In my ongoing quest to expose the academics and other so-called experts who specialize in the field of Muslim/Christian history and interaction such as John Esposito and Karen Armstrong, let’s take a quick look at the 2018 book Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War between the Muslim World and the Global North by William R. Polk.
As we shall see, it encapsulates all the misrepresentations and errors of history that have caused the West to become utterly clueless concerning the roots of its conflict with the Islam — which in turn has left it utterly handicapped in formulating a response to current Islamic threats.
Not only does Polk ignore these formative centuries, but what he does present is often distorted to Islam’s favor.
For starters, the book’s title and ambitious subtitle present it as a comprehensive history. The jacket cover claims that “Crusade and Jihad is the first book to encompass, in one volume, the entire history of the catastrophic encounter between the Global North … and Muslim societies.” It reportedly “explains the deep hostilities between the Muslim world and the Global North and shows how they grew over the centuries”
Rather bizarrely, however, the first thousand years of history are allotted a paltry 30 pages — even though the book is 550 pages long. In other words, a mere 5% of it deals with the 10 pivotal centuries of conflict between the eighth and eighteenth centuries.
What could possibly explain this lopsided approach? After all, that initial millennium contains all the seeds of conflict. As historian Franco Cardini wrote in his 1999 book, Europe and Islam,
A Missing Millennium
While these “violent midwives” are known today as Saracens, Moors, Turks, and Tatars, their invasions and subsequent atrocities were all conducted under the same jihadist logic used by contemporary groups such as the Islamic State: as “infidels” (or kuffar), Christian Europeans were free game for rape, enslavement, or slaughter.
Or as Bernard Lewis writes in his 1993 book Islam and the West:
Not only does Polk ignore these formative centuries, but what he does present is often distorted to Islam’s favor. Again, as the book’s succinct description explains, “Polk shows how Islam arose and spread across [that’s a euphemism for violently conquered] North Africa into Europe, climaxed in the vibrant and sophisticated caliphate of al-Andalus in Medieval Spain, and was the bright light in a European Dark Age.”
After effusively praising Islamic Spain, Polk writes (rather disdainfully) that the “ contrast to the rest of Europe was stunning. Few in Europe could read, and those few were holed up in monasteries…. It is hard to find evidence of more than a few men or women of culture or even of a degree of social refinement. In al-Andalus, in contrast, the arts flourished, new forms of poetry were invented, and musical tastes” advanced.
The Crux of the Matter
The problem here is not that these descriptions are false, but that they are presented in a vacuum. Yes, Islamic Spain was very prosperous, but, as with all premodern Islamic states, its prosperity was built almost entirely by plundering its non-Muslim neighbors of their wealth and bodies (Córdoba was a slave emporium of European flesh for centuries). In The History of Spain (1952), Louis Bertrand, a more honest historian, summarized what “advanced and prosperous” al-Andalus was doing to the Christians of the north as follows:
Likewise, Polk fails to mention that the “stunning” illiteracy of Europeans was itself a byproduct of the jihad. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt (641), papyrus ceased to be imported into Europe, causing literacy rates to drop back to pre-Roman levels. Indeed, Christian Europe’s “Dark Ages” came about largely “because Islam had destroyed the ancient unity of the Mediterranean,” as eminent medievalist Henri Pirenne demonstrated in his 1937 book Mohammed and Charlemagne.
Incidentally, the other 95 percent of Polk’s book also reflects Fake History, but in reverse. I’ll explain in another article.
