Please read this book review from my colleague
Terry Scambray // New Oxford Review
Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen
Centuries of War Between Islam and the West by Raymond
Ibrahim. Da Capo Press, 2018. Pp. 297
We judge individuals by what they say and
what they do. We judge cults, religions and ideologies the same way; that
is, by their doctrines and history.
Which is common sense, of course.
Apparently though, common sense is abandoned
when it comes to ideologies like Marxism which has largely escaped such
scrutiny by our schools and popular culture; and now the same cover up is
happening with Islam.
But Raymond Ibrahim, fluent in Arabic is
an equal opportunity Middle East scholar committed to truth rather than
conforming to dangerous fads.
Ibrahim gained attention
with his revealing translations in his 2007 book, The
Al Qaeda Reader, which showed the difference between what Osama bin Laden said in
Arabic to Muslims and what he said for receptive, if not gullible, Western
audiences.
Ibrahim’s second
book, Crucified Again, showed the murder and destruction that Christians are enduring
at the hands of Muslims throughout the world.
In Sword
and Scimitar, Ibrahim begins by explaining Mohammed’s doctrine of jihad or
“holy war”: “Whereas the rewards of the pre-Islamic tribal raid were limited to
temporal spoils and came with the risk of death, the deified raid (jihad)
offered rewards in the here and the hereafter – meaning it was essentially risk free – and thus
led to a newborn fanaticism and determination.” In other words,
robbery, murder and enslavement were sacralized and then transformed into a
prodigious engine of Islamic conquest.
Conquest being the major
feature of Islam’s 1,400 year history, Sword and Scimitar takes the reader on a
tour – “a tour of force” – as represented by eight significant battles and an
array of lesser clashes.
Skillfully
relying on first person descriptions, Ibrahim’s narration of these battles is
gripping and suspenseful while also evoking the pain and terror of
warfare. Especially after the current revival of jihad, his
recounting of these barbaric episodes and their consequences is not
comforting.
The battles are taken chronologically
beginning in 636 with the lesser known Battle of Yarmuk, a place now in
Syria. This battle displayed the fierce power of jihad by imbedding in
the Western mind a fear of Islam for the ensuing 1,000 years.
And with good reason, for as Ibrahim, channeling
other historians, reports, Yarmuk “had more important consequences than almost
any other battle in all world history,” for within 73 years after this Muslim
victory, the area from Syria west to Morocco, 37,000 sq. miles, was permanently
conquered by Islam! “Put differently, two-thirds of Christendom’s
original territory – including three of the five most important centers of Christianity
– Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria – were swallowed up by Islam and
thoroughly Arabized,” as Ibrahim puts it.
However, despite Islam’s vast conquests,
Constantinople, “Eastern Rome”, with its wealth, strategic location and light
skinned women, prized as potential concubines and slaves, tantalized the
Muslims.
So in
717, Constantinople was sieged by the Arabs of the Umayyad Caliphate.
Unfortunately for them, their invading fleet was commandeered by their own
conscripted Coptic Christians, who jumped ship once the opportunity presented
itself. Worse for the jihadists was the annihilating weapon called “Greek
fire,” akin to modern flamethrowers, which along with a huge storm and debris
from a volcano, wrecked all but five of the attacking 2,560 Muslim vessels.
That the Byzantines withstood this siege was a
stunning setback over an insurgent Islam which had it prevailed would have
opened a crucial portal into a then divided and vulnerable Europe.
Islam’s defeat at Constantinople was followed in
732 by another debacle at the opposite end of the Mediterranean at Tours, 150
miles south of Paris. The Charles-Martel-led Franks, organized into
phalanxes, literally undercut the charging Berber Muslim cavalry. It was
a rout.
After Tours, no serious attempt was made to
breach the wall of the Pyrenees though Islam occupied Spain until 1492 when
Columbus discovered America while seeking an alternate route to India so as to
avoid Muslim raids on caravans through the Middle East.
But
if the Pyrenees became a dam against the rising tide of Islam, that tide
subsequently overflowed into the Mediterranean, as Ibrahim notes. Thus
the coastline of southern Europe was awash with raids by Saracens, as they were
then called, making the Mediterranean “a Muslim Lake” just as it once was, “a
Roman Lake.”
In 1071,
the Seljuk Turks won a significant victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of
Manzikert, also now in Syria.
This triumph marks the “Turkification and
Islamification of Anatolia,” as Ibrahim writes. So what Yarmuk was for
the Arabs, Manzikurt is for the Turks, with the victory commemorated annually
by Prime Minister Erdogan and the Turkish government. Even the
battlefield is considered sacred wherein “15,000 Turks defeated 210,000
Christians”, as the official account puts it.
In 1095, Christendom finally mounted an offense
against Islam, the Crusades. The immediate reason for this
counter-attack was that the Seljuk Turks had gained control of the Islamic Empire
and began raping, murdering and enslaving pilgrims to the Holy Land.
Thus, the Crusaders took the fight across the Mediterranean, a thousand miles
away, and mostly prevailed over the Muslim occupiers of territory that
Christianity had originally gained by conversion.
Another pivotal victory, this time led by
Saladin, occurred in 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, near Tiberius.
It was an ignominious defeat of the Crusaders by Saladin who gleefully watched
while Sufis and other devout Muslims beheaded captured Christians.
