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A Brief Introduction

Slay the unbelievers where you find them…

—Quran, Sura 9:5 the “Sword verse”

The atrocity of September 11 is a violation of Islamic law and ethics.

—The late Sheikh Zaki Badawi, of the Muslim College in London, after 9/11

CONFUSED?

This book will look at the long history of religious warfare in all its aspects, part of what my editor at Citadel Press has rightly described as the “dark heart of man.” It is a phenomenon that one might legitimately call humanity’s dirty secret, especially since religion is also regarded, a few hard-line atheists apart, as primarily a tool for peace and harmony, rather than for war.

I will not be considering only war between Muslims and Christians, since religious warfare is far wider in scope than that. For example, we will see that, as well as going to war against each other, Muslims and Christians have fought within their respective faith, such as during the intra-Islamic warfare of the seventh century, and the 150 years or so of European history usually named the Wars of Religion, when Catholics fought Protestants. In some parts of the world today, Muslims and Christians are the victims, not the perpetrators of aggression, notably in India, where the same extremist Hindu organization that murdered Mahatma Gandhi is still encouraging the massacre of Indians not of the majority faith.

In other words, where you find people, you find war, and since most people alive today are religious in some form or another, religion is often the excuse made to slaughter others on a grand scale.

However, those faiths around today—what British expert Anthony Smith calls “salvation religions”—usually teach that violence is normally wrong, except in specially permitted circumstances. I cannot simply go up to someone I dislike and beat him over the head, however much I might want to do so, because by the standards of most faiths today that would be morally wrong. What applies to an individual is also true of a much larger group of people, such as a nation state or a religious community.

Yet, since the dawn of time, individuals have been killing one another and nations have warred against each other—in our own era, with devastating effects, since the tools modernity uses for slaughter are far more efficient than were the simple weapons of days gone by.

In more recent times, warfare has been for reasons other than religion: for national gain, for economic resources, for ideological conquest. Hitler did not wipe out 6 million Jews and over 20 million Russians for religious reasons, but for a warped belief in the racial superiority of the German people. Communism is profoundly antireligious, and it was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions more during the last century.

Yet the excuse made by so many over millennia to murder in the name of religion has not gone away, be it the slaughter of over 8,000 Muslim men at Srebrenica in 1995 to the better-known carnage in Washington, DC, and New York of September 11, 2001, when over 3,000 innocent victims of a multitude of religions were massacred in the space of just a few minutes. However modern or sophisticated we might think we have become as we embark on the twenty-first century, some of our worst primeval instincts are powerfully with us still.

In this chapter, we will look briefly at two things.

The first is a personal introduction to this theme. Mine is not an academic textbook, with footnotes and quotations from original source material, but an attempt to explain one of the most complex and vital issues to intelligent lay people today. In order for me to do this it is important for you, the reader, to know where I come from, especially as I am aiming to make my views clear and to achieve a proper balance, both at the same time.

Second, we ought to look at the original faith statements of the two major protagonists in this book—Christianity and Islam. What is the Christian concept of a “just war”? Is such a thing even possible? What is jihad—is it always violent or can it be, as many Muslims are now saying, something altogether peaceful and internal? We will, deliberately, consider conflicts other than just Muslim/Christian, but need also to know a bit more about what those two faiths are supposed to believe, before we examine how they have been at daggers drawn for nearly 1,400 years.

In as much as possible of what follows, I will aim to be as fair and objective as possible. My reason is not to have some kind of woolly neutrality, since I would argue that such a goal, while praiseworthy, is in fact impossible. All humans have prejudices, and to me, at least, the real difference is whether we admit them openly or, rather, pretend that I am objective, you are prejudiced, and they are ignorant fanatics. Scholars and other writers who claim to be so wonderfully objective almost always give themselves away in some form or another, and it is surely better to admit to common human frailty from the outset, and then do one’s best at least to be as fair as possible when considering those whose viewpoints differ so much from one’s own.

So like most inhabitants of the West, and certainly those who would claim to be civilized, I must state at the outset that I am naturally against extremism and violence in all its forms. To me, terrorism cannot be justified, however righteous the cause; for instance, while I am of Protestant Scottish-Irish stock, I have always opposed the use of force in Northern Ireland as being against all I believe in and stand for. Democracy, not the gun, is the way to settle tribal disputes.

