Pope Leo XIV is getting lynched on social media. The Chicagoan pontiff renewed his broadside against the death penalty after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he would livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, who shot dead 13 unarmed US soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in 2009. “I, an American jihadi, killed for Islam,” Hasan declared at his court-martial.

Leo rushed to rescue the jihadi from the firing squad. “The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” he pontificated on X. Leo stated his logic for countermanding capital punishment. We have created “effective systems of detention” that keep us safe while not depriving the guilty of “the possibility of redemption,” he argued.

Leo’s tweet garnered over 10 million views. Plebs and highbrows united in an unprecedented barrage of insults against the putative successor of St. Peter. “Sit this out. Let the Christians handle it,” one X-user quipped. Several posted images of the robe and axe used by Giovanni Bugatti, the Papal States’ longest-serving executioner, who carried out 514 executions over 68 years. Scores of Twitterati, including Gad Saad, author of Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, asked Leo to read his Bible. Others asked why Leo was tight-lipped on the thousands of executions in the Muslim world. A 2002 report highlights a 600 percent rise in capital punishment in Bahrain.

“We’ve reached the stage of Catholicism where the Pope has accused God of being a sinner,” one X user quipped, referring to God legislating capital punishment in the book of Genesis. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image,” God commands Noah. In fact, capital punishment for premeditated murder is the only law repeated in all five books of the Torah.

I’m not going to argue that abrogating the death penalty is a contradiction of Scripture and pre-Vatican II magisterial teaching. Catholic philosopher Edward Feser argues this persuasively in his book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, writing: “If capital punishment is wrong in principle, then the Church has for two millennia consistently taught grave moral error and badly misinterpreted Scripture.”

“The reversal of a doctrine as well established as the legitimacy of capital punishment would raise serious problems regarding the credibility of the magisterium,” Cardinal Avery Dulles wrote in 2001. “If the tradition on capital punishment had been reversed, serious questions would be raised regarding other doctrines.”

Pope Francis confirmed the magisterial status of the new teaching on the death penalty by promulgating it in his declaration Dignitas Infinita and his encyclical Fratelli Tutti. Leo’s tweet is simply reiterating what has now become official Roman Catholic doctrine.

Did Jails Exist When the Bible Ordered Capital Punishment?

Leo’s main argument against the death penalty in his latest tweet is the development of “effective systems of detention.” He is citing Francis’ exact words in his revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on capital punishment. Two popes claim that there weren’t prisons fit for purpose when the death penalty was practiced in biblical times.

Leo’s main argument against the death penalty in his latest tweet is the development of “effective systems of detention.” In doing so, he is quoting Francis’ exact wording from the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church on capital punishment. Both popes contend that prisons fit for purpose did not exist in biblical times, when the death penalty was practiced.

Have the popes even read the Bible? Five chapters in Jeremiah deal with his imprisonment (20:1-3, 32:1-5, 37:11-15, 16-21, 38: 1-13, 39:11-14). From overnight detention in stocks by the priest Pashur, to his imprisonment in the “court of the guardhouse” on the orders of King Zedekiah, to his arrest by a royal officer who “imprisoned him in the house of Jonathan the Scribe, which they had converted into a prison,” we are made aware of “effective systems of detention” that imprison the prophet. Jeremiah is also put into a vaulted pit beneath the house, where “he remained for a long time.” At one point, the soldiers detain him in a cistern. They return him to the “court of the guardhouse,” acting on a friend’s petition.

Pharaoh throws Joseph into prison (Genesis 39:20) for 12 years (Seder Olam Rabbah §2 and Shemos Rabbah 7:1). Samson is jailed (Judges 16:21). Assyria’s king Shalmaneser imprisons Israel’s king Hoshea (2Kings 17:4). Jehoiachin, king of Judah, spends time in a Babylonian prison (2Kings 25:27). The psalms speak of God’s concern for prisoners (68:6, 69:33, 79:11, 102:20, 107:10). Herod puts John the Baptist in prison (Matthew 14:3). Jesus tells his disciples to visit prisoners, because by doing so they are visiting him (Matthew 25:44).

Before encountering the Messiah, Saul is on a mission to imprison Jesus’ followers (Acts 8:3). The high priest has the apostles put in the “public prison” (Acts 5:17), and Luke records multiple accounts of their imprisonment. Paul writes four letters from prison. The biblical accounts establish that the detention facilities cited are “effective.” Peter escapes from jail only by angelic intervention (Acts 12:7), and an earthquake enables the jailbreak of Paul and Silas (Acts 16:25-34).

Notably, the magisterial texts do not talk about “humane” detention systems. If they did, one might point to Paul’s two-year house arrest—during which the Romans permit him to receive visitors and preach the gospel (Acts 28:16–31)—as an example. If Leo reads The Oxford History of the Prison, he will discover that effective detention systems weren’t developed after Vatican II. They existed in the ancient world.

Michel Foucault’s Ideological Capture of the Catholic Church

For two millennia, the Catholic Church so firmly upheld biblical teaching on the death penalty that Martin Luther’s nemesis, Pope Leo X, in his bull Exsurge Domine, even declared that it was the will of the Holy Spirit to burn heretics. What accounts for the shift from Leo X to Leo XIV? A strong clue to the revolution lies in how Pope Francis advanced the debate from capital punishment to life imprisonment.

Addressing the International Association of Penal Law in October 2014, Francis condemned all forms of life imprisonment as an affront to human dignity. “Recently the life sentence was taken out of the Vatican’s Criminal Code. A life sentence is just a death penalty in disguise,” Francis stated. Leo similarly rejected chemical castration for a pedophile who savagely raped a 3-year-old girl when he was bishop in Peru, even though Peru faces an epidemic of child rape and several countries, including seven states in the US, prescribe chemical castration for pedophilia.

Francis’ condemnation of life imprisonment as a “hidden death penalty” is straight out of the playbook of Michel Foucault—the “emblematic figure” of French postmodernism. Foucault treated capital punishment as a problem of power—specifically the “right of the sword,” the prerogative of the ruler to take life (articulated by St Paul in Romans 13:4).

Like Leo, Foucault claimed he was taking a “pro-life” position. “How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain and multiply life, to put this life in order?” he asked in The History of Sexuality (Volume 1). In May 2025, Leo said: “Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion but says I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life.”

Foucault condemned the death penalty as a retributive response to crime that pathologized the criminal as a “monster”—someone deemed incorrigible or a threat to the safety of the population (emphasis mine). Francis and Leo’s reasoning closely parallels Foucault’s: the guilty can be redeemed, and modern prisons pose no threat to communal safety. Foucault’s theories have had a huge impact on criminal justice practice in the West. It’s no surprise that the Vatican has capitulated to the zeitgeist.

What is tragic is that Rome has bought into the ideology of a philosopher who simultaneously upheld the dismantling of Christian sexual ethics in his life and works. Foucault sexually abused boys in Tunisia. James Miller’s authoritative biography of the philosopher, The Passion of Michel Foucault, records his interest in sadomasochism. “Besides, to die for the love of boys: What could be more beautiful?” Foucault’s biography records him saying. Foucault was one of the first openly homosexual public figures in the 20th century, dying of AIDS at the age of 57. Known as the “prophet of pederasty,” he signed a petition to the French Parliament calling for the decriminalization of sexual relations between adults and minors under the age of 15.

Popes Silent on Capital Punishment in the Muslim World

On September 17, 2026, Saudi Arabia pronounced the death sentence on Anojan Sivarasa, a 24-year-old Sri Lankan migrant worker, as a hadd punishment under Sharia for posting a Facebook comment deemed insulting to the Prophet Muhammad. Sivarasa later deleted it and issued an apology. Leo said nothing.

In Sunni Islamic jurisprudence, all four major schools (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali) classify apostasy (abandoning Islam) as a capital offense. Muslims who convert to Christianity face the death penalty. Leo says nothing.

Iran and Saudi Arabia account for the majority of recent death penalty cases in the Muslim world (as of mid-October 2026), with Iran especially active on protest-related cases. Leo remains silent.

The Trump administration announces the execution of an Islamic terrorist. Leo roars like a lion.

If he could travel back in a time machine, Leo would plead for Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Höss to be spared the death penalty. Francis would go one step further. Had Hitler survived the war, Francis would ask for him to be spared life imprisonment.

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Karl Marx called “religion the opium of the people.” What would the atheist philosopher say if he walked into a Western university and saw Marxists and Muslims engaging in a libidinous lovefest to secure the liberation of the Palestinian proletariat? Would he find such ideological intercourse promiscuous beyond parody?

I confess I have been discombobulated by the dissonance of the hook-up between a religion that veils women and a godless philosophy that wants to smash the patriarchy. On many occasions, readers ask me why a seventh-century religion that conducts experiments to test if gays can defy gravity would hop into bed with a 19^th-century ideology that champions same-sex marriage.

“What has Marx to do with Mohammed?” the early Christian writer Tertullian might have asked. “Marxism is Marxism and Islam is Islam, and never the twain shall meet,” the poet Kipling might have quipped. Dr Craig Considine’s landmark book, When Marx Meets Islam: Navigating Radical Ideologies in Defense of the West, is an audacious attempt at resolving this coalition of contradiction.

Considine’s stellar contribution to the conversation is to dig deep and scan wide, demonstrating that the Red-Green axis is rooted in the deconstructive theories of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Frantz Fanon and is widely disseminated by a sprawling network of subversive actors, who use the tactics of language inversion described in George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm.

Considine warns that the “soft war” between the Leftist-Islamist alliance and the West has intensified exponentially after Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. This war is an existential threat to Western civilization. Losing the war would be catastrophic for democracy, liberty, religious freedom, free speech, equal rights, and the rule of law, he contends.

Considine crafts a metaphorical chessboard to choreograph how the Red-Green alliance is strategically mobilizing a totalitarian takeover. His book’s five chapters are based on the chess pieces that operate in concert, “much like chess pieces that move together for attack.”

The coalition’s “pawns” or foot soldiers are campus radicals—Islamist and Leftist students. “The absurdity of their convergence is striking,” Considine notes, “given that Leftists are typically pro-LGBTQ and secular, while Islamists are anti-LGBTQ and theocratic.” What unites them is a shared loathing of Israel and the US, and a desire to foist their ideologies on the West.

The “bishops” are faculty members who indoctrinate students using Critical Race Theory, social justice ideology, Herbert Marcuse’s cultural Marxism, Gramsci’s ideas of cultural hegemony and “war of position,” Fanon’s celebration of violence, and Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism.

The “knights” are leftist and Islamist organizations and networks. Using Sun Tzu’s principle

that “all warfare is based on deception”—the knights present themselves as civil rights or humanitarian organizations while engaging in methodical manipulation, controlling societal narratives, and advancing a coordinated campaign against the U.S.-Israel alliance and the West.

The “rooks” are politicians who influence policy and legislation. Considine names leading players like Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Zohran Mamdani, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Their power to vote and dictate law is paramount in realizing the Leftist-Islamist agenda,” he cautions. “They dictate the ideological battle from the highest echelons of power, transforming abstract Marxist theories into actual policy and divisive rhetoric that furthers the Leftist-Islamist cause.”

