during the time of Justinian, and he reciprocated with these legal measures. (See Cyril Mango, Byzantium: the Empire of New Rome, p. 92). And it should be noted that even Justinian, regarded as the most intolerant of the Christian Emperors, had numerous Jewish friends and advisors.
Proof that the Jews experienced no real persecution from the early Christians is seen in the great increase in the numbers and the prosperity of the Jewish people in the centuries that preceded the First Crusade. By the eleventh century both France and Germany were home to large and prosperous Jewish communities. Steven Runciman notes that, “Jewish colonies had been established for centuries past along the trade routes of western Europe.” (The History of the Crusades, Vol. 1, p. 134) These colonies “kept up connections with their co-religionists in Byzantium and in Arab lands, and were thus enabled to play a large part in international trade, more especially the trade between Moslem and Christian countries.” Runciman notes that the Jews “had never undergone serious persecution in the West. … The kings of France and Germany had always befriended them; and they were shown particular favor by the archbishops of the great cities of the Rhineland.”
But if there was no prior persecution of the Jews, whence, we might ask, did this hatred arise?
Europe’s largest Jewish community was located in Spain. Following the Islamic conquest of that land in 711, the Jews came under the domination of a faith that, unlike Christianity, was from its inception virulently and violently anti-Jewish. For Muslims the lead was given by none other than their founder, the Prophet Muhammad. It would be superfluous to enumerate the anti-Jewish pronouncements in the Koran and the Haditha, where the Hebrews are portrayed as the craftiest, most persistent and most implacable enemies of Allah. In the Koran (2: 63-66) Allah transforms some Jews who profaned the Sabbath into apes: “Be as apes despicable!” In Koran 5: 59-60, He directs Muhammad to remind the “People of the Book” about “those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil.” Again, in 7: 166, we hear of the Sabbath-breaking Jews that “when in their insolence they transgressed (all) prohibitions,” Allah said to them, “Be ye apes, despised and rejected.”
From the same sources we know that Muhammad’s first violent action against the Jews involved the Qaynuqa tribe, who dwelt at Medina, under the protection of the city. Muhammad “seized the occasion of an accidental tumult,” and ordered the Qaynuqa (or Kainoka) to embrace his religion or fight. In the words of Gibbon, “The unequal conflict was terminated in fifteen days; and it was with extreme reluctance that Mahomet yielded to the importunity of his allies and consented to spare the lives of the captives.” (Decline and Fall, Chapter 50) In later attacks on the Jews, the Hebrew captives were not so fortunate.
The most notorious of all Muhammad’s attacks against the Jews was directed at the Banu Quraiza tribe. This community, which dwelt near Medina, was attacked without warning by the Prophet and his men, and, after its defeat, all the males over the age of puberty were beheaded. Some Islamic authorities claim that Muhammad personally participated in the executions. The doomed men and boys, whose numbers are estimated at anything between 500 and 900, were ordered to dig the trench which was to be their communal grave. All of the women and children were enslaved, with Muhammad personally taking for himself one of the most beautiful of the prisoners. He also confiscated the property of the murdered Jews. These deeds are mentioned in the Koran as acts carried out by Allah himself and fully sanctioned by divine approval. Thus in Koran 33:26-27, we read:
And he brought those of the People of the Book [Jewish people of Banu Qurayza] who supported them from their fortresses and cast terror into their hearts, some of them you slew (beheaded) and some you took prisoners (captive). And he made you heirs of their lands, their houses, and their goods, and of a land which ye had not frequented (before). And Allah has power over all things.
The killing of the Jewish prisoners is sanctioned in Koran 8:67:
It is not fitting for an Apostle that he should have prisoners of war until He thoroughly subdued the land…
The Massacre of Banu Quraiza was followed soon after by the attack on the Khaybar tribe. On this occasion, the Prophet ordered the torture of a Jewish chieftain to extract information about where he had hidden his treasures. When the treasure was uncovered, the chieftain was beheaded. This chieftain was the husband of the most beautiful Jewish woman of Khaybar, the 17-year-old Safiyah. Safiyah’s family members had been annihilated by Muhammad at the Banu Qurayza massacre. Now having beheaded her husband, the Prophet took Safiyah as his slave. The story is told thus by Sahih al-Bukhari, whose compilation of the acts and deeds attributed to Muhammad was written in the ninth century, and forms one of the two pillars of Islamic jurisprudence. (Volume 5, Book 59, Number 512):
The Prophet offered the Fajr Prayer near Khaybar when it was still dark and then said, “Allahu-Akbar! Khaybar is destroyed, for whenever we approach a (hostile) nation (to fight), then evil will be the morning for those who have been warned.” Then the inhabitants of Khaybar came out running on the roads. The Prophet had their warriors killed, their offspring and woman taken as captives. Safiya was amongst the captives, She first came in the share of Dahya Alkali but later on she belonged to the Prophet. The Prophet made her manumission as her ‘Mahr’. Muhammad was sixty (60) when he married Safiyyahh, a young girl of seventeen. She became his eighth wife.