In being actively religious (in my case, membership of that rare beast, an actually thriving Church of England congregation in Britain), I am very much in the minority so far as Western Europe is concerned, especially in being also university educated. As will probably be obvious, I come from that part of contemporary Protestantism that regards conversion growth or peaceful missionary endeavor as the way in which the Christian faith should spread, and not the sword, or colonial conquest. (My maternal ancestors are Welsh; the English first invaded Wales and then, from 1536 to 1999, abolished the right of Welsh people to rule themselves.) Inevitably, this makes a difference to my view of the Crusades.

My kind of Christianity also believes in what the old Puritans would describe as original sin, the idea that by nature none of us are good, or capable of perfection, but that left to ourselves we instinctively do what is wrong. Far from thinking that this is a pessimistic view of life, I tend to hold that it is simply realistic, from the tantrums of small children to the much bigger horrors we see daily in the newspapers or by observing the world around us.

I do not, therefore, feel the need to defend what those who profess the same faith as I do, have done down the centuries, since they are all sinners, too. This affects not just my view of the Crusades, but also of the wars of religion that occurred in Europe as a result of the Protestant Reformation. Being paternally Northern Irish, and from a family that employed Catholics and Protestants alike on merit, whatever our own devout Protestant beliefs, I have been raised with a dislike of sectarian conflict, and an inability, despite my Calvinist theology, to wear the color orange. Christians have killed other Christians since the decision of the Emperor Constantine to convert to Christianity in the fourth century, something of which I strongly disapprove and which, whatever one’s faith, should certainly not be swept under the carpet when one thinks of the many misdeeds of other religions.

One benefit of being British is, I trust, that I will be neutral in the culture wars of the United States, something that I find so often warps what even the most learned of authors write when it comes to the religious issues at the heart of this book. Just before writing this introduction, I read two fascinating books on the perennially thorny issue of jihad, a term used variably for the struggle to be a good Muslim, or, in the case of others, to wage war against those of other faiths. Is Islam naturally and instinctively a religion of peace? Or is it, by contrast, a faith with violence at its core, one that has been such since its origins over 1,300 years ago? One book argued firmly for the former view, the second for the latter, and the two respective volumes provided the quotations with which this chapter started.

One of the problems that I have observed is that, all too often, analysis of the Muslim past is determined by what side an author is on in very contemporary twenty-first-century culture war debates: either all Muslims secretly do believe in violent religious warfare, and in killing infidels on a grand scale; or Islam is overwhelmingly a peaceful faith, and the misdeeds of some rather misguided Muslims in centuries past does not really matter and should be taken in the context of living in more benighted and primitive times.

Such views naturally contradict each other! Both of them also incorrectly color the past with what we think particular groups believe today. Yet we recognize—or at least I hope we do—that Christians do not, for example, behave now as they did in the sixteenth century, when one group of believers would burn another at the stake. Religions are not absolute objects. In our own times, Islam is undergoing a major change: for the first time in Islamic history, such an enormous proportion of Muslims are living outside the Realm of Belief, the Dar al-Iman, that their faith cannot help but be affected, to literally take a more worldly view.

So if most Muslims today—and opinion polls would support this—believe that their faith is indeed one of peace, I see no reason why we should reject their sincerity. Muslim leaders such as the late Sheikh Badawi in Britain, and the happily still living Akbar Ahmed in the United States, have to me striven genuinely for peace and reconciliation.

But that does not mean that we should reinterpret the violence of the past in the light of the peace-loving present. There is something ridiculous to me about well-meaning writers glossing over the more bloodthirsty elements of Islamic history because we want, as we should, to be friendly and inclusive toward Muslims living in the West today. Such authors—Karen Armstrong, to take just one well-known example—never give the same leeway to the many atrocities in the Christian past, almost certainly because Christianity, being the majority faith of Western culture, is for them a source of criticism not of admiration.

Let us face it—for centuries, practicing Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and members of many other faiths, have all committed the most appalling deeds in the name of their particular religious faith. Not only that, but they have often done so regardless of what their founding faith documents and teachers have proclaimed is the correct way in which to live. The slaughtering of Muslims in Jerusalem in 1099 and Srebrenica in 1995 is hardly compatible with the command of Christ to love your neighbor as yourself, or to reject violence in the name of the Prince of Peace. Likewise, Muslims, for over a millennium, from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries, embarked on imperial conquest and domination, in the name of Islam, and that surely is every bit as much colonialism as the kind perpetrated by Westerners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If it was wrong for Britain to conquer large swaths of Africa, it was wrong for eight-century Muslim armies to conquer Spain.