Most importantly, the “ultimate arbiters” of the “soft war” are state players—Qatar, Iran, and China—and their organizational and media proxies like Hamas, Al-Jazeera, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP), and TikTok. Considine warns that TikTok, the Chinese Communist Party-controlled app, “behaves like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, with its agenda of controlling the narrative to shape not just the current ‘reality’ but also the future.”

A sociologist at Rice University and an internationally recognized scholar on Islam, Considine is a practising Catholic passionate about reconciliation and interfaith dialogue. He writes with the depth and dexterity of a seasoned intellectual, but while wearing the military fatigues of a veteran academic who has been through some of the bloodiest battles in the “woke” wars.

This book stands out due to several distinct hallmarks that boost its credibility and make it highly engaging for readers.

First, it persuasively links the ideologies of Marx & Co to the praxis of the Red-Green entente.

Second, it names and shames the seditious chess pieces, linking them to their partners on the ground and patrons in high places. In doing so, it offers a mini-encyclopedia of the renegade actors in the US and Europe. This isn’t a theory textbook—it is a combat manual.

Third, it demonstrates why Israel is a key ideological fault line in the “soft war.”

Fourth, when trying to make sense of the “soft war,” most of us see the reverse side of what seems like a tangled tapestry of unconnected threads. Considine flips the tapestry over and shows us the whole picture.

Most importantly, with refreshing candor, it semi-autobiographically tells the story of the author’s own Damascus Road conversion in slow motion. Considine is far from a right-wing firebrand. His goodwill for Islam is evident in his bestseller The Humanity of Muhammad: A Christian View. He has been eulogized at the highest level in the Muslim world.

However, the minute he showed support for the victims of October 7, his Muslim cheerleaders turned their megaphones against him. With deep sadness, Considine describes how even the Gülen (Hizmet) movement and the Ahmadiyya community—who advocate a “jihad of the pen” rather than a violent jihad spurned him and now label Israel as “genocidal.”

Considine has paid a price for his commitment to truth and reason, even at his own university, where he regularly hosted voices from across the spectrum. Considine had his own hermeneutical fracture. His mea culpa is inspiring: “I was once a ‘pawn,’ easily moved by the flattering treatment of the Leftist-Islamist alliance. This book is my declaration that I am no longer a pawn, the chess piece that moves forward in a predictable, straight line.”

The book would benefit from analyzing the Islamic counterparts of Marx, Gramsci, and Fanon. Considine examines how Muslim Brotherhood activists have Hassan al-Banna as their mentor. Would he consider including Abul A’la Mawdudi, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, and Ruhollah Khomeini? Or ideologues like Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, and Sayyid Qutb, whose revolutionary methodology borrowed heavily from Marxist-Leninist organizational mechanics?

Further, one would ask if Muslims in the Red-Green axis go beyond the doctrine of their ideological mentors and derive their praxis from their interpretation of Qur’an and hadiths? If so, does Considine consider their methodology and interpretation valid in the overarching schema of Islamic exegesis and practice? Do the primary sources of Islam teach a separation of Mosque and State? If not, aren’t Muslim activists simply being faithful to the model and teaching of their Prophet?

Christians reading this book will ask if the mega-monster created by the mutation of Marx and Muhammad has to do with the gaping vacuum created by the collapse of Christianity in the West. Isn’t today’s West more like the parable of Nietzsche’s madman who, after being forced out of several churches, said: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”

Considine’s analysis leads him to conclude that Leftism and Islamism work synergistically against these ideals by exploiting the very tolerance and openness that Western values demand. The solution is to act urgently on Karl Popper’s decisive dictum: to be “intolerant of intolerance” by establishing clear boundaries to protect our civic culture. John Rawls, the philosopher, expands on Popper and posits in A Theory of Justice that the principle of total tolerance is superseded by a society’s inherent right to “self-preservation,” Considine emphasizes.

Pope Leo XIV and his cohort of interfaith advocates, Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally, and Leftist politicians in the US and most European countries who have been afflicted by the “virus of wishful thinking,” to use a term from Oxford ethicist Nigel Biggar, might miraculously experience a shift in their own ideological tectonic plates if they were to read Considine’s book.

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Mainstream history books often paint the medieval Arab world as a place of absolute, unbroken religious faith. Islamic writings from the past routinely reinforce this image, carefully burying or ignoring the voices of those who dared to question orthodox dogmas. Yet the historical reality is far more complex. Beneath the surface of the medieval Islamic world, especially between the second and fourth centuries of the Hijra, a vibrant, daring movement of freethought took root.

In the West, historical atheism is often defined by the rejection of God himself, an idea that runs from Enlightenment deism through to Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous phrase “God is dead,” and still animates titles like God: The Failed Hypothesis and The God Delusion today. Medieval Arabic freethought took a different path. Its primary target, in many cases, was not divinity but the concept of prophecy, since prophecy was viewed as the only bridge connecting humanity to God, and denying the prophets meant severing the path to revealed religion itself for those who did.

This intellectual rebellion was fueled by a fierce dedication to human reason, humanism, and intellectual freedom. Thinkers, scientists, and poets boldly prioritized logic over tradition. In response, orthodox religious scholars and nervous political rulers fought back with a weapon that remains powerful to this day: accusations of heresy (zandaqa), deviance (ilḥād), and infidelity. For many of the greatest minds of the Islamic Golden Age, choosing intellectual freedom meant risking exile, censorship, or a brutal death.

Virtually all of the most radical writings produced by these freethinkers were lost or deliberately destroyed. What survives of their arguments reaches us primarily through the quotations, summaries, and refutations composed by their orthodox opponents. While these hostile sources preserve invaluable fragments, they may exaggerate, distort, or selectively present the original ideas. Historians must therefore reconstruct these positions with caution, always mindful that the loudest surviving voices are those of the accusers. Where complete works or poetry remain, they offer a clearer window; where only hostile reports exist, we proceed carefully.

The Translation Movement and the Spark of Reason

To understand why freethought flourished between the second and fourth centuries AH, one must look at the Abbasid Translation Movement.

During this era, Islamic rulers, most notably the Caliph al-Maʾmūn, funded a massive project to translate Greek, Persian, and Indian scientific and philosophical texts into Arabic. Scholars working across Baghdad, often loosely associated with the palace library known as the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Ḥikma) though the effort was never confined to a single institution, rendered the works of Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, and others into a language that had never carried them before.

This movement handed a generation of brilliant intellectuals an entire foreign philosophy, and with it the tools of formal Greek logic. Armed with these tools, thinkers began to ask difficult questions, and the study of Islam itself began to change shape in Arabic. Strict logic could now be applied not only to science but to the nature of God, the necessity of prophets, and the truth of holy texts, in ways earlier generations had no vocabulary for. What started as a state-sponsored science project quickly became the intellectual foundation for medieval freethought.

in the late eleventh century AD (The fifth century AH) Al-Ghazālī, a Muslim scholar, grew deeply alarmed by the influence of Greek philosophy over Islamic intellectuals. To check this trend he wrote his most famous book, The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-Falāsifa). In it he systematically attacked the ideas of the rationalist thinkers. The Tahāfut is a serious, technically demanding work of philosophical argument in its own right, and its critique of causality in particular is still studied today on its own philosophical merits, independent of the political uses the book was later put to.

Al-Ghazali declared three specific philosophical beliefs to be acts of total apostasy (kufr):

Believing the universe is eternal and has no beginning. Believing that God knows only universal truths, not particular details about individuals. Believing that only human souls are resurrected after death, not physical bodies.

By labeling these ideas as infidelic, al-Ghazālī’s book supplied orthodox scholars and rulers with powerful theological justification for censoring, banning, and persecuting rationalist thinkers. Its long-term impact on speculative philosophy in the eastern Islamic world was profound, even if philosophy continued in other regions and later traditions.

Profiles of the Infidels of Islamic History

1. Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ

Rūzbih ibn Dādūyeh, a Persian translator and writer, lived through both the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. Upon converting to Islam he took the name ʿAbd Allāh and became known as Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (”son of the shriveled-handed”) because his father had been punished by the governor al-Ḥajjāj, who beat his fingers until they became crooked.

His most famous work is Kalīla wa Dimna. Originally Indian (Sanskrit), it had been translated into Middle Persian; Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ rendered it into Arabic and added material of his own.

His end was tragic. He had a bitter dispute with Sufyān ibn Muʿāwiya, the governor of Basra under the Abbasid Caliph Abū Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr. Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ mocked Sufyān’s large nose, greeting him with “Peace be upon you both,” meaning the man and his nose. When Sufyān’s patience ran out he ordered an oven lit and had Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ cut to pieces limb by limb and thrown into the fire while still alive. As he died, Sufyān told him: “I have no qualms about mutilating you, for you are a heretic who has corrupted the people.”

The primary textual basis for his skepticism appears in the “Bāb Barzūyeh” (Chapter of Barzawayh) in Kalīla wa Dimna. There the narrator states:

“I found many religions and sects… but I found none among them who did not exaggerate in praising their own religion and condemning the religion of those who differed from it. And I found no justice or truth among them that a rational person could recognize and accept.”

Because of this passage, the later Caliph al-Mahdī, who actively persecuted heretics, remarked that he never saw a book of heresy whose roots did not refer back to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ. By applying reason, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ refused to submit to any dogmatic religion, holding that good conduct toward people was sufficient. He was killed at the age of thirty-six.

2. Ibn al-Rāwandī

Ibn al-Rāwandī was heavily influenced by his mentor and close friend, the skeptic Abū ʿĪsā al-Warrāq. Virtually all of their original writings were lost or deliberately destroyed. Their radical opinions survive because opponents quoted them in order to refute them. The most important surviving fragments of Ibn al-Rāwandī’s Kitāb al-Zumurrud (The Book of the Emerald) come from the Ismaili Majālis of al-Muʾayyad fī l-Dīn al-Shīrāzī and from al-Khayyāṭ’s Kitāb al-Intiṣār.

Originally mainstream theologians, both men eventually rejected the necessity of revealed religion. Al-Warrāq criticized the logic of religious dogmas and miracles. Ibn al-Rāwandī’s Emerald directly questioned prophecy. One of the best-attested fragments (the so-called “Brahmin dilemma”) runs:

“The Brahmans say: for us and for our adversaries it is certain that reason (ʿaql) is the greatest benefit from God for his creatures… Therefore, if the messenger has come to confirm good and evil, duty and prohibition already provided by reason, then we can omit to care about his authority… But if his message contradicts the judgement on good and evil according to reason, then we do not need to believe in his prophecy.”

Other fragments attack Islamic ritual, prayer, ritual washing, throwing stones, circumambulating a house that “does not hear or see,” as actions not required by reason, and mock the selective intervention of angels at the battle of Badr versus their absence at the battle of Uḥud. Scholars continue to debate the exact dialogue structure of the Emerald, yet the radical critique of prophecy is consistently attributed to him by both Muʿtazilī and Ismaili opponents.

