by Raymond Ibrahim<\/p>\n
FrontPageMagazine.com<\/p>\n
Imagine if a top American historian appeared on the MSM insisting that the only reason Europeans conquered the Americas was to “defend” the Native Americans \u2014 who somehow had adopted Christianity centuries\u00a0before<\/em>\u00a0Jesus was born \u2014 from being persecuted by heathen tribes.<\/p>\n While that would create a maelstrom of outrage and derision in the West, in the Arab world \u2014 where some think\u00a0bewitched animals<\/a>\u00a0work as infidel operatives \u2014 such absurdities regularly pass for “truth.”<\/p>\n Consider the case of\u00a0Fadel Soliman<\/a>, a celebrated Sharia expert and Arab media darling. Director of the\u00a0Bridges Foundation<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 which teaches Muslims “how to present Islam” to non-Muslims \u2014\u00a0Soliman<\/a>\u00a0also lectures at Western universities, churches, and governmental agencies, including the US Dept. of Defense.<\/p>\n His new Arabic book,\u00a0Copts: Muslims Before Muhammad<\/em>, which he has been promoting all over the media, including\u00a0al-Jazeera<\/a>, asserts that, at the time of the Muslim conquest of Egypt (c. 640), the vast majority of Egyptians were not, as history has long taught, Christians, but rather prototypical Muslims, ormuwahidin<\/em>, who were actually being oppressed by Christians: hence, the Muslim conquest of Egypt was\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0about “liberating” fellow Muslims. Soliman’s evidence is that the Arian sect, which rejected the claim that Jesus was coequal with God, was present in 4th century Egypt. Therefore, according to Soliman, the indigenous Egyptians were practicing “proto-Islam” hundreds of years before it was founded in the 7th century.<\/p>\n As with much of modern academia’s approach to Islam, this thesis is based on pure fiction. While the Arians were pronounced heretics at the Council of Nicea (325) for their interpretation of the Trinity, they nonetheless accepted all of Christianity’s core tenets \u2014 including original sin, crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation \u2014 all of which directly contradict Islam’s teachings. What an imaginative stretch, then, for Soliman to portray the Arians as prototypical Muslims, simply because they did not believe Jesus was coequal with God (a standard that would make many people today “Muslims”).<\/p>\n Needless to say, no historian has ever suggested that Muslims invaded Egypt to liberate “proto-Muslims.” Rather, the Muslim historians who wrote our primary sources on Islam, candidly and refreshingly present the conquests as they were \u2014\u00a0conquests<\/em>, for the glory and empowerment of Islam and its followers at the expense of unbelieving infidels.<\/p>\n Of course, with the weakening of Islam in the modern era, embarrassed Muslims began to euphemize their imperialistic history, portraying jihad as “defensive,” “spiritual,” etc. \u2014 culminating with Soliman’s fairy tale. Even the unapologetic Sayyid Qutb, the sheikh of “radical Islam,” interpreted jihad and the conquests as “altruistic” endeavors to “liberate” mankind.<\/p>\n Such sophistry is inevitable; for the Muslim conquests pose a thorny problem for Muslims. As David Cook writes in\u00a0Understanding Jihad<\/em><\/a>, p.167:<\/p>\n [T]he conquests were seen from the beginning as one of the incontrovertible proofs of Islam. To disavow them or to examine them critically \u2014 which has yet to happen in the Muslim world \u2014 will be very painful for Muslims especially Arabic-speaking Muslims. At every point\u2026 when Muslims have tried to abandon militant jihad for the internal, spiritual jihad\u2026 the memory of the conquests and the need to rationalize them have defeated this effort. The problem may lie in the unwillingness to confront the fact that the conquests were basically unjustified. They were not a “liberation” and they were not desired by the non-Muslim peoples; they were endured and finally accepted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The question remains: Are Islam’s apologists disingenuous or deluded? When it comes to “bridge-building” Soliman \u2014 who provides “sensitivity training<\/a>” to the FBI and Pentagon \u2014 one is inclined to answer in the former: his book contains\u00a0academic crimes<\/a>, including flagrant mistranslations to support his thesis and wild, but undocumented, assertions (for example, that the Arians, like the Muslims, used to proclaim “There is no god but Allah and Jesus is his prophet”).