So much ink, all contradictory, has been spilled over the subject of jihad that this vexing subject has become, if anything, even more confused than before. Many contemporary writers talk about two kinds of jihad: the lesser, or military version; and the greater, or religious one that speaks about the inner struggle toward holiness. Ask most Muslims in the West today about which version they choose, they will almost invariably select the latter. But, for example, read many a work with the word jihad in that title and you will gain the impression that jihad always means violence, bloodshed, and warfare, and, especially since 2001, holy war against the West.

So what should we believe, given the contradictory evidence? Do we believe, for example, John Esposito’s books, propagating a sympathetic and almost apologetic version of Islam, past and present, or the hostile and conspiracy oriented view of Robert Spencer, author and founder of the Web site Jihadwatch.org?

Thankfully, 2005 saw the publication, by the University of California Press, of Understanding Jihad by Rice University professor David Cook. (It could of course be the case that my enthusiasm for this particular work exists because Cook’s views so closely parallel my own.) While I might be more inclined to give contemporary Muslims the benefit of the doubt in the interpretation of twenty-first-century jihad, nonetheless, I think that Cook makes out superbly the historical understanding of mainstream Islam and consequently of what jihad is and entails.

Melding my views with those of Cook, I would say that while it is true that most Muslims today interpret jihad in the sense of the struggle for inner righteousness—my own Muslim friends and colleagues, and many recent opinion polls would back this up—historically jihad has meant one thing and one thing only: war in the name of Allah.

This of course does not and should not mean that most Muslims around today, and certainly those living in the West, would ever see it that way now themselves. When some American-or British-based imam says that today Islam is a religion of peace, I see no reason why we should disbelieve him; I am not a conspiracy theorist, or one to think that supposedly peace-oriented Muslims are secretly out to kill us. Those who do hate the West and all its works, and who follow the extremist, murderous salafiyya form of Islam (of which more in the last chapter) are usually explicit enough in what they think of us and why.

However, to read present-time peaceful Islam back into the past is, to me as well as to Professor Cook, sheer anachronism. While, like me, he much admires the work of University of Edinburgh historian Carole Hillenbrand, for instance, on what Muslims thought of the Crusades both then and since, he points out that there is simply no written evidence that Muslims adopted a predominantly peaceful view of jihad in the way that she states. (Cook makes the same point of the numerous works of Georgetown professor John Esposito, cited earlier.)

We will look in much more detail at the actual history of early Islam in chapter 3. But first, we need a framework within which to interpret events.

My own take is that Islam is undergoing a process of change, particularly among Muslims living outside of the traditional Islamic world, in states under non-Islamic rule. Some younger Muslim men are, if anything, becoming more aggressive, as evidenced by the British-born and-raised Islamic terrorists of 7/7 (July 7, 2005) and those found guilty of attempted atrocities in the United Kingdom since then. However, by contrast, many other Muslims, especially women, are moving in the opposite direction, toward accommodation with the West, yet without in any way giving up their Islamic spiritual beliefs and values. Islam, in other words, is not static in all places or even within the same generation.

But as for the past, it is hard to disagree with the overwhelming historical case made by Cook’s Understanding Jihad, not to mention similar works, some written for a more academic audience, by experts such as Rudolf Peters and Reuben Firestone. It could be that these writers also have a political agenda behind what they say, but if they do I have not found it. What Cook demonstrates conclusively is that the distinction between the greater and lesser jihad is itself anachronistic, and certainly the current-day split between the peaceful and aggressive forms is entirely modern. Jihad as traditionally understood and practiced by hundreds of years of Islam has always been primarily an expression of warfare; and the internal-struggle aspect, while real, is as often as not linked to inner preparation for outward military action.

Jihad has, therefore been part of Islam since the very beginning, even if, as Firestone shows, the actual doctrines relating to holy war took time to evolve. As several writers put it, with Sunni Islam, the gates of new or personal interpretation, or ijtihad, were closed in the tenth century, with reinterpretation being effectively banished since around 900. Most Islamic commentary on jihad, therefore, even if written after that time, such as the commentaries of the famous Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd), is more to do with the details—in the case of Averroes, for instance, making it very clear that Islam does not agree with killing women and children, a point that countless Muslims reminded the world of after the atrocities of 9/11.