3. Abū Bakr al-Rāzī

Al-Rāzī is considered one of the greatest scientists of the Golden Age; some describe him as the greatest physician of all time. His encyclopedic Al-Ḥāwī fī l-Ṭibb remained a primary medical reference in Europe for centuries.

His philosophical work, however, earned him accusations of atheism and heresy. His critical books On the Tricks of the Prophets (or On the Stratagems of Those Who Claim Prophecy) and related treatises were destroyed. What we know of them comes chiefly from the hostile report of the Ismaili Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī, who recorded a public debate. According to that account, al-Rāzī argued that reason is given equally to all, that God would be unjust to single out only some for useful knowledge, that prophets contradict one another, and that miracles are the tricks of charlatans.

In his surviving Spiritual Medicine (Al-Ṭibb al-Rūḥānī) he praises the intellect in terms that make prophecy appear superfluous:

“The Creator… gave us reason and bestowed it upon us… it is the greatest of God’s blessings upon us… and through it we attained knowledge of the Almighty Creator. Reason is the thing without which our state would be the state of wild beasts, of children and lunatics.”

Modern scholars remain divided. Some accept the radical portrait drawn by Abū Ḥātim; others argue that al-Rāzī was a severe internal critic who still operated within a theistic framework. The tension between the surviving moderate works and the hostile reports of the lost ones is itself part of the historical record.

4. Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī

Al-Maʿarrī was a brilliant blind Syrian poet and philosopher. Blinded early by smallpox, he withdrew from society and called himself “the prisoner of the two prisons” (his blindness and his house). He was a strict vegetarian who spoke out against the suffering of animals.

Unlike most of the others, substantial portions of his own verse survive, especially in the Luzūmiyyāt. He did not deny a Creator, yet he systematically mocked the contradictions of theology and the claims of the prophetic religions. Among the best-known lines:

“The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains but no religion, and those with religion but no brains.”

And:

“Wake up, wake up, you misguided ones… for your religions are but a trick of the ancients.”

He asked pointedly whether the women of the Romans had been made lawful for the Arabs “except by the rulings of the prophecies,” and he requested a bitter verse for his gravestone:

“This is what my father did to me… and I did not do anything to anyone.”

His poetry remains one of the most extensive and direct surviving expressions of religious skepticism from the period.

5. Jābir ibn Ḥayyān

Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, remembered as the “father of chemistry” and credited with among the first systematic approaches to the science, may not have existed at all, at least not as a single person. Mainstream scholarship, following the philologist Paul Kraus, doubts that one historical Jābir ever lived, and generally attributes the large body of writing under his name to a school of alchemists writing roughly a century after his supposed death. Whoever stood behind the name, the corpus was influential enough that Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyya later felt the need to attack it in his Majmūʿ al-Fatāwā, claiming that even if Jābir’s existence could be proven, one would only have proven “that he was a great magician in this religion, who worked with alchemy, chemistry, magic, and talismans.” The charge is late but it shows how mainstream Islam viewed scientific innovation as heretical.

6. Al-Fārābī / Alpharabius

Known as “the Second Teacher” (after Aristotle), al-Fārābī was a master of logic and philosophy. He argued that a prophet’s knowledge is imaginative and revealed, while a philosopher’s knowledge is received through the pure active intellect, making the philosopher’s knowledge superior in its intellectual character. Ibn Taymiyya declared him an infidel for claiming the philosopher more perfect than the prophet.

7. Ibn Sīnā / Avicenna

A legendary physician and polymath, Ibn Sīnā wrote The Canon of Medicine, and dictated an autobiography late in life to his student al-Jūzjānī describing a self-taught mastery of logic, physics, and medicine by his late teens. By his own account he read Aristotle’s Metaphysics forty times without grasping it, until he came across al-Fārābī’s commentary on the work, at which point it suddenly made sense. Because his philosophy leaned heavily on this philosophical inheritance, he maintained that the universe is eternal and that bodies do not physically rise on the Day of Resurrection. Al-Ghazālī officially declared him an apostate (kāfir) for these cosmological views; Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya later labeled him “the head of the atheists.”

8. Al-Kindī / Alkindus

The “founder of Arab-Islamic philosophy,” al-Kindī enjoyed royal patronage under open-minded caliphs but lost everything under al-Mutawakkil, who persecuted intellectuals. Rivals, the Banū Mūsā brothers, maneuvered him out of favor at court; al-Mutawakkil had him flogged and his personal library, known as al-Kindiyya, confiscated and handed to his rivals, only returning it near the end of his reign. Muslim scholars condemned him for asserting that human reason is the ultimate means of approaching God. He was declared an infidel and dismissed as a “misguided astrologer.”

9. Ibn Rushd / Averroes

Famous for his commentaries on Aristotle, Ibn Rushd argued in The Decisive Treatise (Faṣl al-Maqāl) that if the apparent sense of holy texts contradicts demonstrative reason, the texts must be interpreted metaphorically rather than the reasoning rejected. His Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahāfut al-Tahāfut) is a direct, point-by-point reply to al-Ghazālī’s Incoherence of the Philosophers, answering the earlier attack chapter by chapter. Muslim scholars convinced the sultan that his books were dangerous. In 1195 he was driven from the mosque in Cordoba by an angry crowd, exiled to Lucena, and had his works publicly burned. Scholars such as al-Dhahabī and Ibn Taymiyya condemned him as a heretic who supported atheist philosophers and sought to corrupt the Sharīʿa with Greek philosophy.

10. Ibn al-Haytham

One of the greatest physicists in history and a pioneer of the scientific method, Ibn al-Haytham authored more than two hundred works. According to later biographers, the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim once invited him to Egypt to regulate the flooding of the Nile; after inspecting the river, Ibn al-Haytham concluded the project was impossible, and, fearing the caliph’s famously volatile temper, feigned madness rather than admit failure to his face. He spent roughly a decade confined to his house until al-Hakim’s death in 1021, after which he abandoned the pretense and settled near the Azhar mosque in Cairo, supporting himself by copying manuscripts and teaching until his own death. Some Muslim scholars nonetheless branded him an atheist outside of Islam, and later writers grouped him alongside Ibn Sīnā among philosophers who held to the eternity of the world.

The tragic reality is that many of the scholars, philosophers, and scientists who are praised today as the crowning achievements of the Islamic Golden Age were persecuted during their own lifetimes. Discouraging independent thought, punishing doubt, and attacking the free use of reason were tools actively wielded by medieval orthodox scholars and rulers.

Ask anyone who went through school in Egypt, or almost anywhere in the Arab world, and they will list Ibn Sīnā, al-Rāzī, and Ibn al-Haytham without hesitation as points of pride, and most will never have heard the other half of the story. Two recent issues of Al-Azhar’s own magazine make the point better than any outside critic could. One credits Islamic teachings themselves with guiding scholars like Ibn al-Haytham toward the correct experimental method, against what it calls the sterile rationalism of the Greeks, while listing Ibn Sīnā and al-Kindī alongside him as uncomplicated contributors to that legacy. Another describes Western accounts of these discoveries using the language of “intellectual fraud and scientific piracy,” and calls for restoring credit to their “true, legitimate” discoverers. Neither article mentions that in their lifetime, these men were ruled as infidels and heretics.

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During an official visit to Spain in June 2026, Pope Leo XIV praised medieval Spain—which was occupied by Muslim conquerors for nearly 800 years—as an interfaith utopia that led to advancements in astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, and science. He urged modern Spaniards to embrace multicultural coexistence with Islam and stop “fanning the flames of polarization” over mass migration from the Muslim world. He claimed that Christians and Muslims can live together as friends as they did in centuries past.

The Pope’s remarks were greeted with significant pushback by historians, theologians, and lay Catholics. They accused him of misrepresenting Spain’s history by repeating the shibboleths of progressive historians that life on the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal) during its occupation by Muslims was a paragon of religious tolerance and harmony.

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that Islamic Spain was ruled by ruthless and tyrannical Muslim theocrats who marginalized and repressed Christians and Jews in all areas of life. Under Islamic law, non-Muslims under Muslim rule were branded as infidels (disbelievers) and relegated to a subordinate social class.

The case of Islamic Spain is a universally significant microcosm that serves as a warning of what awaits Christians, Jews, and other non-Muslims under Muslim rule. Islam and the West represent two diametrically opposed and fundamentally incompatible civilizations.

As millions upon millions of immigrants from the Islamic world pour into Western countries in our lifetimes, the sordid history of medieval Spain is repeating itself. The only difference now is that foot soldiers of the opposing civilization are being invited into non-Muslim lands with open arms by political leaders who are either ignorant of the history of al-Andalus or who despise the heritage of Western civilization.

Demographic trends favor the Muslim newcomers, who, by and large, refuse to assimilate to the Western way of life. They are not only establishing parallel societies in Western cities but are also taking the reins of political power. Islam is spreading across the West at a rapid pace, and if not stopped and reversed, it will eventually take over and impose its will on non-Muslims as in medieval Spain.

May Spain be a warning for the rest of Western world of what happens when Judeo-Christian values, history, and tradition—and especially the protection of individual liberties—are not adequately defended.

A Brief History of Islamic Spain

In AD 711, less than a century after the birth of Islam in the deserts of Arabia, a Muslim military force consisting of approximately 7,000 Arabs and Berbers from North Africa crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and invaded Visigothic Hispania (the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula, modern day Spain and Portugal). The Visigoths, Germanic peoples who had taken full control of Hispania from the Romans by 507 and had converted the entire Iberian Peninsula to Nicene Christianity by 589, had become weak due to internal divisions and were utterly unprepared for the Muslim onslaught.

The Muslim invaders, led by Tariq ibn Ziyad, an Umayyad commander from what is now known as Algeria, faced little resistance. In July 711, at the Battle of Guadalete in southern Iberia, the Muslim forces decisively defeated the Visigoths and their leader, King Roderic, was killed in battle. The rout led to the total collapse of the Visigothic kingdom and opened the way for the capture of Toledo, the Visigoth capital, in 712. Visigoth Spain was forever lost. Christian Spain became Muslim Spain.

The Muslim warriors, known as Moors (a blanket term that refers to the medieval Muslim inhabitants of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula), renamed the territory of Hispania and called it al-Andalus, a term of uncertain etymology but may derive its name from Vandalusia (“land of the Vandals”) and refer to the Vandals, a Germanic people who settled in Iberia and North Africa in the fifth century.

Within a period of just seven years, the Moors, motivated by religious fervor and hungry for plunder, succeeded in conquering most of the Iberian Peninsula and ruled it as an emirate of the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus. In less than a decade, five million Christians suddenly were subjugated to the oppressive rule of Muslim autocrats.

The Moorish advance beyond Iberia was halted in October 732, when the Frankish leader Charles “the Hammer” Martel defeated the Umayyad army at the Battle of Tours (also called the Battle of Poitiers).

