A Brief Overview of Centuries Of Muslim Occupation

Hanan Ashrawi was in rare form at the UN, talking about occupation:

She said that “the longest occupation in modern history must end and it is time for the international community to hold Israel accountable, demand that it desist all settlement activities and actions that violate international law and support our peaceful diplomatic efforts to achieve an independent Palestinian state based on 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

She added that “Israel must be brought to compliance and required to adopt a clear and binding timeframe for the implementation of internationally-recognized agreements.”

Ashrawi of course is just being modest--after all, Muslims may very well take first prize for the longest occupation of all time.

We Never Get To Talk About The Muslim Occupation

And it is unlikely that we ever will--at least not in any public forum that matters. Gerald Steinberg notes the hypocrisy:

The scale of Islamic (or Arab) occupation, settlement and racism around the world is far greater than anything that Israel is accused of, but this is never mentioned in polite or diplomatic company. The Arab tribes that followed Muhammad spread their conquest and settlement activities throughout the Middle East, and then kept going to central Asia, western Europe (Spain and Portugal), eastern Europe (to Kosovo and Albania), northern Africa, and east to Asia, including parts of India, (and what is now Pakistan), Malaysia, Indonesia, and southern Thailand.

In these jihads, anyone who didn’t accept Islam was simply killed – there was no “resistance,” because no one was left to resist. Unlike Israel in 1948 or 1967, these occupiers and settlers did not have the excuse of fighting for their lives against a powerful enemy sworn to “drive them into the sea.”

After many centuries (not decades), this Arab and Islamic occupation continues to be characterized by intolerance for different faiths and opinions. The brief period of enlightened Islamic rule, under the Umayyad Caliphate beginning in the 10th century in Spain (Al-Andalus), still left Christians and Jews as second class citizens – dhimmis – who were tolerated, at best, and often persecuted and expelled. But none of this is mentioned by the politically correct defenders of Islam in the United Nations (as it prepares for its Durban Review Conference), nor is it discussed by so-called “human rights” organizations, journalists, and academics and activists on campuses (York University being a case in point).

Maybe the reason that the history of the Muslim occupation is "never mentioned in polite or diplomatic company" is that the company that Israel usually finds herself with is rarely either polite nor diplomatic.

Technorati Tag: Israel.

Historically, Arab Conquests Have Been An Occupational Hazard

With Arab talk of "Israeli Occupation," you might forget that what are today Arab countries today were not always that way. In The Arab Mind, Raphael Patai gives a short rundown:

Within eighty years after the death of Muhammad (632), the Arabs held sway over Spain, North Africa, Egypt, the Fertile Crescent and several contiguous areas, most of which have remained both Arab and Muslim to the present day. Successive generations carried the banner of Islam into more remote parts of the world, including, in the east, Central Asia as far as Mongolia, the Indian Peninusla, and Southeast Asia; in the west, the Balkans and Hungary; and in the south the wide Sudan belt of Africa. (p. 48)

Bernard Lewis makes the point even more clearly. In What Went Wrong, Lewis notes

In the course of the seventh century, Muslim armies advancing from Arabia conquered Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, all until then part of Christendom, and most of the new recruits to Islam, west of Iran and Arabia, were indeed converts from Christianity. (p.4, emphasis added)

Lewis describes how the Moslem invasions did not stop there.

During the eighth century, using North Africa as their base, the Arab forces were joined by Berber converts as they went into Spain and Portugal and invaded France.

In the ninth century they conquered Sicily and sacked Rome--resulting in the Christian counter-attack known as the Crusades, hardly the offensive unprovoked attack that the Arab world condemns.

In the thirteenth century, the Tartars conquered Russia and later converted to Islam--meaning that Russia and much of Eastern Europe was subjected to Moslem rule till they freed themselves in the late 15th century.

During a third wave of attacks, the Ottoman Turks conquered Anatolia, captured Constantinople, invaded the Balkan peninsula and reached as far as Vienna.