Islam, as I hope to prove, is a faith in which “church and state” are by definition permanently enmeshed, with none of the sacred/secular divide that has characterized, say, Christianity since the late seventeenth/early eighteenth centuries, not to mention Christianity’s first three hundred years as a banned, illegal, underground, and persecuted faith. One of the very reasons why Muslims in the West are turning either, in the minority, to extreme violence, and, in the majority, to peaceful accommodation, is precisely because they are, for the first time, having to live as Muslims in a non-Islamic society.

In the past, however, this was not the case, and that is why, I would argue, the predominant meaning of jihad within the Islamic world has changed.

In the past, faith and state were inexorably interlinked, and, as Andrew Wheatcroft reminds us in his superb Infidels, the Ottoman Empire believed in permanent expansion, and thus in continuous enlarging of the borders of Islam.

Today, as both surveys of Muslims and the writings of eminent Islamic peace activists such as Akbar Ahmed demonstrate, Sufi, or mystical, Islam is overwhelmingly peaceful, contemplative and nonviolent. However, Cook shows from both their writings and their actions that this was far from the case, with eminent Sufi leaders in the past, such as the medieval al-Nuwayri, taking part in battle, in addition to Muslim rulers of more martial bent. Sufis, in centuries gone by, have been as militaristic in their interpretation of jihad as anyone else, even if, like al-Ghazali, the great philosopher, they put more emphasis on the inner rather than violent version.

So while the many Sufi orders, from the Balkans to northern Africa, practiced the inner jihad, Muslims of all descriptions were involved as soldiers in the martial version, that of conquest. Islam was, in effect, perpetually on the march, conquering new territory from 632 to 1683, a period more than a millennium long. The predominance of the West is incredibly recent, and if nations such as China or India catch up with us during the twenty-first century, Western hegemony will be seen as a transient phase lasting not much longer than four hundred years, well under half the time scale of Islamic supremacy. Come a hundred years from now, both Western and Islamic domination will both be phenomena of the past, as we continue in what might well be the Asian Millennium.

ISLAM’S WARS OF CONQUEST:

THE MUSLIM EMPIRE 632–751

“Who started it?”

How often has an irate teacher or parent entered a room in which two children are fighting with each other, only for each child to blame the other one for starting the quarrel.

It is somewhat the same scenario with the age-old dispute between Christianity and Islam. Back in 1998, one thousand years after the start of the First Crusade, a group of Christian pilgrims walked the original Crusader route from France to Jerusalem, in apology for the Crusades of a millennium earlier. Even today, when debates take place between Christians and Muslims, one of the first things that the Islamic side of the discussion will do is to ask the Christians to apologize for the Crusades.

All this has done is to perpetuate what is in fact untrue—that the West is responsible for aggression against the Islamic world, and that Muslims throughout history have been the hapless victims of Christian-inspired Western imperialism.

This, in turn, ties in with two major strands of thought: first, that of self-loathing by many of my fellow intellectuals in the West, in particular those who are motivated by a strong dislike of religion of any kind; and, second, by extremist Islamic groups for whom any attempt or opportunity to tarnish the West, especially its imperialism, is always welcome. As I was writing this book, al Qaeda’s number two leader, al-Zawahiri, issued a statement roundly condemning what he regarded as a Crusader and Zionist alliance against the Muslim world, i.e., those living in Lebanon and who are under Israeli attack.

What is significant about such beliefs is that millions believe in them, well beyond those writing and speaking in the two previous categories: Western secular intellectuals and Islamic hard-line religious extremists. I think Victor Davis Hanson is right, in Between War and Peace, to say that often people simply do not learn such things at school; and lest non-American readers feel complacent, I have found this among pupils on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the main tasks I want to accomplish in this book is to show that this is, in fact, a wholly false perspective. In the near fourteen hundred years in which Christians and Muslims have been living side by side, there is, in reality, very little to choose between them when it comes to wars of aggression or of imperial intent. Not only that, but for the first millennium, roughly from 632 and the death of Muhammad, right up until the second attempt by the Ottoman Turks to capture the city of Vienna in 1683, the boot was firmly on the Islamic foot, with the Muslim powers on the offensive and those of Christianity on the defensive.

Although the motives of the Crusaders were often spiritual rather than imperialistic, their actions were—with some similarity to Sheikh Badawi’s post-9/11 observation—quite contrary to the foundational tenets of Christian faith. To attack Christianity for the Crusades is therefore historically and theologically mistaken, even by the standards of the “just war” theory that evolved in the Church after it became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the late fourth century.

