Read The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS Online
Authors: Robert Spencer
Tags: #Religion, #Islam, #History, #Political Science, #Terrorism, #Non-Fiction
The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (42 page)
This is, however, politically motivated modern-day mythmaking. The German professor Harald Suermann of the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies at Bonn University notes that the evidence of
The Panegyric of the Three Holy Children of Babylon,
a Christian homily dating from soon after the Arab conquest, clearly refutes this idea. Suermann points out “[T]he
Panegyric
calls the Muslims ‘oppressors’. This evidence suggests that the
idea that the Copts received the Muslims as liberators is no longer tenable.”
25
Parts of the seventh-century homily are, disturbingly, applicable to the conquests of the Islamic State more than thirteen hundred years after the sermon was written—where, for example, the text says that the conquerors “give themselves up to prostitution, massacre and lead into captivity the sons of men, saying: ‘We both fast and pray.’”
26
Other accounts from close to the time of these conquests cast the invaders in a decidedly negative light—perhaps understandably, since they were written by the defeated.
John of Nikiou, a seventh-century Coptic Christian bishop, wrote in the 690s about what happened when Umar’s army had arrived in his native town some fifty years before:
Then the Muslims arrived in Nikiou. There was not one single soldier to resist them. They seized the town and slaughtered everyone they met in the street and in the churches—men, women and children, sparing nobody. Then they went to other places, pillaged and killed all the inhabitants they found. . . . But let us now say no more, for it is impossible to describe the horrors the Muslims committed when they occupied the island of Nikiou . . .
LIBERATORS, OR OCCUPATION FORCE?
Umar himself is said to have asked rhetorically: “Do you think that these vast countries, Syria, Mesopotamia, Kufa, Basra, Misr [Egypt] do not have to be covered with troops who must be well paid?”
27
Yet if local populations welcomed Muslim rule as more flexible and tolerant than that of Byzantium and Persia, why was there any need for troops?
Umar’s commander, Amr ibn al-As, was extremely brutal:
Amr oppressed Egypt. He sent its inhabitants to fight the inhabitants of the Pentapolis [Tripolitania] and, after gaining a victory, he did not
allow them to stay there. He took considerable booty from this country and a large number of prisoners. . . . The Muslims returned to their country with booty and captives. The patriarch Cyrus felt deep grief at the calamities in Egypt, because Amr, who was of barbarian origin, showed no mercy in his treatment of the Egyptians and did not fulfill the covenants which had been agreed with him.
Like the Islamic State jihadis when they entered Mosul in June of 2014, Amr’s men began to demand payment of the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims prescribed in the Qur’an:
Amr’s position became stronger from day to day. He levied the tax that had been stipulated . . . But it is impossible to describe the lamentable position of the inhabitants of this town, who came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month, finding no one to help them because God had abandoned them and had delivered the Christians into the hands of their enemies.
28
When the Arabs conquered Armenia in 642—in scenes that may remind us of the Islamic State’s genocidal rampage through the Yazidi population of Northern Iraq in August 2014—they killed untold numbers of people and took captive many more: “The enemy’s army rushed in and butchered the inhabitants of the town by the sword. . . . After a few days’ rest, the Ismaelites [Arabs] went back whence they had come, dragging after them a host of captives, numbering thirty-five thousand.”
29
According to legend, Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, turned the city over to a magnanimous and tolerant Umar after the Arab conquest in 637. Taking Umar around the city, Sophronius invited the caliph to pray
inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but Umar replied, “If I had prayed inside the Church, you would be losing it and it would have gone from your hands because after my death the Muslims would seize it saying, ‘Umar has prayed here.’”
30
This is pious fiction. In reality, Sophronius lamented the advent of “the Saracens who, on account of our sins, have now risen up against us unexpectedly and ravage all with cruel and feral design, with impious and godless audacity.”
31
This is a far cry from the legend, often taken as historical fact, that Umar graciously turned down Sophronius’s invitation to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for fear that his followers would use his prayer as a pretext to turn the church into a mosque.
32
In his actual writings, Sophronius never mentions this incident, or Umar.
Nevertheless, in the popular legend, Umar and Sophronius conclude a pact in which the Christians are not allowed to build new churches, carry arms, or ride on horses, and must pay a poll tax,
jizya,
to the Muslims, but are generally allowed to practice their religion and live in relative peace.