The defeat of Umayyads, who managed to cross over the Pyrenees mountains into France, not only curtailed the spread of Islam into northern Europe but also contributed to the birth a collective European identity. The first recorded use of the word “European” dates to 754, when a scribe, writing in Latin, referred to the victors of the Battle of Tours as Europenses, a term he used to describe the Christian peoples of the western part of the continent.

The Moors were unable to occupy parts of northern Iberia due to mountainous terrain that created a natural protective barrier. In 718, Pelagius (Pelayo), a Visigothic nobleman, founded the Kingdom of Asturias, from where he began to push back against the Moorish occupiers. In the summer of 722, Pelagius defeated an Umayyad army at the Battle of Covadonga, in what is regarded as the beginning of the Christian Reconquista (reconquest) of Iberia.

During subsequent centuries, power struggles and the fragmentation of Moorish al-Andalus allowed for the creation and expansion of Christian kingdoms in Aragon, Castile, León, Navarre, and Portugal. In 1085, Alfonso VI of León and Castile retook Toledo, the ancient Visigoth capital.

A key turning point of the Reconquista occurred in July 1212, when a coalition of Christian armies decisively defeated the Moorish Almohads at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in southern Spain. The defeat significantly reduced the power of Moors in Iberia and gave new impetus to the Reconquista. In 1248, Ferdinand III of Castile retook Seville, further diminishing Islamic control over Spain.

Muslims occupied Spain for nearly eight centuries, until January 1492, when the Catholic Monarchs, Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon, captured Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the Iberian Peninsula. This ended formal Muslim political rule in Iberia.

An Islamic Golden Age?

Like Pope Leo XIV, modern liberal academics, authors, and religious leaders consistently promote medieval Islamic Spain as having ushered in a “Golden Age” of great learning and human advancement—a multicultural age that serves as an example for what could and should be replicated today. They claim that Islamic Spain was benevolent to, and tolerant of, its Christian and Jewish subjects. They present Islamic al-Andalus as the savior of medieval Europe and assert that Islamic Spain pulled Western Europe out of the Dark Ages by sparking the Renaissance.

Some examples include:

• Historian David Levering Lewis, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, in his book, God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, claimed that al-Andalus was a “beacon of cosmopolitanism, tolerance, and intellectual brilliance.” He praised Muslim leaders in medieval Spain for their “prodigious interfaith collaboration.”

• Acclaimed author James Reston Jr., in his book, Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors, wrote: “In arts and agriculture, learning and tolerance, al-Andalus was a beacon of enlightenment to the rest of Europe…. Among its finest achievements was its tolerance. Jews and Christians…were permitted to practice their faith and their rituals without interference. This tolerance was in keeping with the principles of the Koran.”

• Professor Maria Rosa Menocal, author of the best-selling book, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, described al-Andalus as a “golden age of tolerance.” She wrote: “A thousand years ago on the Iberian Peninsula, an enlightened vision of Islam had created the most advanced culture in Europe…. al-Andalus was rooted in pluralism and shaped by religious tolerance.”

• U.S. President Barack Obama, during a speech at Cairo University in June 2009, declared: “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Córdoba during the Inquisition [sic]…. Likewise, it is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit—for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear. We can’t disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretense of liberalism.”

Many of the claims that are being peddled by liberal Westerners about Islamic tolerance in medieval Spain are demonstrably false and yet millions of people are being led to believe a lie about multicultural coexistence with Islam.

Infidels, Jihad, Dhimmitude

Before presenting evidence regarding the reality of life for non-Muslims in medieval Spain, a quick review of what Islamic doctrine says about Islam and non-Muslims (infidels) is in order.

Islam and its concepts, objectives, and terminology are derived from the Qur’an, the Hadith (quotes by Muhammad), Sunnah (actions by Muhammad), and Islamic law (sharia).

The term Islam means “submission” or “surrender” to the will of Allah. Islam does not mean “peace,” as many claim, although the Arabic words for Islam and peace (salam) do share the same three-letter root (s-l-m).

The Qur’an teaches that: Islam is preeminent over all other religions (9:33); Islam is the only true religion of Allah (3:19); Islam is universal and should reign over all of humanity (34:27); the Muslim community (umma) is perfect (3:110) and elected by Allah to rule over the world (35:37). This goal will be achieved by jihad (holy war), which is an obligation for all Muslims (2:216).

Islamic law divides the geopolitical world into two groups: Dar al-Islam (territory of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (territory of war). In other words, lands that are under Muslim rule and lands that are under non-Muslim rule.

Under Islamic jurisprudence, once a land becomes Islamic it is declared a waqf(religious endowment) and ownership transfers to Allah. As such, it cannot be permanently transferred back to non-Muslim ownership. For this reason, many jihadists believe they have a right to reconquer Spain for Islam.

Islam divides people into two groups: Muslims (umma) and unbelievers (kafir, roughly equivalent to the Latin term infidel). In medieval Spain, Christian and Jews, the so-called People of the Book (monotheists), were dhimmis(protected persons) and required to submit to Islam and pay an annual poll tax (jizya). In general, the jizya tax required Christians to pay an annual tribute of one gold coin per person, plus quotas of barley, honey, vinegar, and wheat.

Although legally protected, they were second-class citizens and required to accept religious and cultural repression in all aspects of life. Because they could never have equal status with Muslims, the jizya incentivized nominal Christians and Jews, including noblemen and elites, to convert to Islam.

Al-Andalus was governed by the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, one of four major schools of Islamic law within Sunni Islam. The Maliki school was founded by Malik ibn Anas (c. 711–795), a jurist in Medina, to prioritize the influence of the Umayyads over the Abbasids. Alongside the Hanafi, Hanbali, and Shafi’i schools, the Maliki school provides a conservative methodology for interpreting the Qur’an, and deciding practical questions of worship, family life, criminal justice, and public order.

Myth of the Andalusian Paradise

In Islamic Spain, Christians faced systematic inequalities. They were heavily taxed, prohibited from proselytizing, and faced social restrictions aimed at humiliating non-Muslims.

In his landmark book, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, historian Darío Fernández-Morera documents the “brutality,” “brute force,” and “ruthless methods” with which the Muslims subjugated the Jewish and Catholic populations of Spain. He shows how Muslims systematically sacked Catholic cities and towns, demolished their churches, confiscated their property, enslaved them, and increased their taxes “to finance the embellishment of al-Andalus.” He further documents imprisonments, forced exiles, assassinations, and racial prejudice by Muslims against Jews and Christians. He explains:

“The existence of a Muslim kingdom in Medieval Spain where different races and religions lived harmoniously in multicultural tolerance is one of today’s most widespread myths. University professors teach it. Journalists repeat it. Tourists visiting the Alhambra accept it. It has reached the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, which sings the virtues of the “pan-confessional humanism” of Andalusian Spain (July 18, 2003). The Economist echoes the belief: “Muslim rulers of the past were far more tolerant of people of other faiths than were Catholic ones (November 15, 2001)…. The problem with this belief is that it is historically unfounded, a myth. The fascinating cultural achievements of Islamic Spain cannot obscure the fact that it was never an example of peaceful convivencia.””

Christian, Jewish, and Muslim sources document how the Muslim invaders burned churches and monasteries, destroyed castles, looted treasures, burned sacred Christian books, and took Christian women as sexual slaves.

The earliest known sources that document the Moorish conquest of Spain are the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle of 741 and the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754, both of which were written in Latin and provide details on the realities of Christian life under Muslim rule.

Following are some select examples documented by Fernández-Morera and other sources, including the Spanish Arabist Francisco Javier Simonet (1829–1897), whose magisterial work about the reality of the daily life of Christians in al-Andalus was not published, even back then, for more than 30 years after it was written due to fears of offending Muslim sensibilities. His book, Historia de los mozárabes en España, was finally published in 1897, briefly before Simonet died.

• 711. Shortly after they crossed into southern Spain, Muslims boiled, in large cauldrons, the cadavers of Christians killed in battle. Christian prisoners who witnessed the atrocities became convinced that the Muslims were cannibals and promptly submitted. The Muslim invaders were ruthless in their efforts to demoralize Christians.

• 711. After Muslims conquered Córdoba, surviving Christians gathered in a church. The Muslims torched the building and everyone inside was burned alive. Other Christians in Córdoba who surrendered were beheaded.

• 711–714. Musa ibn Nusayr (c. 640–716), a blood-thirsty Arab military commander who was a key figure in the Islamic conquest of Spain, spent three years waging jihad against infidels in Spain. Musa burned any city that resisted, “crucified” the nobility, and “cut to pieces” young men and infants so that the towns surrendered.

• 797. Al-Hakam I, Emir of Córdoba, and his local governor, Amrus ibn Yusuf, organized a grand banquet in Toledo, where he beheaded 700 Christian elites. The event is known as the Jornada del Foso de Toledo (Day of the Ditch) because their bodies were dumped into a massive pit.

• 850–859. A group of 48 Christians—including monks, nuns, and laypeople—were beheaded in Córdoba, the capital of Umayyad al-Andalus. Known as the Martyrs of Córdoba, they were prosecuted under the laws of the Emirate of Córdoba for a series of offenses, including refusing to renounce their Christian faith, publicly denouncing Islam, or insulting Muhammad. The Martyrs of Córdoba continue to be symbols of religious persecution in Islamic Spain.

• 852–886. Muhammad I (823–886), the fifth Umayyad ruler of al-Andalus, ordered Catholic nuns to be thrown into a cauldron of molten lead, monks to be lashed to death, and soldiers to be impaled.

• 891. The Umayyad governor of Seville unleashed a brutal campaign of repression and persecution against Christians as well as Christian converts to Islam who maintained ties of kinship with the Christian population.

• 919. A Christian woman in Córdoba was sentenced to death for publicly saying that Jesus was God and that Mohammed was a liar.

• 926. Abd al-Rahman III, Emir of Córdoba, ordered a thirteen-year-old Christian male named Pelayo to be beheaded after he refused a homosexual encounter.

• 928. Abd al-Rahman III ordered the mortal remains of Ibn Hafsun (c.850–917), a convert to Christianity who contested Umayyad rule in Spain, to be disinterred and crucified.

• 981. Muhammad Ibn Abu Amir al-Mansour (c. 932–1002), a prominent Moorish military commander known for burning Christian cities, razed the entire city of León, in what is now northwestern Spain, and left only a tower standing as a testament to his victory. In Córdoba, he ordered all heretical books to be burned. He regularly entered into peace treaties with local Christians only to betray them when he gained the upper hand. He carried out nearly sixty jihads against Christians.

• 985. Al-Mansour sacked and burned Barcelona.

• 997. Al-Mansour destroyed the Christian shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia and ordered Christian slaves to carry the church bells over 800 kilometers to Córdoba, where the bronze was melted, turned into lamps, and hung in the Great Mosque.

• 1013. Jews were expelled from Córdoba and their wealth was confiscated.

• 1066. In a pogrom, Muslim rioters obliterated the Sephardic community in Granada.

• 1099. Muslim leaders destroyed the great church in Granada and plundered its sacred items.

• 1101. Christians fled the city of Valencia to avoid Muslim persecution.

• 1106. The Almoravids deported Christians from Málaga to Africa.