All this debate—indeed much of the subject matter of this book—is, alas, also part of the internal culture wars in the present-day United States, something wearily familiar to many American readers, and also a debate that frequently baffles those living outside it, including often-bewildered British regular visitors like me.

It is therefore important for me to say here—as someone who has close friends on both sides of the cultural conflict in the USA—that I will attempt to write as someone neutral in internal American discussions, and that what follows should be read without bias in that regard. Muslims are often perceived in stark terms, as all wonderful, peace-loving victims of Western oppression, or evildoers in whom no good is ever to be found, enemies of the West and everything we stand for. (I am exaggerating but, in the light of some books I have read on each side, sadly not by all that much.) Thankfully, too, there are plenty of historians who, while having strong views of their own, are scrupulously fair to all standpoints, and I will do my best to be the same.

So let us transport ourselves back to the seventh century, to see what happened then, regardless of whether we think that twenty-first-century Muslims are nearly all peaceful people who love us or fanatics out to blow Western civilization into oblivion.

Whatever our views on the advice Princeton sage Bernard Lewis played in advising the Bush administration in 2003 on the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, I think that his views on the contrast between early Christianity and the dawn of Islam are incontrovertible. Christianity, he shows in his many books, spent its first three hundred years as an underground, persecuted religion. Islam, from the beginning, was a faith of military and political power, with its founder, Muhammad, not just the spiritual leader, but the head of state and army commander all rolled into one.

This difference, Lewis argues, makes all the difference even today, in how those of us in the West perceive life and issues in a way quite distinct from those inspired by Islam. This will be crucial for our understanding of the final chapter, when we look at Islamic-inspired terrorism, but its application to the subject of the present topic—the historical Islamic wars of conquest—is obvious.

Islam is, and always has been, a religion of power. There is surely no doubt that the early Muslim centuries are those of political and military conquest, and what controversial British/ Israeli academic Ephraim Karsh calls in his latest book, those of Islamic imperialism.

While the first century of Christianity saw martyrdoms, of converts being thrown to the lions in the Circus, or used as human torches by the emperor Nero, the first generation of Muhammad’s followers were engaged in creating one of the biggest land empires that the world has ever seen. From 632, the year of his death and the election of Abu Bakr, as his first successor or caliph, until exactly a century later, when, in 732, the Muslim invaders of France were checked at a battle between Tours and Poitiers by the army of Charles Martel, the Islamic shock troops conquered an empire far bigger even than that of Rome at its peak. From the Atlantic coast of Spain in Europe, across the whole of North Africa and the Middle East, through to Persia and the borders of the Indus in what is now India: all this was under the rule of the caliphs, and under the banner of the Prophet Muhammad and his law.

Christianity also spread in its first century, but slowly and clandestinely, since to be caught promoting or practicing this faith could involve death. As a result, the growth was through conversion—through persuasion—and in the teeth of opposition from the ruling authorities.

Islam, to be fair, later also grew through a mix of trade and conversions, especially in what is today the biggest Muslim nation in the world, Indonesia. We must never forget that most Muslims are not Arabs, and that for them the actual language of the Quran is as foreign to them as it is to us. Even now, for instance, while the millions of Christians in Nigeria read the Bible in their own language, the only permitted version of the Quran remains that of the Arabic original—although Islam, like Christianity, is a universal monotheistic missionary faith, it remains rooted in its Middle Eastern origins in a way that Christianity is not.

As British scholars Peter Cotterell and Peter Riddell remind us, this is in itself part of the military triumph of early Islam, when Islam was a both a faith and a tool of Arab imperialism, religious belief traveling hand in hand with the sword.

Debates rage among the politically correct on the one hand and the overtly incorrect on the other, as to how the early Muslim soldiers behaved. Were there massacres, with the innocent slain, or was it a more civilized affair, with casualties limited to those on the field of battle?

The problem is that by now, with so little written down at the time, it is impossible to tell. Furthermore, contemporary accounts would all be partisan one way or the other, with independent corroboration hard to achieve.

But what we do know is that the heartlands of Christianity were conquered within decades of the launch of the invasions, many of them taking place in the reign of the second caliph, Omar (634–644),

Under his rule, the Byzantine Empire suffered a major defeat at the Battle of Yarmuk in 636. By 638, Jerusalem itself was taken, and, by 641, Egypt also soon found itself under Islamic rule.