These defeats hastened the Crusader’s
departure from The Holy Land, as Ibrahim writes, though the superior Crusader
forces could had remained in Palestine. But they left in 1291, tired of
this distant conflict just as Americans are tiring of their own overseas wars
with jihadists.
“For more than three centuries prior to the Crusades and for more than three
centuries after Hattin, Spain for eight hundred years was a microcosm of the
war between Islam and Christianity,” Ibrahim adroitly summarizes. Thus
the Spanish victory in 1212 at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa was
transformational, for it ended Muslim hegemony in Spain and was celebrated for
hundreds of years until Vatican II abolished the celebration.
Constantinople, however, remained “a bone in
the throat of Allah.” So in 1453 the Turk’s 100,000 fighters and
100 warships surrounded the great metropolis’ 7,000 Christians guarding its 15
mile wall.
The previously repelled Muslims now possessed a
cannon provided by a bribed German or Hungarian. It had a mile range and
belched out 1,300 pound bombs which devastated the walls of the city though it
took hours to reload. When holes were blown in the city’s walls, the
defenders hurriedly repaired them; when the Turks tunneled under the wall, they
were intercepted or buried alive. When a fire spewing siege tower was
rolled up to the wall, the defenders blew it up.
After seven frustrating weeks, the Turk’s leader
Muhammed II exhorted his troops with promises of women, handsome boys and
virgins in the next world and booty and concubines in this world; slackers were
promised “a lingering death” by impalement which meant hammering a lengthy pole
up the anus and then standing the pole and person upright like a scarecrow to
frighten other potential deserters.
As one observer of the ensuing carnage wrote:
the invaders climbed through breeches in the walls and clawed over human
pyramids of their own fallen; the defenders fought bravely with axes, pikes and
javelins.
Finally on
May 29, with overwhelming numbers, the jihadists triumphed. So the city
that began with Constantine the Great ended with Constantine XI, and the Roman
Empire, dating from 753 BC concluded its 2,206 year run! The victors then
forced the vanquished to endure “strange and horrible unions and foul
debaucheries,” according to other contemporary commentators. Survivors
were enslaved; the Hagia Sophia, the most beautiful church of the early Middle
Ages, was transformed into a brothel.
Gaining
impetus by this momentous victory, the scourge of Islam continued to lash its
victims into submission though there were notable defeats at Malta and
Lepanto.
Nonetheless, Muslim forces began bombarding
Vienna in mid July 1683. The Viennese retaliated with their own artillery
barrages. But the Ottoman’s blockade caused the spread of dysentery
inside the city and bodies began piling up.
As
happened in 1453 with Constantinople, Western Europe refused to help because of
its own troubles and also at this juncture because of the disunity caused by
the Reformation.
By
September the situation was dire. Fortunately, the Polish military
hero, Jon Sobieski, offered deliverance. As Ibrahim writes,” the Poles
were common and crude, at least to the ultra-refined, wig-and-powder-wearing
Viennese court”; nonetheless, King Leopold flatteringly wrote Sobieski, “Your
name alone, so terrible to the enemy, will insure victory.”
By then, joining in to rescue Vienna were 40,000 Austro German
troops which merged with the 25,000 man Polish army. Though outnumbered
by jihadists, the Christians turned back this last direct attack on Europe by
Islam.
One could argue that Ibrahim has equated
lesser battles to historical hinge points like those at Tours, Constantinople,
Lepanto and Vienna. Nonetheless, as one can see, he establishes the
significance of each of his choices just as his book demonstrates that his
knowledge of Muslim conquests and depredations offers depth and perspective to
each of his choices.
This is so because Ibrahim fleshes out the
history of these eight battles by recounting the numerous attacks and savagery
that occurred in their wake. One such occurred in 1019 when the Seljuk
Turks descended on Armenia, the nearest Christian country. The Armenians
fought bravely but succumbed to the plunder, rape and massacres by the
invaders; as Ibrahim dryly writes, “This was the beginning of the misfortunes
of Armenia.”
Cameos of fearless individuals like the Genovese
nobleman, Giovanni Guistiniani, animate this tale of the killing fields of
jihad. In 1453 Guistiniani, a siege expert, rushed in to defend
Constantinople at his own expense accompanied by 700 highly trained soldiers at
a time when others were fleeing in panic.
Ibrahim was an Arabic language specialist for
the Library of Congress and has testified before Congress, is a consultant to
America’s intelligence community and lectures at universities and the National
Defense Intelligence College.
Ibrahim quotes Bernard
Lewis to the effect that, “. . . the limits and even the identity
of Europe were established first through the advance, and then the retreat, of
Islam.” As Ibrahim trenchantly concludes, “Simply put, the West is
actually the westernmost remnant of what was a much more extensive civilizational
block that Islam permanently severed.”
And that separation remains
though it is sometimes blurred by the velocity and volume of contemporary
events. But Sword & Scimitar is a compelling reminder of the terrifying
dynamic which continues to drive the Islamic world. History hasn’t
ended and Ibrahim has written an engaging and sobering narrative that makes
that extremely clear.
This review originally appeared in the September
2019 issue of the New Oxford Review, and is reprinted with permission. Copyright
© 2019 New Oxford Review, www.newoxfordreview.org
Terry Scambray lives and writes in Fresno, California