• 1126. Ali ibn Yusuf (1084–1143), Emir of the Almoravid dynasty in al-Andalus, ordered the mass deportation of Christians from Spain to North Africa, where they were forced into hard labor.

• 1135. Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Córdoba, where Muslim mobs stormed Jewish homes, plundered belongings, and killed Jewish residents.

• 1138–1170. Christians in Granada, Córdoba, and Seville were forcibly deported from al-Andalus and public Christian worship ended. Those who remained were dispossessed and martyred for their faith.

• 1148. Abd al-Mumin, the Almohad Caliph, ordered all Jews in Córdoba to either convert to Islam, leave al-Andalus, or be executed. Among those exiled was Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), a jurist, philosopher, and the foremost Jewish intellectual in medieval Europe. He was forced to leave al-Andalus in 1160. In 1164, Maimonides wrote a work titled “Epistle on Forced Conversion.” He died in Egypt in 1204. Maimonides was not a beneficiary of Andalusian tolerance.

• 1195. Averroes, an Andalusian jurist and philosopher, was banished from Spain for his attempts to integrate Islamic traditions with ancient Greek thought. Averroes, also known as Ibn Rushd, was born in Córdoba in 1126, and became universally known for his extensive commentaries on Aristotle. His work helped reintroduce Greek philosophy to Western Europe and influenced medieval Christian scholasticism. Averroes was an expert in the Maliki school of Islamic law and served as a chief judge (Qadi) in Córdoba. His books on metaphysics and philosophy were eventually condemned and publicly burned. He was exiled in 1195, the same year the Almohad Caliph Abu Yusuf won a decisive victory over the Christian forces of King Alfonso VIII at the historic Battle of Alarcos. Averroes died in Morrocco in 1198 and his body was later transferred to the family tomb in Córdoba.

• 1492. When King Boabdil of Granada capitulated to the Catholic monarchs, he included in the treatise of surrender a clause stipulating that “Your Highness will not allow Jews to have any authority over Muslims nor collect any kind of taxes from them.”

Other Examples of Moorish “Tolerance”

Fernández-Morera explained the why Muslims were required to dominate non-Muslims and why Islamic tolerance of infidels in al-Andalus was practically and theologically impossible:

“Muslims in medieval Spain considered Islam the final and most perfect form of divine revelation. They also believed that the “People of the Book”—Christians and Jews—had strayed from the teachings of their Bible in various ways that rendered them religiously inferior to Muslims, who had kept the true faith. Given this conviction of superiority, Islam in medieval Spain could hardly be said to be “tolerant” of other religions. To prevent other faiths from contesting the religious and therefore political, social, and cultural supremacy of Islam, rulers and clerics endeavored to keep every type of hegemony over the “People of the Book.””

Following are further examples of how non-Muslims in al-Andalus were discriminated against by their Muslim overlords:

• Beheading. Large-scale beheadings of Christian prisoners was a widespread practice in al-Andalus. Spanish Arabist Maribel Fierro writes, “The rulers of al-Andalus, most especially the Umayyads, carried out indiscriminate beheading of prisoners of war, and took great pains to transport the severed heads to the capital, as symbols of the extension of their power and of the submission of their enemies.”

• Blasphemy. According to the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, which was dominant in al-Andalus, infidels who insult Muhammed must be killed. Blasphemy violated the promise of protection granted to dhimmis.

• Cemeteries. In Córdoba, Christians were forbidden from walking across Muslim cemeteries because if they did they would supposedly contaminate the Muslim tombs. This resulted in the creation of separate cemeteries for Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

• Destruction of Churches. Moorish invaders desecrated or destroyed churches, looted treasures, destroyed Christian art, crosses, or icons, which they considered to be blasphemous. They transformed churches into mosques to humiliate Christians and erase signs of pre-Islamic grandeur. After Islamic invaders took control of Córdoba, for example, all churches were destroyed. Churches could be converted into mosques, but mosques could never be used as churches. Muslims loudly announced the call to prayer, but Christians could not ring their church bells.

• Diet. Muslims were not allowed to eat at the homes of Christians because Christian meals might contain forbidden foods, such as pork or garlic, or beer and wine. Muslims were required to use their own utensils for eating and drinking because anything touched by Christian infidels was considered impure.

• Dress. Christians were compelled to wear badges, belts or other distinguishing clothing that identified them as non-Muslims.

• Law. Islamic jurisprudence prescribed greater punishments for Christians than for Muslims who commit the same crimes. For instance, Muslims were not to be executed for killing a Christian, but Christians faced execution for killing a Muslim, even if the death was accidental. A Muslim was entitled to full compensation from a Christian as compensation for injury or death, but a Christian was entitled to only half.

• Music. In al-Andalus, the Maliki school of Islamic law views musical instruments and singing as haram(prohibited).

• Restrictions. Non-Muslims were prohibited from carrying weapons. They were not allowed to ride horses, only donkeys, which were to be mounted sideways so that non-Muslims could easily dismount and genuflect before Muslims. Muslims were not allowed to initiate the greeting when meeting a Christian.

• Segregation. Islamic law forbade Muslims from having Christian neighbors. This led to the creation of distinct Muslim neighborhoods, like the Muslim parallel societies that exist across Europe today.

• Sexual Relations. Muslim men were allowed to marry Christian women, but Christian men were prohibited from marrying Muslim women. The children of Muslim men with Christian women were required to be raised as Muslims. If Christian men fornicated with a Muslim woman, they were sentenced to death. Muslim men were allowed to have up to four wives. Polygamy exponentially increased the Muslim population in medieval Spain.

• Slavery. Slavery was a widespread practice in al-Andalus, and many Christians—male and female—were bought and sold at slave markets. Male slaves were often required to perform heavy labor or military service, while female slaves frequently served as concubines in Islamic harems. Spanish Arabist Celia del Moral documented how the Umayyads especially valued blond or red-haired women from France and Galicia as sexual slaves. Christian slaves were also exported to North Africa and other parts of the Muslim world. The slave market in Córdoba was one of the largest and most prominent hubs for the slave trade in medieval Europe, and in the nearby city of Seville, slaves comprised an estimated 7.5 percent of the population.

• Social Life. The Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence forbade socializing between Muslims and Christians or Jews.

• Worship. Christians were required to practice their religion indoors and under severe restrictions.

As has been shown, al-Andalus was not the multicultural paradise many progressive academics make it out to be. The Islamic overlords always considered Christians and Jews as inferior to Muslims. Non-Muslims were infidels and declared dhimmis, (protected people) if they paid a special tax called jizya. They were infidels (an English word used to translate the Arabic term kafir, which broadly refers to anyone who does not accept the Islamic faith).

Over time, most of the native inhabitants of al-Andalus either fled to northern Spain, converted to Islam, or became dhimmis. As a result, many Christian communities eventually ceased to exist as distinct religious entities.

The Re-Islamization of Spain

Modern Spain appears to have learned little from its former history as the only Islamic state in Western Europe. Today, Muslim immigrants are pouring into the country at breakneck speed, and nothing is being done to halt the demographic and cultural transformation of the country that the 800-year Reconquest of Spain worked so hard to stop.

In 1975, there were only 2,277 Moroccan residents in Spain, according to data from the Moroccan Consulate in Madrid. Fifty years later, that number has increased to 1.2 million, an increase of 53,000 percent.

Overall, there are now an estimated 2.5 million Muslims in Spain (of course, there is no way of knowing exactly how many illegal Muslim immigrants are currently present in Spain), roughly five percent of the total population, according to the March 2026 study, “Demograpy of Islam in Spain.” Of this group, approximately 1.8 million are first-generation immigrants, and 680,000 were born in Spain to at least one Muslim parent.

According to the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE), eleven percent of babies born in Spain in 2024 had at least one Muslim parent.

The Muslim population is unevenly distributed across Spain. In absolute terms, the largest Muslim populations in Spain are concentrated in Catalonia, Andalusia, and the Valencian Community. In relative terms, Murcia, Catalonia, and La Rioja stand out. In these three regions, 19 percent of those born in 2024 had at least one Muslim parent. By province, this percentage rose to 28 percent in Almería, 27 percent in Girona, 25 percent in Lleida, 23 percent in Tarragona, and 22 in Álava.

Foreign-born Muslims now represent around eight percent of men aged 20 to 44 in Spain. This age group is demographically relevant because it accounts for a large proportion of births. In some provinces this this percentage is far higher: Almería (24 percent), Lleida (22 percent), Girona (percent), Tarragona (percent), Murcia (15 percent), and Huesca, Teruel, and Huelva (13 percent).

Approximately 85 percent of first-generation Muslim immigrants come from Africa, and nearly 65 percent were born in Morocco. After Morocco, the countries of origin with the largest Muslim populations are: Pakistan, Senegal, Algeria, Mali, Gambia, and Bangladesh.

The study highlighted that the fertility rate of Muslim women in Spain is far higher than that of Spanish women and non-Muslim immigrants. Statistics show that Muslims in Spain have far higher rates of unemployment, poverty, and crime, than non-Muslims.

Mass migration from the Muslim world continues to cast a spotlight on the problem of Islamic extremism in Catalonia (of which Barcelona is the capital), which has the largest Muslim population in Spain. The region is home to an estimated 700,000 Muslims, or roughly ten percent of the total Catalan population.

Catalonia, controlled for decades by radical separatists who seek independence from Spain, has deliberately imported hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants due to reasons of linguistics. Immigrants from Latin America speak Spanish, but in an effort to increase the number of speakers of Catalan, Muslim immigrants are preferred because they do not speak Spanish and are thus more likely to learn Catalan rather than Spanish.

The result of this linguistic policy has had devastating results. According to leaked diplomatic cables from the U.S. Embassy in Madrid, Catalonia has become a “prime base of operations” Islamic terrorists and a “international magnet for terrorist recruiters.” One cable warned that the influx of large numbers of North African immigrants “is changing the profile of Spain-based Islamic extremists, creating a large pool of young, alienated men available for recruitment.”

In his book Jihadism: The Radical Islamic Threat to Catalonia, the Catalan terrorism analyst Jofre Montoto estimated that at least ten precent of the Muslims in Catalonia are “radicals” who are hardcore believers in the “doctrine of jihadism.” He described Catalonia, which constitutes an important transit point and destination for migration flows, as the “Mediterranean corridor of jihadism.”

The July 2026 migrant invasion of Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in northern Africa, where more than 70,000 people illegally crossed the border into Spain, shows that Muslim migration into Spain continues at a relentless pace and is unstoppable unless Spanish authorities take effective measures to stop the onslaught. Strangely, no mainstream political party in Spain, left or right, seems ready to stop the permanent Islamization of Spain, one of the oldest countries in Europe.

Conclusion

Five centuries after Spanish monarchs succeeded in ousting the Islamic presence in Spain, one of the largest countries in Christendom, millions of immigrants from the Muslim world are now arriving unabated. Parallel societies are proliferating, Crime rates are skyrocketing and Spanish women and girls increasingly are the victims of sexual attacks. Muslims, rather than assimilating are demanding special privileges. Any yet, the general population overwhelmingly appears to believe the false narrative that Spain and the rest of Europe benefits from mass migration from the Muslim world—the uncontrolled influx of people who are culturally alien and non-integratable.

