By David Warren
Let us begin by remembering Covadonga, the great Christian victory in Spain, A.D. 722, and the beginning of the Reconquista.
This was a decade before the Battle of Tours, when Charles Martel, "the Hammer," repelled the "unstoppable" Umayyad cavalry, preparing the ground for the Carolingian Empire that saved, or one might say, invented, Europe.
For all of Christendom had been laid waste, including the civilized centers in Egypt and Syria, except for the shrinking "Rome" (Byzantium), and the largely pagan wastelands in the far, far, far, far West. Miracles alone saved France, for instance, from falling prey to the aggression.
Yet the vanquishing of Iberia by the desert savages was, like their progress through the Middle East and North Africa, a catastrophe for the Christians, who had ruled, fairly peacefully.
Fourteen centuries of annihilation had begun, with other Arab stormings preceding Islam. Zoroastrian Persia was also pulverized, and massacres were also perpetrated deep into Hindustan and even to Tibet.
Islam has bloody borders, as Samuel P. Huntington wrote a decade before 9/11, and it always has. Wherever Islam meets non-Muslims, there is bloodshed. This is not the modern condition, only. It was true from the beginning. Islam spread by terrorism, by utter surprise, out of the blue. Nine-elevens were its constant strategy.
Non-Muslims generally have a history of enmity with Muslim neighbors, and most have been slaughtered by Muslims in their turn. But Christians and Jews have been the principal victims, as both were psychotically identified in the Koran and the Hadiths.
To learn about the realities of Islam, one must study these foundational texts, as one must read the Bible to access Christianity. Finding accurate translations is necessarily a challenge, for Arabic to English must be nearly impossible; there are wild disparities between any two versions. At least a third of the Koran is senseless blather, even in the original. Good luck.
Questions such as who was Mohammad, and if he existed in fact, or if Mecca was even built by the seventh century, cannot be resolved by using evidence in the Western sense. There is nothing like the scholarship that buttresses both Old and New Testaments.
For good reason, investigation of Islamic texts and claims is prevented in all Muslim countries and endangered when attempted in the West. By contrast, Christianity and Judaism can be studied openly, even by sceptics, and have been available for destructive disassembly over a very long time.
Archaeology has shown all Bible traditions to be sound or plausible. Whereas, all the ancient archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia have been thoroughly bulldozed and scoured. Huge efforts have been made to keep the history of Islam away from scrutiny, or restrict it to official authorities. Indeed, virtually all attempts to study the Islamic past have been conducted in, and limited to, institutions in the West.
This may sound like exaggeration, and a scandal to the "multicultural" happy-face liberalism of today. But check, for it is fact. Moreover, if one consults the older academic literature, up to a few decades ago, one finds that all agree on the indigence of Islam. Our older historians did actually master the field. The more recent have been, almost always, "politically correct," and timid apologists, for fear of Muslim reprisals.
I was myself commissioned to write on this state of affairs, by Peter Collier at Encounter Books, just after the subject became current in the wake of the Islamic terror attacks of 9/11. I did not accept the advance, and declined until I could be sure the task was doable.
Alas, it wasn't, by a person who can't read Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and several other languages. Too, I think I was a coward. But braver and more learned have since emerged.
Perhaps we have got beyond President George W. Bush's uttering fatuous nonsense about "the religion of peace," and regretting the use of the word "crusade."...