Bernard Lewis writes:

At the peak of Islamic power, there was only one civilization that was comparable in the level quality and variety of achievement; that of course was China. (p. 6)

The difference being that China was limited to one area.

So historically, the Arabs have the distinction of being The World's Greatest Occupational Power.

And you know what that means. Like any other occupational force, the occupying forces of the Moslem army had to deal with the occupied population--though not in terms of terrorist militant counter-attacks.

In The Crisis of Islam, Lewis writes

By this time the jihad had become almost entirely defensive--resisting the Reconquest in Spain and Russia, resisting the movements for national self-liberation by the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and finally, as Muslims see it, defending the very heartlands of Islam against infidel attack. (p. 34 emphasis added)

By contrast, pre-1948 Palestine was a bargain--where Jews were willing to share a land that never lacked for some Jewish presence, in spite of its desolation at the hands of the Arab occupation, as recorded by Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad:

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies...Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is becorme a pauper village...

...Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? (online here)

But the Arab occupier-as-occupied claim goes along with similar claims made regarding the Taj Mahal and their continued claim to Spain. As Ephraim Karsh writes:

the fact is that the fuel of Islamic imperialism remains as volatile as ever, and is very far from having burned itself out. To deny its force is the height of folly, and to imagine that it can be appeased or deflected is to play into its hands. Only when it is defeated, and when the faith of Islam is no longer a tool of Islamic political ambition, will the inhabitants of Muslim lands, and the rest of the world, be able to look forward to a future less burdened by Saladins and their gory dreams.

But the first step is to recognize the threat, and we are not even up to that point yet.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Islamism and Middle East and Occupation and Arab.

These Pirates Didn't Sing Opera

I pray you, pardon me, ex-Pirate King!
Peers will be peers, and youth will have its fling.
The Pirates of Penzance

In an article appearing on National Review Online, Joshua E. London writes about the first case of an unprovoked attack on Americans by Muslim terrorists under the protection of Arab dictators--when Thomas Jefferson dealt with the Barbary pirates:

The Barbary states, modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, are collectively known to the Arab world as the Maghrib (“Land of Sunset”), denoting Islam’s territorial holdings west of Egypt. With the advance of Mohammed’s armies into the Christian Levant in the seventh century, the Mediterranean was slowly transformed into the backwater frontier of the battles between crescent and cross. Battles raged on both land and sea, and religious piracy flourished.

The Maghrib served as a staging ground for Muslim piracy throughout the Mediterranean, and even parts of the Atlantic. America’s struggle with the terror of Muslim piracy from the Barbary states began soon after the 13 colonies declared their independence from Britain in 1776, and continued for roughly four decades, finally ending in 1815.

One of the key points London makes is to focus on the reason behind the ongoing conflict between these Moslems on the one hand and the US--which did not understand the reason for the attacks in the first place. The answer to that question was later explained at a meeting:

the 1786 meeting in London of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the Tripolitan ambassador to Britain. As American ambassadors to France and Britain respectively, Jefferson and Adams met with Ambassador Adja to negotiate a peace treaty and protect the United States from the threat of Barbary piracy.

These future United States presidents questioned the ambassador as to why his government was so hostile to the new American republic even though America had done nothing to provoke any such animosity. Ambassador Adja answered them, as they reported to the Continental Congress, “that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.” [emphasis added]

Based on this, Mr. London makes what should be a point well taken but one that will undoubtedly ignored anyway:

Note that America’s Barbary experience took place well before colonialism entered the lands of Islam, before there were any oil interests dragging the U.S. into the fray, and long before the founding of the state of Israel. [emphasis added]

True, Israel holds a special place in the hearts of Moslems, in part as the dhimmis that got away and are now the equals--and more--of the one-time Moslem empire.