The historian Fernández-Morera concludes:

“By any objective standards…Islamic Spain was not a model of multicultural harmony. Andalusia was beset by religious, political, and racial conflicts controlled in the best of times only by the application of tyrannical force. Its achievements are inseparable from its turmoil….

“Extolling al-Andalus offers the double advantage of surreptitiously favoring multiculturalism and deprecating Christianity, which is one of the foundations of Western civilization. This mechanism is not unlike that in the mind of those who dislike Western culture intensely, but who with the fall of Communism find themselves without any clear alternative and so grab Islam as a castaway grabs anything that floats. So anyone who dislikes Western culture or Christianity—for any reason, be it religious, political, or cultural—goes on happily pointing out, regardless of the facts, how bad Catholic Spain was when compared to the Muslim paradise.”

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Despite the gravity of the hate speech directed at non-Muslims in what is called the Islamic world, and despite the fact that the clerics of Islam scorn all religions, especially Judaism and Christianity, as naturally as they breathe, the real danger lies in the pairing of takfir (declaring others infidels) and jihad against the infidels (the kuffar).

Some try to simplify the matter and downplay the gravity of the term takfir by saying that all the Abrahamic religions declare one another infidels.¹ This is a grave mistake, because the term kafir exists only in Islam, and not in the hundreds of other religions in the world. In Christianity there are believers and non-believers, and no earthly punishment, discrimination or persecution follows for the non-believer. In Judaism there is the Jew and the Gentile, and the rules are about Jews not mixing with the Gentiles. This was to isolate them from the evil of the nations until the Messiah comes, and God promised to defend them and protect them from the nations’ attacks.

In Islam the matter is different. Anyone who does not believe in the message of Islam’s prophet Muhammad is a kafir, and anyone who is not a Muslim monotheist is a kafir. Even denying any part of Islam, as the Sheikh of al-Azhar, Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb, says, is kufr. Kufr in Islam is disbelief in Allah and His Messenger, as set out in the Islamic tradition. According to the Syrian writer Fayez Ali Sahlab in his book Takfir and Counter-Takfir, 524 verses of the Qur’an contain the word kufr: disbelief in Allah, in Allah’s signs, in Allah’s blessings, in the Messenger, in the Day of Resurrection, in the Qur’an, in part of the Book, in Allah and His angels and messengers and the Last Day, and the kufr of lying and fabricating against Allah.

According to the website al-Durar al-Saniyya, 2,180 hadiths of Muhammad refer to kufr, kafir, kafirin and kuffar. On top of that there are tens of thousands of fatwas and sayings of jurists affirming the kufr of everyone who is not a Muslim.

Kufr extends to anyone who differs from the thought of Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jama’a (the Sunnis), even a Muslim. In 1991 the Mufti of Egypt, Dr. Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, issued a fatwa on the Druze and Ismaili sects. It said they have the status of neither People of the Book nor polytheists. Eating their food is not permitted. Muslims may kill them wherever they are found. They are apostate heretics (zanadiqa) whose repentance is not accepted. Their boys must be killed so they do not mislead others, and it is forbidden to sleep in their houses or walk with them².

There are of course many fatwas on the apostasy, heresy, kufr and atheism of the Baha’is. A fatwa of the Islamic Research Academy issued in December 2003 described Baha’ism as “a kind of deadly intellectual epidemic, which the state must mobilize all its resources to combat and eradicate.” Many fatwas and court rulings against the Baha’is in Egypt were collected by Dr. Farag Foda in one of his studies³. Among Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jama’a it even reaches the point of declaring someone who abandons prayer a kafir.

We are speaking here of takfir, which is vastly graver than the charge of contempt. According to explicit verses in the Qur’an, the kuffar are: those who have gone astray, wrongdoers, enemies of Allah, the worst of beasts (that is, the vilest of animals), more astray than cattle, the worst of creation, people who do not understand, a clear enemy to the Muslims, and Allah is an enemy to the kafirin⁴.

Imagine describing a person as the enemy of Allah, the enemy of Islam and the enemy of the Muslims. Fighting him then becomes justified, and for many jurists obligatory. That is why Islamic jurisprudence holds that fighting the kuffar is a duty on every Muslim who is an adult, sane and mature.

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali says in his book al-Iqtisad fi al-I’tiqad (Moderation in Belief): “The settled principle is that whoever denies the message of Muhammad is a kafir, that is, abiding in the Fire after death, and his blood and property are permitted in this life.” In Faysal al-Tafriqa bayna al-Islam wa al-Zandaqa (The Decisive Criterion Between Islam and Heresy), al-Ghazali also says: “Kufr is to deny the Messenger in anything he brought, and faith is to affirm him in everything he brought. Kufr is a legal ruling like the ruling on slavery. Its penalty is the licitness of blood and abiding in the Fire, and its basis is legal, by text or by analogy to a text.”

Kufr in Islam is therefore a legal status and a legal ruling, an attribute and an accusation carrying severe penalties, the gravest of which is making a person’s blood licit. Takfir carries a death warrant for whoever Muslims classify as kuffar. As the writer Hamed Abdel-Samad says, 25 Qur’anic verses call for fighting the kuffar⁵.

Jihad is the legal definition and method of fighting the kuffar. It may be defense of Muslim land. It may be fighting the kuffar and polytheists until they allow Islam to be spread by force, or removing polytheism (shirk) by force from every country in the world. Put plainly, fighting non-Muslims across the whole world is a legal duty. Islam never knows peace, and the Qur’an calls for peace only in the case of defeat: “So do not weaken and call for peace while you are superior” (Muhammad 35). That is why the Nobel-winning writer Naipaul, described as Indian, said that if Muslims have power and are able to use it, they will not hesitate to use it, and for that reason described Islam as a “force for conquest.”

As for the People of the Book (Jews and Christians), the Egyptian sheikh Muhammad Hassan says there is no disagreement among Muslims anywhere in the world about their kufr. There is a vast number of fatwas declaring them kuffar, and still more accusing them of shirk, such as the fatwa of the late Sheikh of al-Azhar, Gad al-Haq Ali Gad al-Haq⁶.

Search the internet under “the kufr of the Jews and Christians” and you find a consensus among senior sheikhs on their kufr, and even on the kufr of whoever does not believe in their kufr. Categorical headlines meet you: “The Decisive Statement on the Kufr of the People of the Book,” “The Evidence and Proofs That Jews and Christians Are Polytheists,” “The Kufr of Jews and Christians Is Confirmed by the Consensus of Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jama’a,” “The Consensus of the Muslims on the Kufr of the Christians,” “Whoever Doubts the Kufr of Jews and Christians Is a Kafir.” From Abu Hamid al-Ghazali to Ibn Taymiyya to Sayyid Qutb to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab to Ibn Baz to Ibn Uthaymin, all agree on the kufr and shirk of the People of the Book, Jews and Christians, and on fighting them.

Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, goes further and speaks of “the obligation to fight the People of the Book, and that Allah multiplies the reward of whoever fights them.”⁷ Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, of course, does not let the matter pass without a fatwa. He says on the IslamOnline site: “The kufr of the Jews and Christians is among the clearest of the clear for any Muslim who has an atom of knowledge of Islam.”⁸ Sheikh Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Khaliq says in his book The Ruling on Peace and Reconciliation Treaties with the Jews: “The basic principle in the relationship between Muslims and the kuffar is enmity and war, because of the saying of Allah the Most High: ‘And fight them until there is no fitnah and the religion, all of it, is for Allah’ [8:39].” He adds: “Whoever thinks that war and enmity between Muslims and Jews will cease is a denier of Allah’s promise and His religion, and whoever works to remove this enmity and hatred between Muslims and Jews is a kafir in Allah, glory be to Him.”

Brother Rachid’s program Bold Question devoted an entire episode to explaining the danger of declaring non-Muslims kuffar. It relayed statements by the Sheikh of al-Azhar, Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb, in which he explicitly acknowledges the kufr of the Jews and Christians. The well-known Egyptian sheikh Yasser Borhami explained that “fighting the kafir is a divine command, except for the mu’ahid among them,⁹ and the covenant is either a covenant of dhimma, a covenant of truce, or a covenant of safe-conduct.” In other words, fighting most of humanity is an Islamic duty.¹⁰

Yes, terrorism begins with classifying people as Muslim or kafir. It then escalates from the verses of fighting to the fatal bullet, the poisoned dagger or the severing of necks. It is the racism that permits killing others, killing those who, in the eyes of the jurists of Islamic fiqh, do not deserve to be sound human beings because they do not resemble them in belief.¹¹

There is an entire body of jurisprudence called the fiqh of the dhimmis, in addition to the fiqh of a Muslim’s dealings with the kuffar and the polytheists. Both establish a special status for Christians and Jews. They pay the jizya “while they are subdued.” A non-Muslim may not hold authority over a Muslim. Non-Muslims may be employed only in cases of extreme necessity. The penalty for slander is not applied to a Muslim who slanders a dhimmi or a kafir. The blood money of a dhimmi is half that of a Muslim. A believer is not killed for a kafir, even if the killer is a Muslim slave and the victim a free dhimmi. By the consensus of the jurists the testimony of a dhimmi is not accepted, except in rare, specified cases. A kafir does not inherit from a Muslim. The matter extends even to congratulations and heartfelt affection, which a Muslim is forbidden to show a non-Muslim.

This means that classifying a person as a kafir in Islam has consequences that run from insult to discrimination to racism to terrorism, killing and permanent war. At the same time Muslims complain about mere critical opinions of Islam, which they treat as contempt, and they want international sanctions on anyone who comes near their religion with criticism. A difference of opinion is, to them, a crime, while racism, terrorism, killing and bloodshed are lawful and sacred violence in the fiqh of Islam. According to the fiqh of loyalty and disavowal (al-wala’ wal-bara’), the house of Islam and the house of war, and the Muslim and the kafir, they are in a state of permanent war with the world. Meanwhile they complain, scream, destroy and kill because someone in some part of the globe voiced a mere opinion about their religion and their prophet.

When Muslim jurists speak of the “controls of takfir,” they mean the controls and restrictions on declaring a Muslim a kafir. Non-Muslims are kuffar and polytheists according to clear Qur’anic verses, according to the hadiths of Muhammad, and according to the opinions and consensus of Muslim jurists across the ages.¹²

The crime of contempt of religions in Islamic countries is nothing but one of the effects of this takfir, which the Organization of the Islamic Conference is seeking to export to the international level. According to the U.S. religious freedom report for 2008, “the introduction of the concept of defamation into the Human Rights Council in Geneva and the UN General Assembly in New York is in reality nothing but an attempt to export the laws of takfir existing in many Islamic countries to the international level.”

Hatred, takfir of non-Muslims, and from them fighting and jihad against non-Muslims, are principal components of Islamic sharia. Takfir and jihad are the most dangerous of the Muslims’ doctrines, so much so that Islamic jurists consider jihad the sixth pillar of Islam.