It is only the plight in twenty-first-century Iraq of the hundreds of thousands of Assyrian Orthodox and Chaldean Catholic Christians, now being harassed for their faith by extremists, that we remember at all that in the seventh century the vast bulk of the inhabitants of the Middle East were once Christian, not Muslim.

Some of the local inhabitants were glad to see the Islamic conquerors. When, in 381, Christianity became the official religion of the East Roman—or Byzantine—Empire, theologically heterodox forms of the faith were regarded as politically as well as spiritually rebellious. Such forms of dissent were thus suppressed or otherwise discouraged, in a way that was to continue in Christianity until the seventeenth century, when the results from the split caused in Western Christian faith by the Reformation led some of its adherents to return to the nonstate origins of Christianity’s founders. As a result, several small Christian groups, in the seventh century, realized that Islam did not distinguish doctrinally between one form of Christianity and another, so that believers in what the Byzantines deemed to be heresies would no longer be persecuted for their beliefs. Now the Byzantine folly would haunt the Orthodox Church, since many territories formerly under its sway would be lost to Islam for good.

Rather than try to hold onto the entire Middle East, the Byzantines decided to protect their own territorial heartland—their lands in Anatolia, and their possessions in Europe and other parts of the Mediterranean. Crucially, as relates to the later Crusades, this entailed not attempting to reconquer areas such as Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Consequently these were to enter what Muslims before or since call the Dar al-Islam, or Realm of Islam, territory that, theologically speaking, once Muslim is always Muslim, for all time.

(Those of us outside Islam live in the Dar al-Harb, or Realm of War. Some Muslims, historically, have allowed for a Dar al-Sulh, or Realm of Truce, where non-Islamic rulers live peacefully with their Muslim neighbors, so long as that is agreeable to the Islamic side. Today, peace activists within Islam also want to create a Dar al-Salaam, which we have seen means a Realm of Peace.)

To the east, the great Iranian Empire, that of the Sassanid Persians, was also swiftly conquered. At the end of the 650s that, too, was under Muslim rule. The ancient, pre-Christian Zoroastrian faith was all but wiped out (that religion barely exists today, observed by a comparatively small number of Parsis in India, and some other scattered adherents.)

After not very long, major differences arose within the Islamic community of the faithful, the umma.

According to such scholars as Michael Cook (author of The Koran: A Very Short Introduction, and Patricia Crone, it is hard at this distance to work out who exactly believed what, when, and why. It is possible that Islamic doctrine was not fixed as early as Muslim scholarship would have us believe, though, as I have argued in other books that I have written on this area, there is no intrinsic reason to doubt the official version of the development of Islam in these early decades, so long as one does not examine it all through rose-tinted spectacles that deny the downside as well as the achievements.

Whichever side is true, the new faith found itself at war almost immediately, in armed conflict over what Muslims now call ridda (apostasy, the renunciation of an old faith). Only Abu Bakr, of the four Rashidun, or Rightly Guided Caliphs (632–61) died peacefully in his bed—all the others met violent ends in one form or another.

Much of the bloodshed involved who should legitimately succeed Muhammad as the leader of the faithful, the umma. Muhammad, as the founding Prophet, was deemed to be God’s final revelation, and was, in that respect, irreplaceable. But he was also a political and military leader, since Islam then and since does not make the separation of the spiritual and the secular that early Christianity made, and that we in the West rediscovered in the seventeenth century and after.

On three occasions, Ali, who was both Muhammad’s cousin and also the husband of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, was passed over as caliph. In view of his somewhat lackluster performance when he was finally chosen, this is perhaps not surprising. No daughter could succeed Muhammad. But Ali and Fatima had sons, and these were male descendants of the founder. A strong minority thus saw Ali as having all the right hereditary and spiritual credentials. Ali’s supporters were the party of Ali, the Shia’t Ali, and it is from them that Shia Islam and its Shiite followers—today about 15 percent of Muslims worldwide—gain their name.

Since politics and military rule were all interwined, the issue was solved by war, one group of Muslims against another. By 657 Ali had entered a truce called by Muawiya, Othman’s nephew, and also governor of Damascus. Like his uncle Muawiya was a member of the Ummayad clan, the aristocratic Meccan group that had initially rejected Muhammad.

