Is Western Victimization the Root Cause of Islam’s Many Problems?

We recently looked at William Polk’s book, Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War between the Muslim World and the Global North. Although it’s a mighty tome containing some 550 pages and claims to cover “the thousand-year war between the Muslim World and the Global North,” most of the years between 634 (when Islam first invaded the West) to 1800 (when it went on the retreat) received only some 30 pages of coverage.

In other words, those many centuries which saw Muslims conquer most of Christendom’s original territory and invade more — with all the attendant massacres, enslavements, and destruction of churches — received a few sanitized pages, mostly alluding to how Islam “spread” through trade and the glories of al-Andalus.

So what is the rest of this book about? In fact, about 520 of the 550 pages of this book on the “thousand-year war” are confined to the last two centuries, when Europe finally went on the offensive against Islam. Here Polk meticulously describes in vivid (and hyperbolic) detail every conceivable sin the West committed against Muslims. Here’s a typical excerpt:

Of course, having whitewashed the first millennium of jihad on the West, it’s easy for Polk to make Europeans appear as unprovoked aggressors — greedy monsters come to destroy the glories of Islam.

Yet he fails to mention that Columbus sailed west precisely because the Mediterranean was an Islamic terror zone (with Turkic Ottomans and Egyptian Mamluks slaughtering and enslaving any Christian that appeared over the horizon); and he presents Russian expansion into Tatar regions as a merciless enterprise without explaining that the Tatars — known in Russian chronicles as the “heathen giant who feeds on our blood” — had terrorized and enslaved Russians centuries earlier.

As more balanced historians such as Bernard Lewis explain:

Regardless, Polk habitually harps that “[m]emories of [Western] imperialism are deep [among Muslims], and they helped create much of the world’s disorder and danger today…. [T]he humiliation and wholesale massacres of populations carried out by imperialists, though largely forgotten by the perpetrators, remain today vivid to the descendants of the victims.” As such, every Islamic terror group, including the Islamic State, is a product of “the anger and frustration of Muslims.”

Again, one need only look to real history to appreciate the folly of his deterministic reading which sees Muslims as perpetual victims of an imagined history. After a millennium of actual European victimhood — a millennium of Muslim invasions that saw the conquest of three-quarters of Christendom’s original territory, the enslavement of five million Europeans (between just the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries), and the slaughter of countless people — “backwards” Europe still managed to rise triumphant, and did so without any apologies or appeasements from Muslims.

Why can’t Islam do the same? Could it be that its problems are intrinsic and have nothing to do with the purported sins of Europe?

For instance, in a chapter titled “Somalia, the ‘Failed State,’” imperialism is again cited as the blame-all. Yet in 1855, decades before Europeans colonized it, adventurer Richard Burton described Somalia in very unappealing terms, adding that Somalis “are extremely bigoted, especially against Christians … and are fond of Jihading.”

Today Somalia remains one of the world’s most “failed states.” Al Shabaab (“the Youth”) is its jihadist vanguard, and any Somali “outed” as a Christian is beheaded.

Is European colonialism really necessary to explain such continuity?

This is the crux of the issue: in order to exonerate the problems plaguing and emanating from the Muslim world — from socio-economic-political issues to rampant Islamic radicalization and terrorism — Islamophiles like Polk are committed to two premises: 1) that for centuries Islam was a beacon of light in a dark world (and thus something must have gone horribly wrong since); and 2) that which went wrong begins and ends with Western meddling via colonization, etc.

As should be evident by now, the reverse is true: Islam always did what Islam does, and was constrained only during that brief era of Western assertion.

The greater irony is that whereas jihads often culminated in slavery, depopulation, and devastation, European colonialists abolished slavery and introduced their Muslim subjects to the boons of modernity, from scientific and medicinal advances to the radical concepts of democracy and religious freedom.

Writing in the early twentieth century, a Coptic Christian summarized the status of Egypt under British rule as follows:

Or consider that North Africa was once among the most prosperous and civilized regions of Christendom — home to Carthage and St. Augustine, etc. — but centuries of “jihading,” ransacking, and the enslavement of countless souls turned it into a desert. Then, once it was entirely populated by Muslims, North Africa subsisted entirely on enslaving Europeans — centuries before the colonial era.

In fact, the United States’ first war as a nation was with these “Barbary States,” as the Christians referred to North Africa, meaning it was a land of “barbarians.” When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams asked Barbary’s ambassador why his countrymen were enslaving American sailors, he said nothing about “open scars” or the “anger and frustration of Muslims,” to use Polk’s words. Rather the

Sadly, Crusade and Jihad represents the academic and mainstream opinion concerning the relationship between Islam and the West. As is typical of the social sciences — and increasingly the hard sciences as well — reality, in this case history, has been recast to conform to the accepted narrative, one which follows a familiar matrix: anything white and Christian equals hypocrisy, intolerance, greed, and exploitation; anything nonwhite and non-Christian equals honesty, tolerance, fair-mindedness, and benevolence.

Thus, despite how Muslims persecuted Spain’s Christians for centuries, here is how Polk describes the indigenous liberators vis-à-vis the invading occupiers: “Over the centuries … the warlike Christian states … pushed south until, in 1492, they drove away tens of thousands of Muslims … and put an end to one of the most advanced societies in Europe.”

The lesson is clear: from a historical point of view, Islam can do no wrong — even when it invades, conquers, and persecutes; and the West can do no right, even when it defends, liberates, and civilizes. While we are to exonerate contemporary Muslim terrorism as a product of “grievances” against (an imagined) history of colonialism and abuse, only condemnation remains for those premodern Christians who set so many wrongs to rights.

Such are the pseudo-histories that have long plagued the West’s understanding of its relationship to Islam. It is in large part to combat these false narratives that I wrote my book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. Not only does it document the politically incorrect facts of history, but every century gets its fair due.