The full magnitude of the modern West’s ignorance of its own past recently struck me while rereading some early history books concerning the centuries-long jihad on Europe. The historical narrative being disseminated today simply bears very little resemblance to reality.
Consider some facts for a moment:
A mere decade after the birth of Islam in the 7th century, the jihad burst out of Arabia. Leaving aside all the thousands of miles of ancient lands and civilizations that were permanently conquered, today casually called the “Islamic world”—including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and parts of India and China—much of Europe was also, at one time or another, conquered by the sword of Islam.
Among other nations and territories that were attacked and/or came under Muslim domination are (to give them their modern names in no particular order): Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Sicily, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Lithuania, Romania, Albania, Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Crete, Cyprus, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Belarus, Malta, Sardinia, Moldova, Slovakia, and Montenegro.
In 846 Rome was sacked and the Vatican defiled by Muslim Arab raiders; some 600 years later, in 1453, Christendom’s other great basilica, Holy Wisdom (or Hagia Sophia) was conquered by Muslim Turks, permanently.
The few European regions that escaped direct Islamic occupation due to their northwest remoteness include Great Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany. That, of course, does not mean that they were not attacked by Islam. Indeed, in the furthest northwest of Europe, in Iceland, Christians used to pray that God save them from the “terror of the Turk.” These fears were not unfounded since as late as 1627 Muslim corsairs raided the Christian island seizing four hundred captives, selling them in the slave markets of Algiers.
Nor did America escape. A few years after the formation of the United States, in 1800, American trading ships in the Mediterranean were plundered and their sailors enslaved by Muslim corsairs. The ambassador of Tripoli explained to Thomas Jefferson that it was a Muslim’s “right and duty to make war upon them [non-Muslims] wherever they could be found, and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners.”
In short, for roughly one millennium—punctuated by a Crusader-rebuttal that the modern West is obsessed with demonizing—Islam daily posed an existential threat to Christian Europe and by extension Western civilization.
And therein lies the rub: Today, whether as taught in high school or graduate school, whether as portrayed by Hollywood or the news media, the predominant historic narrative is that Muslims are the historic “victims” of “intolerant” Western Christians. That’s exactly what a TV personality recently told me live on Fox News.
So here we are, paying the price of being an ahistorical society: A few years after the Islamic strikes of 9/11—merely the latest in the centuries-long, continents-wide jihad on the West—Americans elected a man with a Muslim name and heritage for president, who openly empowers the same ideology that their ancestors lived in mortal fear of, even as they sit by and watch to their future detriment.
Surely the United States’ European forebears—who at one time or another either fought off or were conquered by Islam—must be turning in their graves.
But all this is history, you say? Why rehash it? Why not let it be and move on, begin a new chapter of mutual tolerance and respect, even if history must be “touched up” a bit?
This would be a somewhat plausible position—if not for the fact that, all around the globe, Muslims are still exhibiting the same imperial impulse and intolerant supremacism that their conquering forbears did. The only difference is that the Muslim world is currently incapable of defeating the West through a conventional war.
Yet this may not even be necessary. Thanks to the West’s ignorance of history, Muslims are flooding Europe under the guise of “immigration,” refusing to assimilate, and forming enclaves which in modern parlance are called “enclaves” or “ghettoes” but in Islamic terminology are the ribat—frontier posts where the jihad is waged on the infidel, one way or the other.
All this leads to another, perhaps even more important point: If the true history of the West and Islam is being turned upside its head, what other historical “orthodoxies” being peddled around as truth are also false?
Were the Dark Ages truly benighted because of the “suffocating” forces of Christianity? Or were these dark ages—which “coincidentally” occurred during the same centuries when jihad was constantly harrying Europe—a product of another suffocating religion? Was the Spanish Inquisition a reflection of Christian barbarism or was it a reflection of Christian desperation vis-à-vis the hundreds of thousands of Muslims who, while claiming to have converted to Christianity, were practicing taqiyya and living as moles trying to subvert the Christian nation back to Islam?