This truce was not acceptable to a group of hard-line Muslims, now called the Kharajites (literally “those who withdraw”). Although they were not influential in mainstream Islam, the Kharajites, with their purist view of how the Muslim world should be run, nevertheless continued to be highly thought of by a steady minority of extreme Muslims over the centuries. Although it might be pushing a point, one can see in them the future germ of al Qaeda and that group’s equally purist view of an ideal Islamic caliphate. It was a Kharijite that murdered Ali in 661—this in itself shows the degree of internal violence that was endemic in the Islamic world at this time.

War in the Muslim world continued; upon Ali’s assassination, this time the Ummayads left nothing to chance: Muawiya proclaimed himself caliph, making his capital Damascus.

Needless to say, this assumption of power by one of the Meccan aristocracy was not acceptable to all, and fighting continued among different factions all eager to assume power of what was now an increasingly large empire, stretching from what is now Iran in the east to even further stretches of North Africa in the west.

Ali’s first son by Fatima, Hassan, was not a natural warrior, and allowed the new regime to take power. But Hassan’s brother Hussein was made of sterner material. When Yazid, Muawiya’s son, took over as caliph in 680, many regarded what was now an hereditary monarchy in all but name as contrary to custom, as the Ummayads were not of the Prophet’s family. Hussein therefore made a bid for power and was completely crushed at the Battle of Karbala that year, his head sent to the new caliph in Damascus.

Most Muslims continued to support the victorious Ummayads, and mainstream Sunni Islam does so today. But Hussein’s death was seen as martyrdom by his loyal band of followers, and that remains the case with modern-day Shiite Muslims. The annual festival of Ashura, when Shiite Muslim men scourge themselves with chains, is still the major celebration of Shiite Islam in our own time. Not only that but the sense of being martyrs, of being a minority within Islam, arguably gives Shiism a very different outlook and self-image than that of the Sunni majority.

While Muslims were killing each other back in the beginning of the eighth century, they were also spreading the Dar al-Islam ever wider. By now the borders of the Indus were being reached in the east, and, by 711, most of North Africa was also in their hands.

At this stage it is important to say that most of the peoples they conquered were not forcibly converted to Islam. Arabs remained small minorities in the new domains, often restricting themselves to new garrison towns, from which they could control their territories.

Some subject peoples did convert but, under the Ummayads, who held onto power until 750 (when most of them were massacred), real authority and status belonged to the tiny Arab overlord class, similar in many ways to the equally tiny British elite who ruled over India in the days of the Raj. These converts, Muslim but not Arab, were called mawalis and most of them, especially those from Persia, were bitter about their second-class status.

Christians, Jews, and others deemed to be of monotheistic faith who did not convert were known as dhimmi, or peoples of the Book, granted special but nonetheless subservient status by the Quran, In recent years, mainly due to the pseudonymous author Ba’t Yeor, the precise status of the dhimmi class under Muslim rule has become one of considerable debate, not just in academic circles but also in the way in which Islam has become part of the culture wars in the United States since 2001.

As a consequence it is hard to know who is right, and how exactly dhimmi were treated. I tend to think that their treatment varied enormously both geographically and chronologically, some Islamic rulers being highly enlightened—such as the Ummayad rulers of Andalus in Spain—whereas others being viciously oppressive, not hesitating to murder those of their subjects who refused to conform. In other words, generalization is impossible, as local circumstances vary.

One of the reasons why conversions were not forced is that non-Muslims had to pay a special poll tax. This meant that it was financially beneficial to the community for the dhimmi to not convert, as becoming Muslims eventually exempted them from the tax. So it was several centuries before the region that we now think of as inexorably Muslim actually turned to the Islamic religion. Even today the Middle East has large Christian minorities, most notably the Copts in Egypt.

By 711, Islamic armies were poised on the edge of Europe. A local dispute in Vandal-ruled Spain—Vandals being the Germanic tribe that had conquered the Iberian Peninsula after the fall of Rome—gave Tariq, an ambitious Muslim general, the chance that the invaders needed to cross over into Europe and begin what soon turned out to be yet another story of lightning conquest and Islamic triumph.

The peninsula was overrun in no time and, by the early 730s, Muslim armies were in southern France, not all that far from Paris. It seemed as if Western Europe itself would be the next victim of holy war.

However, in France, in Charles Martel, the mayor of the palace to the nominal French kings, the Merovingians, the forces of Islam had finally met their match after one hundred years of effortless conquest. In 732, a century after the death of Muhammad, at a battle somewhere between the modern towns of Tours and Poitiers, the Islamic invaders were defeated and the Frankish forces prevailed. France was safe and so was the rest of Western Europe.