<\/p>\n That said, Muslim\u00a0self<\/em>-deception \u2014 typified by the impulsive need to always exonerate Islam \u2014 is a very real and widespread phenomenon. I am reminded of an Arabic op-ed I read last year in\u00a0Al-Masry Al-Youm<\/em><\/a>, which opened by bluntly saying: “We Muslims have an inferiority complex\u2026and feel that our Islamic religion needs constant, daily affirmation from Europeans and Americans\u2026 What rapturous joy takes us when one of them converts \u2014 as if to reassure us that our religion is ‘okay’.” Discussing how the Arab world exulted when it erroneously thought that Muslim critic Henryk Broder had accepted Islam \u2014 based on sarcastic remarks he had made \u2014 the author wrote “but we are a people who do not understand sarcasm, since it is subtle and requires a bit of thinking and intellectualizing; rather, we read quickly,\u00a0with a hopeful eye, not an eye for truth and reality<\/em>.” \u00a92011 Raymond Ibrahim<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Raymond Ibrahim FrontPageMagazine.com Imagine if a top American historian appeared on the MSM insisting that the only reason Europeans conquered the Americas was to “defend” the Native Americans \u2014 who somehow had adopted Christianity centuries\u00a0before\u00a0Jesus was born \u2014 from being persecuted by heathen tribes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[225,227],"tags":[192,1028,1017,1044,30,1060],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-O0","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6219,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/crucified-again-venn-institute-interviews-raymond-ibrahim\/","url_meta":{"origin":3100,"position":0},"title":"Crucified Again — Venn Institute Interviews Raymond Ibrahim","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 18, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Raymond Ibrahim [Note: The following interview was conducted by the\u00a0Venn Institute\u00a0with Raymond Ibrahim] Raymond Ibrahim is a widely published author, public speaker, and Middle East and Islam expert, and author most recently of\u00a0Crucified Again: Exposing Islam\u2019s New War on Christians. Follow him on Twitter\u00a0@RaymondIbrahim5 Venn Institute: Most Americans see persecution\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Raymond Ibrahim"","block_context":{"text":"Raymond Ibrahim","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/raymond-ibrahim\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Crucified-Again-Cover.jpg?fit=797%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Crucified-Again-Cover.jpg?fit=797%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Crucified-Again-Cover.jpg?fit=797%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/Crucified-Again-Cover.jpg?fit=797%2C1200&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":915,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-historical-reality-of-the-muslim-conquests\/","url_meta":{"origin":3100,"position":1},"title":"The Historical Reality of the Muslim Conquests","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim Jihad Watch Because it is now almost axiomatic for American school textbooks to whitewash all things Islamic (see\u00a0here\u00a0for example), it may be instructive to examine one of those aspects that are regularly distorted: the Muslim conquests. Few events of history are so well documented and attested to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Islam"","block_context":{"text":"Islam","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/islam\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6603,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/surreal-and-suicidal-modern-western-histories-of-islam\/","url_meta":{"origin":3100,"position":2},"title":"Surreal and Suicidal: Modern Western Histories of Islam","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim \/\/\u00a0RaymondIbrahim.com\u00a0 The full magnitude of the modern West\u2019s ignorance of its own past recently struck me while rereading some early history books concerning the centuries-long jihad on Europe. \u00a0 The historical narrative being disseminated today simply bears very little resemblance to reality. 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\nConsidering Islam’s\u00a0lax views<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0deception<\/a>, this comes as no surprise. After all, whether Muslims consciously deceive infidels or unconsciously deceive themselves, the goal has long been one: empowering Islam and its adherents \u2014 reality be damned.<\/p>\n