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.