The backbone of Islam is jihad and fighting, and the most important cause of jihad is takfir. Takfir is the cornerstone of jihad, jihad is the cornerstone of Islam, and jihad in turn is the cornerstone of international terrorism. There are 70 verses in the Qur’an that call for jihad.

The British researcher Bill Warner says that takfir in Islam has not ceased for a single moment in the whole of Islamic history, and that takfir and jihad caused the killing of 270 million people throughout history, not counting the wounded and the male and female slaves. He says Islam has no achievements in history except through takfir, jihad and raids, since Islam does not flourish without raids, as the well-known historian Bernard Lewis wrote.

Jihad is at once defensive and offensive. According to Islam’s jurists offensive jihad is the more important, because it removes kufr and shirk from the earth, as the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, Abul A’la Maududi, said. The Egyptian Sayyid Qutb says that jihad against the kuffar cannot be anything but offensive.

Takfir is a racist classification, followed by a duty to hate the kuffar, to be hostile to them, and then to fight them. By extension, takfir is a threat to the most important human right, the right to life. Takfir is a crime against humanity. Jihad is not a right but aggression, assault and terrorism in international law. Killing the apostate is not an Islamic right but a crime against human life. The call to hatred is not religion but a racist crime.

Takfir and jihad are without doubt a war on the contemporary world, especially the West. America, the West and the international community must therefore:

• Completely prevent the application of Islamic sharia outside Islamic countries

• Criminalize Islamic takfir

• Criminalize Islamic jihad

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References

1. Muhammad Hassan al-Munir, Dialogue by Killing: The Massacres of Fiqh and the Jurists, p. 47.

2. Farag Foda, “Minorities and Human Rights in Egypt,” a study issued by the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, in the book Freedom of Opinion and Expression: Restrictions and Problems, pp. 200–201.

3. Qur’anic verses describing the kuffar:

   • “Indeed, those who disbelieved and averted [others] from the way of Allah have certainly gone far astray.” [An-Nisa 167]

   • “And the disbelievers are the wrongdoers.” [al-Baqarah 245 in the original, apparently 2:254]

   • “O you who have believed, do not take My enemy and your enemy as allies, extending to them affection while they have disbelieved in what came to you of the truth.” [al-Mumtahanah 1]

   • “Whoever is an enemy to Allah and His angels and His messengers and Gabriel and Michael, then indeed, Allah is an enemy to the disbelievers.” [al-Baqarah 98]

   • “Indeed, the worst of living creatures in the sight of Allah are those who have disbelieved, and they will not [ever] believe.” [al-Anfal 55]

   • “Or do you think that most of them hear or reason? They are not except like livestock. Rather, they are more astray in [their] way.” [al-Furqan 44]

   • “Indeed, they who disbelieved among the People of the Scripture and the polytheists will be in the fire of Hell, abiding eternally therein. Those are the worst of creatures.” [al-Bayyinah 6]

   • “That is because they believed, then disbelieved, so their hearts were sealed, and they do not understand.” [al-Munafiqun 3]

   • “And when you travel throughout the land, there is no blame upon you for shortening the prayer if you fear that those who disbelieve may attack you. Indeed, the disbelievers are ever to you a clear enemy.” [an-Nisa 101]

4. Hamed Abdel-Samad, debate on German television. https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=769094739803151

5. Said al-Ashmawy, fatwa and article, al-Ahali newspaper, April 10, 1996.

6. Hasan al-Banna, Collected Letters, al-Matba’a al-Shar’iyya, p. 280.

7. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, IslamOnline website, “A Statement of the Truth of the Kufr of the People of the Book and Their Resentment of the Muslims.”

8. A mu’ahid (plural mu’ahidun) is a non-Muslim who is protected by a covenant (‘ahd) with Muslims, so he can’t legitimately be fought.

9. For more, see Bold Question episode no. 238,

1. and episode no. 415, “The Danger of Takfir,” a dialogue between Brother Rachid and Magdy Khalil,

2. Muhammad Hassan al-Munir, previous reference, p. 63.

3. Qur’anic verses describing Jews and Christians as kuffar and polytheists:

   • “Say, ‘O People of the Scripture, come to a word that is equitable between us and you: that we will not worship except Allah and not associate anything with Him and not take one another as lords instead of Allah.’ But if they turn away, then say, ‘Bear witness that we are Muslims.’” [Al Imran 64]

   • “They have certainly disbelieved who say that Allah is the Messiah, the son of Mary, while the Messiah has said, ‘O Children of Israel, worship Allah, my Lord and your Lord.’ Indeed, he who associates others with Allah, Allah has forbidden him Paradise, and his refuge is the Fire. And there are not for the wrongdoers any helpers.” [al-Ma’idah 72]

   • “They have certainly disbelieved who say that Allah is the third of three. And there is no god except one God. And if they do not desist from what they are saying, there will surely afflict the disbelievers among them a painful punishment.” [al-Ma’idah 73]

   • “The Jews say, ‘Ezra is the son of Allah’; and the Christians say, ‘The Messiah is the son of Allah.’ That is their statement from their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before. May Allah destroy them; how are they deluded?” [at-Tawbah 30]

   • “They have taken their scholars and monks as lords besides Allah, and [also] the Messiah, the son of Mary. And they were not commanded except to worship one God; there is no deity except Him. Exalted is He above whatever they associate with Him.” [at-Tawbah 31]

   • “O you who have believed, indeed the polytheists are unclean, so let them not approach al-Masjid al-Haram after this, their [final] year. And if you fear privation, Allah will enrich you from His bounty if He wills. Indeed, Allah is Knowing and Wise.” [at-Tawbah 28]

Noor (not her real name) says she figured it out in seventh grade. Her Islamic studies class had just covered Muhammad’s “glorious victory” at Khaybar. His army took the Jewish fortresses one by one. According to Ibn Ishaq, his men then tortured Kinanah, the chieftain of one of the clans, to make him reveal where the treasure was hidden. When they found it, Kinanah was beheaded.

Kinanah had just married a seventeen-year-old named Safiyyah, whose clan Muhammad had earlier exiled from Medina. Muhammad had also had her father killed. Now he took her as part of his share of the spoils and told her that if she accepted Islam, he would free her and make her freedom her bride-price. According to the Islamic resources she told him of a dream in which a bright moon fell into her lap, took it as a sign, and became one of his wives.

Noor rolled her eyes. “He killed her father, tortured and killed her husband, conquered her people, and now all of a sudden she’s in love with him?” She said it out loud, in front of the whole class. The teacher made an example of her. Her classmates shunned her. She was branded murtada, apostate, and she wore the label with her head up. She has not thought of herself as a believing Muslim since.

Ahmed (also not his real name) was in ninth grade at an Al-Azhar school in Egypt. He had been raised never to say Muhammad’s name without the full formula, sala Allah aleihi wa selam. But sala is the ritual prayer Muslims perform five times a day, with its bowing and prostrations, and the phrase can be read to mean that Allah prays for Muhammad. Ahmed tried to picture it. Did Allah bow toward Mecca? Did he wash first? Whom was he praying to? Whatever answer the scholars have, his teacher didn’t give it. When Ahmed left the formula off, the teacher corrected him and waited for him to repeat it. Ahmed asked his questions out loud instead.

He was beaten. The teacher told Ahmed’s parents he was a mulhed, an atheist, which in that community was a verdict as much as an insult. Ahmed says he would have been expelled if his father hadn’t been influential. The school made an example of him instead and treated him as an outcast, so that no other student would ask what a teacher couldn’t answer.

This is how it is done across the Muslim world. Teachers shame children into silence and tell each one that his private doubts come from Satan and must be pushed away. When no classmate ever voices a doubt, every child concludes he is the only one who has them. The lesson is reinforced by the insistence that nobody ever leaves Islam.

A society trained not to ask questions is defenseless against anyone who arrives with answers from the Qur’an. ISIS tells young men it is their religious duty to fight in Allah’s cause, killing and being killed (9:111). The Muslim Brotherhood and Tablighi Jamaat grow without challenge, and their preachers point to the Qur’an’s repeated promise that Islam will prevail over every other religion (9:33, 48:28, 61:9). The whole world, they say, will one day live under sharia. Allah wills it, so it is inevitable.

The West has its own masses who don’t ask. In November 2025 Washington received Syria’s Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former al-Qaeda commander known as al-Julani, at the White House, days after striking him from its terrorism blacklist. In Britain, a man who burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in 2025 was convicted of a religiously aggravated public-order offense, while the man who slashed at him with a knife got a 20-week sentence, suspended for eighteen months. In the West anyone who checks whether sharia calls for the subjugation of non-Muslims, as the sources make plain, risks being called a racist or an Islamophobe.

Through the internet, Muslims everywhere, including in the most repressive countries, are finding out that they are not the only ones with doubts. They look further and find holes in the story they were told.

The perfectly preserved Qur’an. Muslims from Indonesia to Morocco have been taught that the Qur’an’s greatest miracle is its perfect preservation: not one letter changed in fourteen centuries. Then Hatun Tash, a Turkish-born former Muslim turned Christian preacher, began appearing with Dr. Jay Smith at Speakers’ Corner in London, showing passers-by that there is not one Arabic Qur’an but many. The tradition recognizes ten canonical readings, each with two transmissions, twenty in all. Hafs, used across most of the Muslim world, and Warsh, used across much of North and West Africa, differ in many places. In 17:102, Hafs has Moses tell Pharaoh “you knew,” while the reading of al-Kisa’i has him say “I knew.” If the book was dictated word for word, why does the dictation vary? Islamic scholarship holds that all the canonical readings were revealed, so the variants don’t trouble the scholars. They trouble the believers who were promised not one letter. The videos went viral. Hatun was stabbed at Speakers’ Corner in 2021 and kept going back.

The Man Himself. Ex-Muslims regularly say that nothing pushed them through it harder than what the sources record about Muhammad himself. Islamic sources say he married Aisha when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was nine (Sahih al-Bukhari 5158). He was in his fifties. After the battle of Hunayn, Sahih Muslim 1456a reports, his men hesitated to have sex with captive women because the women’s husbands were still alive among the enemy. Verse 4:24 was revealed, setting aside the prohibition on married women for “those whom your right hands possess,” and the women became lawful to the fighters once their waiting period ended. That is the rape of prisoners of war, sanctioned by revelation.

Two forces are now in direct competition. On one side, the front line of Islam marches on with unwavering determination toward its goal: one sharia to rule everyone, everywhere. On the other, its rear guard disintegrates as more and more Muslims find the holes in the story.

If the proponents of sharia reach critical mass and get the upper hand, they will crush all dissent, and freedom will dissipate. If vocal ex-Muslims reach critical mass, Islam will be exposed as an object of ridicule, its victim narrative dismissed and its ambitions snuffed out, and freedom will be preserved.

Which will it be?

