CHRISTIAN TESTIMONY ON MUSLIM CONQUESTS

 

 Quranic Foundations And Structure Of Muslim Society

B. CHRISTIAN TESTIMONY ON MUSLIM CONQUESTS

Says Will Durant ^[1] in The Age of Faith (pp. 187-190, 218-219, 227):

“Mohammed had appointed no successor to his power, but he had chosen Abu Bekr (573-624) to conduct the prayers in the Madina mosque … this mark of preference persuaded the Moslem leaders to elect Abu Bekr the first Caliph of Islam … Abu Bekr was … simple and abstemious, kindly but resolute; attending personally to details of administration and judgment, and never resting till justice was done; serving without pay till his people overruled his austerity; and then, in his will, returning to the new state the stipends it had paid him … the Moslem leaders were passionate disciples of Mohammed, prayed even more than they fought … The Arab troops were more rigorously disciplined and more ably led; they were inured to leadership … could fight on empty stomachs … ‘Be just’, ran Abu Bekr’s proclamation, ‘be valiant; die rather than yield; be merciful; slay neither old men, nor women, nor children. Destroy no fruit trees, grain, or cattle. Keep your word, even to your enemies. Molest not those religious persons who live retired from the world’ … 

Omar (the second Caliph) … Having beaten a Bedouin unjustly, he begged the Bedouin— in vain—to inflict an equal number of strokes upon him. He was a severe puritan, demanding strict virtue of every Moslem … Moslem historians tell us that he owned but one shirt and one mantle, patched and repatched; that he lived on barley bread and dates, and drank nothing but water; that he slept on a bed of palm leaves, hardly better than a hair shirt; and that his sole concern was the propagation of the faith by letters and by arms. When a Persian satrap came to pay homage to Omar he found the conqueror of the East asleep among beggars on the steps of the Madina mosque … The Patriarch Sophronius agreed to surrender Jerusalem if the Caliph would come in person to ratify the terms of capitulation. Omar consented, and traveled from Madina in stately simplicity, armed with a sack of corn, a bag of dates, a gourd of water, and a wooden dish … He received Sophronius with kindness and courtesy, imposed an easy tribute on the vanquished, and confirmed the Christians in the peaceful possession of all their shrines … Omar forbade the conquerors to buy or till land… 

 

“The Jews of the Near East had welcomed the Arabs as liberators … they stood on equal terms with Christians, were free once more to live and worship in Jerusalem, and prospered under Islam in Asia, Egypt, and Spain as never under Christian rule. Outside of Arabia the Christians of western Asia usually practised their religion unhindered; Syria remained predominantly Christian until the third Moslem century; in the reign of Mamun (813-33) we hear of 11,000 Christian churches in Islam—as well as hundreds of synagogues and fire temples. Christian festivals were freely and openly celebrated; Christian pilgrims came in safety to visit Christian shrines in Palestine; the Crusaders found large numbers of Christians in the Near East in the twelfth century; and Christian communities have survived there to this day. Christian heretics persecuted by the patriarchs of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Alexandria, or Antioch were now free and safe under a Moslem rule that found their disputes quite unintelligible. In the ninth century the Moslem governor of Antioch appointed a special guard to keep Christian sects from massacring one another at church. Monasteries and nunneries flourished … relations between the two religions were so genial that Christians wearing crosses on their breasts conversed in mosques with Moslem friends. The Mohammedan administrative bureaucracy had hundreds of Christian employees … Sergius, father of St. John of Damascus, was chief finance minister to Abd-al-Malik, and John himself, last of the Greek Fathers of the Church, headed the council that governed Damascus. The Christians of the East in general regarded Islamic rule as a lesser evil than that of the Byzantine government and Church. 