The distribution of the booty is described thus in al-Bukhari Hadiths No.143, page-700:
Sulaiman Ibne Harb…Aannas Ibne Malek (ra) narrated, “in the war of Khayber after the inhabitants of Banu Nadir were surrendered, Allah’s apostle killed all the able/adult men, and he (prophet) took all women and children as captives (Ghani mateer maal).. Among the captives Safiyya Bint Huyy Akhtab was taken by Allah’s Apostle as booty whom He married after freeing her and her freedom was her Mahr.”
It is said that at first Dihyah al-Kalbi, one of Muhammad’s followers, asked for Safiyah. But when Muhammad saw her exquisite beauty, he chose her for himself and gave her two cousins to Dihyah.
In the massacre of the Jewish Settlement of Bani Mustaliq, Muhammad captured their women and took twenty-year-old Jewish girl, Juwairiya as his personal slave. [Al-Bukhari 3.46.13.717, p431-432]. Sahih Muslim (2.2349, p.520) says that Mohammed attacked the Banu Mustaliq tribe without any warning while they were heedlessly grazing their cattle. Juwairiya was a daughter of the chief. Sahih Muslim 3.4292, p.942 and Abu Dawud 2.227, p728 and al-Tabari 39, p.182-183 also say Juwairiya was captured in a raid on the Banu Mustaliq tribe. She had been married to Musafi’ bin Safwan, who was killed in battle.
We need go no further into the horrific details of these events, as they have already been examined by numerous writers and their veracity denied by no one. What we need to emphasize is the attitude these atrocities betray, as well as the fact that they became the model for the behavior of all future followers of The Prophet.
What caused Muhammad’s seemingly implacable hatred of the Jews? According to Gibbon, it was their refusal to recognize him as their long-awaited Messiah that “converted his friendship into an implacable hatred, with which he pursued that unfortunate people to the last moment of his life; and, in the double character of apostle and conqueror, his persecution was extended into both worlds.” (Decline and Fall, Ch. 50)
As noted above, it is a widely-held fiction that, aside from the Prophet’s persecution of the Jews of Arabia, Muslims in general and Islam as a rule was historically tolerant to this People of the Book, who were generally granted dhimmi (“protected”) status in the Islamic Umma, or community. But dhimmi status, also accorded to Christians, did not, as Bat Ye’or has demonstrated at great length, imply equal rights with Muslims. On the contrary, dhimmis were subject, even at the best of times, to a whole series of discriminatory laws and to relentless exploitation. At the worst of times, they could be slaughtered in the streets without any hope of legal redress. One of the most noxious measures directed against them was the requirement to wear an item or color of clothing by which they could be easily identified: identified for easy exploitation and abuse. The latter law was copied, significantly enough, by the Nazis. Bat Ye’or has shown that this law was enforced in Islam right from the beginning. The violence was not continuous, but the exploitation was, and the pattern of abuse initiated by Muhammad in Arabia in the seventh century was to be repeated throughout history. The first massacres of Jews in Europe, carried out by Muslim mobs in Spain, were preceded by other massacres carried out in North Africa, and clearly formed a continuum with Muhammad’s massacres of that people in Arabia.
Nonetheless, there was, at times, a semblance of tolerance for both Jews and Christians. It could not have been otherwise. When the Arabs conquered the vast territories of Mesopotamia, Syria, and North Africa during the seventh century, they found themselves a small minority ruling over enormous populations comprising mainly Christians and, to a lesser degree, Jews. As such, they needed to proceed with caution. Like all conquerors, the Arabs were quick to exploit any internal conflicts; and it was in their interests, above all, to divide the Christians from the Jews. This was particularly the case in Spain, where the Jewish population was very large. A united Jewish and Christian front could have proved extremely dangerous, and it was entirely in the interest of the conquerors to sow mistrust and suspicion between these communities. In the words of Bat Ye’or, “The [Arab] invaders knew how to take advantage of the dissensions between local groups in order to impose their own authority, favoring first one and then another, with the intention of weakening and ruining them all through a policy of ‘divide and rule.’” (The Dhimmi, p. 87)
Now, Jewish communities, both in Spain and elsewhere, tended to be both educated and prosperous. Jewish doctors, scientists and merchants could be usefully employed by any ruling group. And employed they were by the Arabs. Some, such as Ibn Naghrela, rose to positions of great prominence, whilst the international connections of the Jews and their mastery of languages proved invaluable to the new rulers. The Jews frequently found themselves in the role of intermediaries between Muslims and Christians. And we cannot pass over the role of Jewish merchants in supplying Muslim Spain with all its essentials – including slaves from northern and north-eastern Europe. (See eg. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe, p. 143)
Yet such favors as the Jews enjoyed was transitory and uncertain. There was never any real security, as the massacres of 1011 and 1066 illustrate only too well. On the other hand, it was entirely in the interests of the Muslims that the Christians believed the Jews were favored. And part of that myth was the notion that “the Jews” had actually assisted the Muslims in their conquest of the country.