33
In fact this “Pact of Umar” is not likely to be authentic, but it does reflect the core tenets of the Islamic legal system of the dhimma, or contract of protection, which denies equality of rights to non-Muslims in the Islamic state and is oppressive in numerous other ways. As we have already seen, the Islamic State has imposed the same system upon the Christians who remain in its domains—no building or repairing churches, no public Christian worship, no Christian aid and comfort to the Muslims’ enemies, and so forth.
NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM
In a sermon from December 636 or 637, Sophronius laments “so much destruction and plunder” and the “incessant outpourings of human blood.” He says that churches have been “pulled down” and “the cross mocked,” and that the “vengeful and God-hating Saracens . . . plunder cities, devastate fields, burn down villages, set on fire the holy churches, overturn the sacred monasteries, oppose the Byzantine armies arrayed against them, and in fighting raise up the trophies [of war] and add victory to victory.”
34
SPEAKING IN GOBBLEDYGOOK
“Speaking in social-anthropological terms—and this provides an important corrective to the view that Islam is fundamentally oppressive, if not persecutory—the rules of the Pact of ‘Umar and other restrictions served as a means to create and preserve a ‘natural’ hierarchy, in the sense that it characterizes most religious societies in premodern times.”
—spectacularly ineffective myth-busting from Mark R. Cohen in
The “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim Relations: Myth and Reality
(p. 33) (one wonders why only Islam found a need to “create and preserve” this purportedly “natural” hierarchy—supposedly shared by “most” religions—by means of the elaborate rules of dhimmitude)
Umar lived by the sword, and he died by the sword. In 644, Fayruz al-Nihawandi (a.k.a. Abu Luluah), a slave who had been captured by the Muslims during the conquest of Persia, stabbed Umar multiple times while he was leading prayers in the mosque in Medina. He died three days later.
35
The Third Rightly Guided Caliph, Uthman: Armed Revolt
The next “Rightly Guided Caliph” was Uthman ibn Affan, under whom the rapid expansion of the Arab empire continued. Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s son-in-law, was passed over again, and his partisans, the party of Ali (
shiat Ali,
whence the word Shia), never accepted Uthman as the legitimate caliph, just as many Muslims today do not accept the pretensions of the Islamic State’s caliph Ibrahim today.
Ali’s supporters mocked Uthman for having run away during some of the early battles of the Muslims, “like a donkey runs from the lion.”
36
Uthman didn’t deny this; he just said he had permission: a hadith depicts a Muslim asking the caliph Umar’s son Abdullah, who was an old man by this time, if he was aware that Uthman fled from the Battle of Uhud, was absent also from the Battle of Badr, and didn’t even attend when Muhammad’s closest companions pledged their fealty to him. Abdullah explains that Allah “excused” Uthman from Uhud, that Uthman was absent from Badr because Muhammad asked him to stay behind and care for his ailing wife, who was Muhammad’s daughter, and that Uthman was on another assignment from Muhammad when the prophet’s companions gathered to pledge their loyalty.
37
Uthman thus claimed the authority of both Allah and Muhammad to excuse his apparent cowardice. The fact that this defense wasn’t universally dismissed as an unacceptable act of presumption demonstrates the stature that the caliph had in the eyes of at least some of the Muslims.
Uthman is also credited with compiling the Qur’an as it stands today (finishing the work begun by Umar) and distributing the copies of the correct version to the Muslim provinces, which now stretched across North Africa and the Middle East and into Persia. The story goes that in the early 650s, a Muslim named Hudhaifa bin al-Yaman warned Uthman that the Muslims were in danger of becoming like the Jews and Christians: “O chief of the Believers! Save this nation before they differ about the Book (Quran) as Jews and the Christians did before.”
38
So the caliph appointed a commission to standardize and codify the Qur’anic text, and once this work was done in 653, Uthman is supposed to have distributed the final version and burned all the variants.
39
The Qur’an isn’t mentioned anywhere in the historical record for several decades after Uthman’s caliphate, so the historical value of this later story about the third caliph is very low, but it does illustrate the authority of the caliph: no one else would have had the stature
to edit and standardize what were considered divine revelations—but Uthman is credited with the achievement despite the fact that his authority was so widely challenged.