Edward Gibbon, the great British eighteenth-century historian, wondered how life would have been different had that battle gone the other way. Would the Islamic scholars of Oxford have been expounding the Quran, instead of the Christian clergy upholding the Bible there instead? It is an interesting counterfactual question, and, as Gibbon also outlined in the same paragraphs, it shows how close the West came to conquest, since, as he put it, the rivers of Western Europe were surely no greater a natural barrier to invaders than were those of the Middle East and North Africa.

The Islamic conquests did not stop altogether, though. In 751, Islamic soldiers won a major battle over Tang dynasty forces at Talas, in Central Asia, expanding the Muslim conquests there with consequences we shall see in the next chapter. In 831, Muslim armies also conquered Sicily, which was not fully liberated until 1091, and the fact that the latter date is very close to that of the proclamation of the First Crusade in 1095 is surely no coincidence.

(Sicily was to be multicultural for centuries after liberation, especially under its subsequent German Hohenstaufen rulers, and through that, a major conduit of wholly positive Islamic learning in medicine, science, and similar fields in the twelfth century—we should not forget that there were some Islamic invasions, in this case of advance learning, that were entirely beneficial.)

From Sicily, occasional Islamic raiding parties were able to seize parts of southern Italy, albeit temporarily, and raiders from North Africa—later to be nicknamed the Barbary pirates—were able to spread terror on successful slaving expeditions to all parts of Western Europe, Britain included, until finally destroyed by the Americans under Thomas Jefferson as recently as the nineteenth century.

As for Spain, the liberation of the peninsula took until 1492, well over seven hundred years after it was first captured by the invaders from northern Africa. Although the Christians were able to gain as far south as Toledo by 1085, it was an immensely slow process.

In 750, yet another sanguinary coup occurred within Islam, when the Ummayads were overthrown—one of them escaped to Spain to establish his dynasty there in Andalus—and relatives of Muhammad, the Abbasid dynasty, seized power. They were to rule in Baghdad at least in name, until 1258. In terms of civilization, this was to be the golden age of Islam, when the Abbasid caliphate enabled the world of Islam to be one of the greatest intellectual power houses on earth, with discoveries in science, medicine, and philosophy that were to change history and be to the long-term good of mankind. In Spain, especially under the Ummayads, one can make a claim that there really was interreligious tolerance, since in the Iberian Peninsula—unlike, say, Egypt or what is now Iraq, where most inhabitants eventually did become Muslim—the ancestors of today’s Spaniards and Portuguese remained firmly Christian.

Nevertheless, we cannot get away from the fact that all these parts of the Dar al-Islam were so because of conquest, and that while there was no compulsion to convert to Islam, nonetheless the political as well as religious leadership by Muslim caliphs was secured by these military invasions and not by the consent of the people over whom they ruled.

All this goes, I think, to prove the point made by American historians such as Thomas Madden and Victor Davis Hanson, that we need to rethink how we see the traditional strife between Islam and Christianity. Because in the past two centuries or more the West has been significantly ahead, and because in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was undoubtedly the West that was the conquering colonial power, we forget that for most of history it has in fact been in reverse—the Muslims were the conquerors and the Christian West was on the permanent defensive.

Although I don’t buy the idea that the Crusades were no different, say, from the Normandy invasions of 1944 to liberate France, nonetheless, looked at in the long perspective, there is no doubt that, from 632 to 1683, the Islamic world was the imperial power, and the countries of Europe, from Spain to Greece, were the objects of its imperialism.

Where I differ from such historians as Ephraim Karsh, the author of Islamic Imperialism, is on whether such imperialism is endemic in Islam in all places and for all time. While some extremists of the al Qaeda variety certainly hold such ideas today, I do think that it is fair to argue that this is not the case, because so many millions of Muslims, for the first time, no longer live under Islamic rule, but in the West and, indeed, many are not themselves Arab. However undeniably bad the past—and some of the present—I do think that the twenty-first century might see a major shift within Islam, and, we can all hope, this will be very much for the better.

But as for the era of Islamic invasions, especially in the period of effortless conquest between 632 and 831, from the death of the Prophet to the seizure of Sicily, invasion, and the militaristic form of jihad surely prevailed. It is in that context that we ought now to go on to the Crusades, and the attempts of Western Christians to conquer the lands seized by Islam in the seventh century.