Don’t expect to get true answers to these and other questions from the makers, guardians, and disseminators of the West’s fabricated epistemology.
In the future (whatever one there may be) the histories written about our times will likely stress how our era, ironically called the “information age,” was not an age when people were so well informed, but rather an age when disinformation was so widespread and unquestioned that generations of people lived in bubbles of alternate realities—till they were finally popped.
Raymond as an historian surely you are aware of humanities axiom ‘History is clearly written so fools can ignore it.’
too pro christian
What does being pro-Christian have to do with what Raymond is telling us and it is “what really happened” you tell us as in prove him wrong Mr ignorant
the tone is pro christian, it can be written in a much neutral way
You cannot put lip stick on a pig! The religion of the Arabs is a pig
i m not saying islam is a less shittier religion, islam is violent and i hate it more that you would, but then chirstianity is also one of the stupidest religion around..
Raymond is not promoting Christianity he is telling us “what really happened’ as a historian would do
Now you tell me if I say to you that the Muslim invaders of India murdered millions of Hindus would this means that I’m promoting Hinduism or am I telling you “what really happened”? If you do not get this one then you would be beyond help! So did you get it?
N. Wasse, good thinking. I often invert it to clarify the issue such as the Christian counter attack in Spain to show that explaining its history is not promoting Islam. But what you did works.
religious atheism is the stupidest religion, and just as dangerous as islam.
Another anti-Christian bigot. The article is about Islam – not Christianity.
Thank you Raymond very good reading and if you read Emmet Scott book “Mohammed and Charlemagne revisited” you realize that Islam and the Arab invasions starting in 633CE destroyed the late antique world and forced not just Europe but also Egypt and the Levant into what we call now the dark ages
The crimes of Islam and Arabian imperialism are too many to count
Muslim domination in Belarus? You must be joking, Raymond. Or just mistook deep raids into infidels territory with domination.
sentient guillotine, please read the whole paragraph: the bit below comes BEFORE the list of countries including Belarus: “Among other nations and territories that were attacked and/or came under Muslim domination are… My emphasis.
OK, my mistake.
Too often believers in PC multiculturalism ignore the bigger picture while defending anything anti-American or anti-Western.
The big picture of Islam is horrendous. Islam is the ultimate colonialism. From the Philippines to Morocco once independent cultures now bow towards Mecca and pray in Arabic. And the PC crowd complains about British colonialism.
Afghanistan is one of the best examples of Islamic scourge. It once was a peaceful Hindu and Buddhist area. Since the “arrival” of Islam, it has descended into a bloody hell hole. Neighboring Pakistan is the same.
Islam is the scourge of mankind. Almost every conflict on the face of the globe presently has Islam as its foundational cause.
Western liberals bad mouth everything about Western civilization. If it is so bad here in the West – 1 why don’t the liberals go to some “better” civilization and 2 why do so many Muslims want to come here?
Great comment Bob! Well-said.
Good comment but the reason a lot of Muslims want to come to the west is so they can IMPOSE Islam on more infidels
Muslims went from the murderous Turkish hordes threatening
to swallow all of Europe at the Gates of Vienna in 1683, to the
murderous Libyan pirates of the late 1700’s to the bloody savages (along
with Hindus, and Sikhs) conquered by Britain (and France and others) in
the early 1800’s. For 150 years (1800 to 1950) the snarling murderous
beast of islam was safely under the foot of colonial powers.
It’s because Islam was so safely contained for 150 years that we
forgot what it’s true nature really is. We have forgotton what islam is
when Imams are allowed to preach the ‘true islam’ without fear that they
will be summarily executed by the (colonial) state. We have forgotten
what an islamic government does when it controls it’s own oil wealth
like international Wahhabism funded by the Saudis. We have forgotten the
absolute murderous intolerance for all things unislamic (especially
Jews), and the violent supremacy inherent in islam.
