War Without End: The Muslim Conquests
by T. David Curp - November 1, 2005
Reprinted with permission from our good friends at InsideCatholic.com, the leading online journal of Catholic faith, culture, and politics.
Crusading ideals in the West were an answer to the greater threat of jihad. They were spurred by fear and necessity in a desperate competition with Islam that, for many centuries, Christians lost—and were aware that they were losing. The extent of Islam's victories can be seen in the all-but-complete disappearance of the once-thriving Christian communities in North Africa, the Middle East, and Western Asia, as well as the deep roots that Islam still has in the Balkans—a region whose very name was imposed upon it by successful late medieval Turkish imperialism.
Islam is a remarkably successful religion that for most of its existence has inspired its adherents to creatively synthesize the often-conflicting requirements of warfare, imperial politics, and missionary zeal. Projecting Western freedom of action backward in time seriously distorts the more dramatic story of ongoing Western weakness that almost destroyed Christendom. The pathos and peril of much of contemporary radical Islam's protest against the West is not fueled primarily by aggrieved victimhood; it is nourished by an even stronger memory of how Islam's final victory over Christendom remained for so long a real possibility. Muslim triumphs in earlier centuries were the crucible that forged both Christendom's fears and Islam's confidence.
The Rise of the Dar al-Islam
Unlike Christianity, which began on the margins of social and political life in the Roman world and stayed there for centuries, Islam quickly achieved a good bit of worldly success. Within a century of the death of the prophet Mohammed, his followers had overrun most of the southern half of the Mediterranean world. Muslim armies advanced from the Arab peninsula all the way to southern France to the west; north to the outlying districts of Constantinople, the greatest city of Christendom; and further eastward to the ancient civilizations of Persia, India, and the easternmost borders of China.
In Islam's first centuries, Muslim scholars and jurists formulated their understanding of the religious and political division of the world into the Dar al-Islam, or the House of Peace, and the Dar al-Harb, the House of War. While truces between Islamic and non-Muslim polities were acceptable, the Koran taught that these were to be limited in duration. Ultimately, no permanent peace between Muslims and nonbelievers was possible until all nonbelievers submitted to Muslim rule, and the Dar al-Islam encompassed the whole world. Jihad, either in the form of the "greater jihad" (the struggle all Muslims must wage against sin) or the "lesser jihad" (the armed struggle with nonbelievers), was integral to bringing wholeness and unity to a divided world.
Islam's original conquests were terrifying in their power and speed. They struck the Mediterranean world at a time when domestic strife and war made a common front against Arab Muslim expansion impossible. Fierce doctrinal disputes among Christians and a thoroughly exhausting war with the Persians left the world's only major Christian power, Byzantium, unprepared to face a frightfully effective jihad. The various small Christian and pagan principalities in North Africa and Spain—like the weakened Zoroastrian Persians—were even less able to turn back the Muslim armies.
Christian and Persian weakness and the success of Islam in bringing large tracts of territory under its control produced a range of reactions among Christians and Muslims. In the West, particularly in Spain, the Muslim religious presence left surprisingly few traces in the sparse Christian documents of the first century after the conquest. It appears that most Christians accepted their new Muslim overlords with equanimity. Indeed, many found that collaboration with rulers who were tied into the Dar al-Islam's "common market," stretching from Spain to the Hindu Kush in India, was more profitable than resistance against a new ruling class whose demands were not initially onerous and whose military power was irresistible.