 

“Despite or because of this policy of tolerance in early Islam, the new faith won over to itself in time most of the Christians, nearly all the Zoroastrians and pagans, and many of the Jews, of Asia, Egypt, and North Africa … Gradually the non-Moslem populations adopted the Arabic language and dress, the laws and faith of the Koran. Where Hellenism, after a thousand years of mastery, had failed to take root, and Roman arms had left the native gods unconquered, and Byzantine orthodoxy had raised rebellious heresies, Mohammedanism had secured, almost without proselytism, not only belief and worship, but a tenacious fidelity that quite forgot the superseded gods. From China, Indonesia, and India through Persia, Syria, Arabia, and Egypt to Morocco and Spain, the Mohammedan faith touched the hearts and fancies of a hundred peoples, governed their morals and molded their lives, gave them consoling hopes and a strengthening pride … 

 

“… We must concede that the early Caliphs, from Abu Bekr to al-Mamun, gave successful organization to human life over a wide area, and may be counted among the ablest rulers in history. They might have devasted or confiscated everything, like the Mongols or the Magyars of the raiding Norse; instead they merely taxed. When Omar conquered Egypt he rejected the advice of Zobeir to divide the land among his followers, and the Caliph confirmed his judgment: ‘Leave it’, said Omar, ‘in the people’s hands to nurse and fructify’. Under the caliphal government lands were measured, records were systematically kept, roads and canals were multiplied or maintained, rivers were banked to prevent floods; Iraq, now half desert, was again a garden of Eden; Palestine, recently so rich in sand and stones, was fertile, wealthy, and populous … the caliphs gave reasonable protection to life and labor, kept career open to talent, promoted for three to six centuries the prosperity of areas never so prosperous again, and stimulated and supported such a flourishing of education, literature, science, philosophy, and art as made western Asia, for five centuries, the most civilized region in the world.”

 

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[1] It may be remembered here that, as a good Christian, Will Durant is always ready to attack and insult Islam and its promulgator on the flimsiest grounds.

Source

to be continued . . . . . 

Quranic Foundation & Structure Of Muslim Society In The End Times

CHRISTIAN TESTIMONY ON CHRISTIAN CONQUESTS

 

 Quranic Foundations And Structure Of Muslim Society

2. WITH REFERENCE TO POST-CONQUEST TREATMENT OF THE SUBJECTED COMMUNITIES 

 

A. CHRISTIAN TESTIMONY ON CHRISTIAN CONQUESTS

Arnold J. Toynbee says in his Study of History (London, New York, Toronto 1962), vol. I, pp. 211, 212, 225:

“The race-feeling which is thus aroused in our Western Society by the present situation and temper of our settlers overseas also springs naturally from the religious background … This has been a misfortune for Mankind; for the Protestant temper and attitude and conduct in regard to Race, as in many other vital issues, is inspired largely by the Old Testament … Under this inspiration, the English-speaking Protestant settlers in the New World exterminated the North American Indian, as well as the bison, from coast to coast of the Continent, whereas the Spanish Catholics only exterminated the Indian in the Caribbean Islands and were content, on the Continent, to step into the shoes of the Aztecs and the Incas—sparing the conquered in order to rule them as subject populations, converting their subjects to their own religion, and inter-breeding with their converts … The sense of religious solidarity and fraternity did not, however, restrain the Spaniards and the Portuguese in South America, a century and a half ago, from cold-bloodedly and brutally destroying—out of sheer greed for (non-existent) gold and for (to them, unutilizable) land—the wonderful society which had been conjured into existence, by the genius of the Jesuit missionaries, among the primitive peoples of  Paraguay.” 

 

The Spaniards might not have employed bullets for wiping out the conquered ‘natives’ on the American mainland, as Toynbee says. But the decimation of the indigenous population occurred nevertheless as a blessing of the Spanish conquest. The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 2, p. 583, (1958), gives the following figures for Central Mexico:

“A recent and well documented study gives the following approximate figures of the indigenous (Indian) population on different dates in Central Mexico (then known as New Spain):

1519……………………………………….  11 Million.

1540……………………………………….  6,427,466.

1565……………………………………….  4,409,180.

1597……………………………………….  2,500,000.

(vide S.F. Cook and L.B. Simpson: The Population of Central Mexico in the Sixteenth Century, Berkeley, California, 1948).”