In the west there is the collective guilt of colonialism against the muslim world without ever once considering that, for all it’s evils, perhaps western colonialism was actually more human and fair than the islam it suppressed.
Wow, I had not realized that the Dark Ages actually co-incides with the Muslim invasions of Europe… I think that is right, it would be a real factor. Did the ‘crusades’ then mark the beginning of the end of that dark age as we started to take it to them?
There is a lot one can say about Islam, it’s origins, its errors and its conduct, but I think you are missing the major reason for these new histories: Cultural Marxism. This new post-modernist ideology is obsessed with destroying the standards and norms of European civilization because it has concluded, in the only way a marxist can, that the reason communism has failed is because Occidental civilization has corrupted the world. These “social justice warriors” who are so eager to defend and rehabilitate Islam because they see the European, heterosexual, christian, male as the epitome of evil because they have been the most resistant to communism. They believe the only way to make communism successful is to destroy all things Occidental and the entire European-Christian demographic. They see Islam as their ally in this quest of destruction, they see Muslims as easily pliable and controllable. Since, to them, God is not real they believe they can easily use the same tactics they have implemented to undermine Christianity to undermine Islam. What they fail to realize is they are the frog and their muslim “pets” are the scorpion; Islam has no loyalty to non-believers and anyone who challenges Islam is meet with violence. For Occidental culture, Islam is a threat, but it is merely an external threat; it is Cultural Marxism that is the internal threat, corrupting our schools, our halls of government, our media, try to warp the very way we look at reality.
In 100 years time when the future generations look back at the pointless tolerance of Islam that our generation applied to these barbarak aliens they will curse us in our graves. “THE FUTURE MUST NOT BELONG TO THOSE THAT BELIEVE THAT SHARIA LAW IS ABOVE THE LAW OF THE LAND, THAT IT’S OK TO BUTCHER APOSTATES, THOSE
THAT WANT TO START A WORLD WAR AT THE SLIGHTEST HINT OF INSULTING A DEAD MAN OR THEIR HOLY BOOK “. INTOLERANCE ISLAM IS THY NAME.
Excellent. I’ve known about the true history of Islam for decades and lately have taken to sharing articles like this on Face Book, trying to get the message out. Islam is a religion on hatred, misogyny, slavery, child molestation, rape, theft, honor killings, and intolerance, among other things. Be afraid, America. Be very afraid. There are no such things as “moderate” Muslims. They are inactive Muslims who, when they see that the western world is about to be conquered, will become active. Anyone calling them selves “moderate” Muslims must publicly and openly call for the reform of the Islamic religion, to repudiate the call to jihad–to convert or kill all non-believers–to repudiate misogyny, slavery, honor killings, and all the non-personal freedoms that we enjoy in the west. Until the so-called “moderate Muslims do this, know that they, too, are the enemy. ISIS and Al Qaeda are not radical or extremist they are merely carrying out what their Koran and Mohammed told them them must do. They are fundamentalist Muslims.
Good write up, the Muslims did the same thing in the Indian subcontinent, we Hindus fought back and regained our land , if not for Nehru and the subsequent pseudo Secular governments, the whole sub continent would be ours again but our numbers decreasing, theirs increasing, but we will FIGHT BACK
History tells us that Arabs have invaded Asia and Europe but even after facing atrocities by the Arabs who converted Hindus in India to Islam forcefully and then destroyed all temples and built mosques over here our history books teaches us that they were great warriors and heroes and even cities and roads are named after them like Akbar the Great. Read articles like Persecution of Hindus and it shows how Pakistan over the years and Bangladesh have waged wars against Hindu society and changed it to Islam. But, still our leaders and historians alter the fact, and Hindus as being always tolerant just listen to western and Indian media which is always supportive of Muslims all over the world
Many of us are aware of this history, the question remains is…what can we do to turn things around?
Excellent article! You have nailed it.
This is everywhere. Listen to this story in Russia (about halfway into this fine commentary work) where an Islamic woman cut the head from an MRDD child and paraded it on the streets! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjxmYv-P2zQ