The likelihood that this story was true is vanishingly small, especially when we consider the massacres of Jews carried out in Arabia by Muhammad himself just a few decades earlier. No people had better international links than the Jews, a nation of merchants par excellence, and those of Spain would have been very much aware of Muhammad’s behavior long before the first Muslim armies landed on Spanish soil. Nonetheless, the story got out that the Jews had helped the Muslims. There can be little doubt that this story was fostered by the Muslims themselves, as part of the policy of divide and conquer; of sowing mistrust between the two vanquished communities.
Now, all during the tenth and eleventh centuries, the war for possession of the Iberian Peninsula raged between Christians and Muslims. This conflict was to grow into a real clash of civilizations, as Christians and Muslims called in the assistance of co-religionists from far and wide. The Shrine of Santiago de Compostela became a rallying symbol for the Christians of the north and for those of France and Germany, who crossed the Pyrenees to join the struggle against Islam. Their Christian allies in Spain already had the conviction that the Jews were secret allies of the Muslims – a belief, as we said, encouraged by the Muslims themselves. They were convinced that the Jews had assisted the Muslims in their conquest of the country; and they came into contact with Muslim anti-Semitic attitudes – attitudes which the Christians began to imbibe. This latter point needs to be emphasized, because it has never I feel been given the weight it deserves. As the dominant power of the time, Islam was hugely influential. Christian kings, both in Spain and southern Italy, began to adopt Islamic ideas and norms on a whole range of things. Some began to keep harems, attended by eunuchs; others became enthusiastic slave-traders; and all began to see the Jews as somehow enemies of God – a treacherous people who might poison wells and murder Gentile children.
Now, it is an acknowledged fact that it was in Spain that the warriors who later joined the First Crusade learnt to dislike the Jews. In Runciman’s words, “Already in the Spanish wars there had been some inclination on the part of Christian armies to maltreat the Jews.” (The History of the Crusades, p. 135) Runciman notes that at the time of the expedition to Barbastro, in the mid-eleventh century, Pope Alexander II had written to the bishops of Spain to remind them that there was all the difference in the world between Muslims and Jews. The former were irreconcilable enemies of the Christians, but the latter were ready to work for them. However, in Spain “the Jews had enjoyed such favour from the hands of the Moslems that the Christian conquerors could not bring themselves to trust them.” (The History of the Crusades, p. 135) This lack of trust is confirmed by more than one document of the period, several of which are listed by Runciman.
Just over a decade after the Christian knights of France and Germany had helped their co-religionists in Spain to retake the city of Toledo from the Muslims, some of them prepared to set out on the First (official) Crusade. Before they did so, a few of them took part in the mass murder of several thousand Jews in Germany and Bohemia – an atrocity unprecedented in European history.
In view of the fact that these pogroms were committed by warriors some of whom had learned their trade in Spain, and in view of the fact that such atrocities were hitherto unknown in Europe, we may state that there is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Christians had been influenced by the Muslims. This is all the more probable in view of Islam’s history of virulent and violent anti-Semitism. And if the Europeans were influenced in this by the Muslims, this was by no means the only novelty learned by them from their Muslim foes. The very idea of “Holy War”, previously unthinkable in Christian terms, now became an accepted principle of Church teaching; as did the notion that apostates and heretics should be violently suppressed. The latter doctrine, present in Islam from the very beginning, only became part of Church dogma with the launch of the Inquisition near the end of the twelfth century.
In my newly-published, Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization, I argue at length that all of things commonly regarded as “Medieval” were in fact introduced to Europe from Islam, and that it was Islam, and not the Huns, Vandals and Goths, which terminated Classical Civilization, the rational and humane civilization of Greece and Rome, a civilization which had become synonymous with Christianity during the fourth century. This civilization survived in Europe and in North Africa and the Near East until the seventh century, at which point it was terminated by the Muslim conquests.
Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization, is published by Felibri Publications. For information, see:
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