 

That the intolerance practised by Christendom has always gone to the highest level of barbarism in the form of mass murder of human populations, wherever they could carry it out, is fully borne out by history. For instance, in the Sudan, the extensive blood-bath undertaken by the crusading Lord Kitchener against the Muslims reduced the population, estimated by the British authorities in 1880 at ten million souls, to less than two million—actually 1,853,000. (Ref: Encyclopaedia Britannica, X, XI, and XII editions; 1902, 1911, 1923).

 

As to those conquests wherein mass murder did not take place, Toynbee, the ardent lover of Christianity attributes to expediency and not to any Christian moral idealism. Citing the example of India, he says: 

“Finally, in Continental India, where the English could not think of supplanting the conquered ‘Natives’ as they had supplanted them in North America, but could only impose their rule on them as the Spaniards had imposed theirs on the ‘Natives’ of Mexico and Peru, the sequel was not the same as it had been in the Spanish Indies … The reasons are almost too obvious to need mentioning. In the first place, Europeans could not hope to make themselves at home in the Indian climate, even if they had found, or made, the soil of India free from other human occupants. In the second place, the existing ‘Native’ population of India was too numerous and too far advanced in civilisation to be exterminated, even if our British Israelites had ever contemplated treating the Canaanite in India as they treated him in America.” (op. cit., p. 212).  

 

Indeed, Toynbee, with all his subjective devotion to Christianity, is so deeply convinced of the Bible being responsible for all the most amazing and the most callous barbarism and ferocity demonstrated by Christendom in history that he finds himself forced to advocate the subjection of the Christian sacred scripture, which Christendom has adored as the Word of God, to the amputator’s knife. He says:

“When the first translation of the Bible into a Teutonic language was made by Ulfilas, the Apostle of the Goths, in the fourth century of our era, the translator wisely omitted the Books of Samuel and Kings, on the ground that war and bloodshed were too much in the minds of the Goths as it was, without their proclivity in this direction being consecrated and confirmed by the authority of the sacred book of their new religion. It is a pity that Luther and the English translators did not follow Ulfilas’ example—or, indeed, improve on it by omitting Joshua and Judges as well! King James I’s English Authorized Version of the Bible, which presents the Old Testament complete and unexpurgated, was published in A.D. 1611. A book called The New English Canaan, by Thomas Morton, was published in 1637!” (op. cit., p. 212).  

 

That sheer barbarism was employed as an instrument for converting the heathen ^[1] is also borne out by Christian history. And it was employed from the very beginning of the acquisition of political power by Christianity; as, among others, Will Durant testifies:             

“Christians divided on almost every point but one—that the pagan temples should be closed, their property confiscated … Constantine had discouraged, but not forbidden pagan sacrifices and ceremonies; Constans forbade them on pain of death; Constantius ordered all pagan temples in the Empire closed, and all pagan rituals to cease. Those who disobeyed were to forefeit their property and their lives; and these penalties were extended to provincial governors neglecting to enforce the decree.” (The Age of Faith, p. 8).

 

We may also notice in this connection that the unparalleled barbarisrn which Christendom inflicted on the black races of Africa, to which we shall refer shortly, was also conceived by the Christian proselytisers as the instrument for their Christianisation. A brief remark by an eminent Christian scholar may suffice here:

“The Church also supported the slave trade. The Spaniards saw in it an opportunity of converting the heathen, and the Jesuits, Dominicans and Franciscans were heavily involved in sugar cultivation which meant slave-holding, The story is told of an old elder of the Church in Newport who would invariably, the Sunday following the arrival of a slaver from the coast, thank God that ‘another cargo of benighted beings had been brought to a land where they could have the benefit of a gospel dispensation’.” (Dr. Eric Williams: Capitalism and Slavery, London 1964, p.42).

Christian testimony in this behalf has been provided in Thomas Arnold’s Preaching of Islam (latest edition: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf; Lahore, Pakistan).

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[1] In respect of conversion. the law of Islam stands radically opposed to the use of force, because of the Qur’an’s categorical prohibition (2:256). Hence, Muslim history presents a radical contrast to Christian history in this respect.

Source

to be continued . . . . . 

Quranic Foundation & Structure Of Muslim Society In The End Times