After all, while Moslems are fond of pointing to "Palestine" as occupied territory, they tend to gloss over the history of the Moslem attempted expansion which started from the originally Christian areas of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, and invadedRussia, Belgrade, Spain, Budapest, and Vienna, France and Iceland--before the Moslem invaders were repulsed. (see Israeli Occupation? Moslems Are Just Being Modest) The Crusades were a reaction to Moslem imperialism, a piece of history that seems to get forgotten.

Daniel Johnson, a senior editor and columnist for the London Times and Daily Telegraph, and currently a columnist for the New York Sun writes in How To Think About The Crusades:

In that larger perspective, they take their place as a short-lived counteroffensive against another, much lengthier, and much more relentless holy war — namely, the Muslim jihad against Christendom. For the fact is that whereas the Crusades were a temporary phenomenon that flourished for some two centuries and had quite limited purposes, jihad is and has been a permanent and ubiquitous fact of Islamic life.

Jihad evolved into a doctrine of Islamic jurisprudence as a byproduct of the great Arab expansion after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, thus predating the First Crusade by more than four centuries. Muslim scholars were well aware of the uniqueness of this institution. Ibn Khaldun, the greatest of all Islamic historians and a key witness from the period just after the Crusades, compares Islam with Christianity and Judaism in this respect:

In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or force… . The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty to them, save only for purposes of defense.

But today, past history amounts to little. Quoting Santayana is droll. The Crusades were evil. The Moslems were victims--and don't even mention the 'C' word, lest you offend. Meanwhile, the Barbary pirates are forgotten. Moslems are not all evil, but without the viewpoint of history we are being led to the belief that the West, and Israel, is.

As long as millions of dollars are being offered to universities to offer even more courses on Islam, isn't it about time to finally have an honest presentation of Islam and Islamic history--warts and all--instead of babying those who claim that Islam and Moslems are just being misunderstood. It's time for Islamic studies not only to grow but also grow up.

Crossposted at Israpundit

Technorati Tags: Israel and Islam and Crusades.

Israeli Occupation? Moslems are Just Being Modest

Like the rest of the world, the Palestinian Arabs and the Moslem world as a whole gives a geshrei about the Israeli 'occupation' along with cries of American 'occupation' of Iraq, imperialism, globalization, etc.

Moslem history is worth looking at in comparison.

In an article for The New Yorker back in 2001 entitled the The Revolt of Islam Bernard Lewis writes about the European counter-attack against Moslem invasion during the Middle Ages:

The Tatars were expelled from Russia, and the Moors from Spain. But in southeastern Europe, where the Ottoman sultan confronted first the Byzantine and then the Holy Roman Emperor, Muslim power prevailed, and these setbacks were seen as minor and peripheral. As late as the seventeenth century, Turkish pashas still ruled in Budapest and Belgrade, Turkish armies were besieging Vienna, and Barbary corsairs were raiding lands as distant as the British Isles and, on one occasion, in 1627, even Iceland. [emphasis added]

The material in the article appears also in Lewis' The Crisis of Islam (see page 51).

On page 34 of that book, he describes the beginning of Moslem Imperialism:

The then Christian provinces of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa were absorbed and in due course Islamized and Arabized, and they served as bases for the further invasion of Europe and the conquest of Spain and Portugal and much of southern Italy. By the early eighth century the conquering Arab armies were even advancing beyond the Pyrenees into France. [emphasis added]

Lewis describes the European attempt to end the Moslem occupation in contemporary terms:

By this time the jihad had become almost entirely defensive--resisting the Reconquest in Spain and Russia, resisting the movements for national self-liberation by the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and finally, as Muslims see it, defending the very heartlands of Islam against infidel attack. [emphasis added]

Lewis adds how Moslems describe this period of Christian self-liberation:

This phase has come to be known as imperialism.

Apparently Zionism is not the first nationalist movement to be labeled 'imperialist' by the Moslem world.

Technorati Tag: Middle East.