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On October 7th, 2023, at 6:29 a.m., the first rocket barrage began as Hamas-led attackers breached the border and entered Israel. Times of Israel reported a channel 12 estimate, based on data from the IDF’s Gaza Division, that approximately 6,000 Hamas and their Palestinian supporters entered Israel that day, including 3,800 trained and armed Hamas terrorists from the Nukhba force who brutally murdered Israeli civilians in their homes and at the Nova music festival, and abducted hostages to Gaza. According to the same report, some 1,000 terrorists inside Gaza were responsible for firing rockets at Israel on that day, bringing the total number of Palestinians involved in the attack to 7,000. The scale of the barrage was staggering, “[some] 5,000 rockets were fired at Israel that day, 3,000 of them in the first four hours of the onslaught.”

The Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) reported that approximately 1200 people, mostly civilians were killed and more than 251 were taken hostage. Yet, even these staggering numbers and the barbarity shown that day cannot convey the horror of October 7th. The loss and the brutality are beyond what statistics or words can ever capture or convey. We once again were “in the presence of a crime without a name.”

In the wake of that devastation, a question rose within me. Where was God?

I carried that question with me on one unforgettable afternoon in July 2024 as I walked through the silent grounds of Kibbutz Nir Oz. I could hear bombs exploding in the distance in Gaza. My guide had to tend to an urgent matter, and I was finally alone and I preferred it that way. I wanted to be alone with the birds chirping still over the broken bricks and charred walls; alone to whisper a prayer, shed a tear, and honor those who were no longer there.

Outside some homes, the sukkot still stood. I approached one, its structure was partly damaged and torn cloth fluttered in the air. A mild breeze went through the torn fabric and caressed my face. I was shaken; I felt the anguish of those whose lives had been shattered pass through me.

On a blackened wall hung pictures of a family; a mother, a father, and their three children. They may have been celebrating Simchat Torah the night before they were mercilessly murdered. With every footstep, the ground seemed to tremble beneath me, as if the earth itself still held within it the pain of that frightful day. Later, I learned their names and their stories. “Tamar Kedem Siman Tov, 35, her husband Yonatan ‘Johnny’ Siman Tov, 36, their 5.5-year-old twin daughters, Shahar and Arbel, and son Omer, 2, were all murdered by Hamas terrorists in their home in Kibbutz Nir Oz on October 7.” The Siman family was remembered as delightful and loving; their lives was cut short far too soon.

A month later, Tamar’s mother wrote: “‘Tamar, John, Arbeli, Shahar and Omriko, our beloved. The world has seen only your names written on my skin, but I want the world to know what a shining and huge light you were for us. In this world and the world to come. I love you my angels and fairies. Forever and ever you will light our world.’”

As I approached the other homes, I paused out of respect. I imagined the ordinary lives interrupted within them, their traces still visible to the world; tea flasks, broken breakfast cups, burnt cooking devices, and shoes charred to a crisp. Outside the Bibas family’s house; the children’s toys were scattered on their front lawn.

I do not need to explain what happened there. I can only bear witness to what I felt as I walked through the silence.

I could not walk away from Nir Oz before asking God: “Where were You in these homes? Did You see parents trying to protect the children who were set ablaze before their very eyes? Did You hear a mother’s shriek? Did You feel a father’s horror? Were You there or were they alone?

As I left Nir Oz, the question I carried with me has led me to the Book of Job. His story is important here not because it explains or justifies suffering, rather it helps us better understand that grief cannot be easily explained. Job brought his anguish directly to God. This act and his example illustrate that amidst despair, we must approach our Father and question Him. Job’s story of loss leaves us with lament, moral questioning, and the courage to speak honestly before God. But this does not settle the question I carried from Nir Oz, Was God present in their suffering? That question leads me to the Jewish concept of the Shekhinah.

In the Bible, God has promised to be with the one who suffers, and in turn, the believer naturally longs to experience God’s presence and nearness in times of pain and sorrow. This promise is stated in Isaiah 57:15, “For thus said the One who high aloft forever dwells, whose name is holy: I dwell on high, in holiness; yet with the contrite and the lowly in spirit, reviving the spirit of the lowly, reviving the hearts of the contrite.” The Jewish tradition offers us insight into God’s presence among His suffering children through the Shekhinah, a term derived from the Hebrew root meaning “to dwell.” Although the name Shekhinah does not appear in the Torah, it is frequently mentioned as the indwelling presence of God, the Ruach (spirit) within every human being. There are numerous verses in the Bible that attest to the presence of God among His people; Genesis 46:4 states: “I will go down with you into Egypt,” and Isaiah 43:14 says, “For your sake I was sent to Babylon.” Psalm 22 begins with the anguished words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” same words uttered by Jesus on the cross.

Scripture does not erase that cry of distress, and these texts do not give reason to the suffering, but they give the afflicted words with which to cry out and insist that their suffering is seen and heard by their Father.

In the confines of the tunnels beneath Gaza, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, reportedly comforted his fellow hostages with repeating a line he had read in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, “‘He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.’” Or Levy, who had been held alongside Hersh, later told the world that Hersh shared these words with fellow hostages.

I do not know whether Hersh ever wondered where God was or whether he believed God suffered along with him and his fellow hostages. I cannot know what truly sustained him. I only know what Or Levy later recounted, which explains how Hersh offered the other hostages a way to hold on to hope.

The theological tension remains. Some traditions insist that God, being beyond human limits, cannot suffer as humans do. Jewish tradition states that the Shekhinah followed Her people into exile, and Christian theology, in its distinct language, speaks of God’s participation in human suffering through Christ. These are very specific and distinctive ways of addressing God’s nearness to His creation. However, neither explains tragedies unfolding across the globe or the enduring human suffering.

The question I carried from Nir Oz remains; Was God with them, and what does that presence mean when no rescue ever came?

Three years after the tragedy of October 7th, an ethical responsibility continues to be placed upon us. In Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 1:18, we read “Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel used to say: ‘On three things does the world stand: on justice, on truth, and on peace, as it is said: ‘execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates.’ (Zechariah 8:16).” This teaching implicates us to remain committed to the truth, to seek the truth that seeks us.

We will never fully comprehend the savagery committed on October 7th or the suffering inflicted on the innocent. To acknowledge this is not to walk away and become indifferent, but to approach the victim stories with honor and humility. Job’s protest, the Indwelling presence of the Divine, the Christian witness to the Cross, Frankl’s words, and Hersh’s resolve and message of hope do not explain or justify human suffering. They leave us with a tremendous responsibility; to remember the victims, to stand with the survivors, and to tell the truth about October 7^th. Even from the depths of the silence shrouding Nir Oz, God cries out to us, as He cried out to the first human being, “Where are you?” My answer is, Hineni, Here I Am: To remember and to bear witness.

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Three years have passed since October 7, 2023, when Hamas poured out of Gaza and unleashed the most brutal massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Entire families were butchered, women raped and paraded through the streets. Western journalists and politicians called it “unprecedented,” as if they were seeing something entirely new. But for Jews, and for anyone who has studied Islamic history, it was not new at all. It was a repetition, a reenactment. It was the same jihad that has been carried out against them for fourteen centuries.

When Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD, Medina was home not only to pagan Arab tribes but also to Jewish clans who had lived there for centuries, among them the Banu Qurayza. Muhammad and his followers later surrounded their strongholds for nearly a month. The Jews were cut off from food and water and subjected to constant psychological pressure. According to Islamic historian Ibn Ishaq, they sought terms of peace, hoping to be treated like the Banu Nadir, another Jewish tribe Muhammad had previously expelled from Medina.

The Jews of Banu Qurayza agreed to let Sa‘d ibn Mu‘adh, a companion of Muhammad, decide their fate. They thought Sa‘d would be merciful in his judgment, since his tribe had been allied with theirs before Muhammad’s arrival. But Muhammad made sure that Sa‘d’s judgment was brutal: all adult men were to be executed, the women and children enslaved, and the property divided as spoils.

One by one, the men of Banu Qurayza, estimated to number between 600 and 900, were brought out, bound and executed. Boys on the threshold of puberty were inspected to determine whether they had grown pubic hair. If they had, they were classified as men and beheaded. If not, they were spared, only to be sold into slavery.

The massacre of Banu Qurayza was not simply an episode in tribal warfare. If it had been, it might have faded into obscurity like countless other clashes in Arabia’s tribal past. Instead, it became enshrined in the very core of Islamic memory as a model of how to deal with Jews and other non-Muslims who resist Islamic supremacy.

Muhammad declared that Sa‘d ibn Mu‘adh’s ruling was not merely his personal judgment, but the judgment of Allah himself. “You have judged with the judgment of Allah from above the seven heavens,” Islamic records him as saying. This elevated what would otherwise be a brutal act of vengeance into a timeless precedent, sanctifying violence and making it a religious template. From this moment onward, jihad against Jews and other non-Muslims became institutionalized. The Qur’an in Surah 33:26–27 explicitly commemorates the slaughter of the Qurayza in a celebratory passage that sanctifies terror, killing, captivity, and confiscation as acts of divine favor.

“And He brought down those who supported them among the People of the Book from their fortresses and cast terror into their hearts. A group you killed, and you took captive a group. And He caused you to inherit their lands and their homes and their wealth, and a land you have not trodden. And Allah is over all things competent.”

After Banu Qurayza, Muhammad turned his sights on the Jewish oasis of Khaybar, north of Medina. Khaybar was fertile, wealthy, and strategically important. In 628 AD, Muhammad’s forces besieged the oasis. The Jews resisted but were eventually overwhelmed. Many were killed, their women taken as slaves. Muhammad personally took a woman named Safiyya bint Huyayy, whose father, husband, and male relatives had just been executed, as his concubine, and had sex with her the same day.

In an authentic saying, Muhammad declared: “I swear by Allah that I will expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula.”

Later, when Muslims controlled the entire region of North Africa and the Middle East, Jews were tolerated under the humiliating conditions of dhimmi status: second-class subjects required to pay the jizya tax “with willing submission and feeling themselves subdued” (Qur’an 9:29). For centuries, Jews could live in Muslim lands so long as they accepted public humiliation: distinctive clothing, prohibitions on carrying weapons, restrictions on building synagogues, and constant reminders of their inferiority. Whenever Jews stepped outside those boundaries, they risked massacre.

In Granada in 1066, a Muslim mob killed the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred the city’s Jews; the traditional estimate puts the dead at roughly 4,000. In Morocco, Jews were forced into segregated quarters known as mellahs. In Mashhad in 1839, the Allahdad pogrom forced the Jewish community to convert to Islam, leaving many survivors to practice Judaism secretly, afraid of exposure. In Safed in 1834, the Jewish quarter endured thirty-three days of pillage and persecution. In Hebron in 1929, 67 Jews were butchered; that same year, another massacre struck Safed.

These Jews were not being attacked by people protesting an Israeli government that did not yet exist. Their suffering belongs to a history of persecution that cannot be explained away by invoking the occupation, settlements or Netanyahu. Anyone who claims that anti-Jewish violence began with Israel must first account for the Jews murdered, dispossessed and forced to abandon their faith long before its establishment.

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Once upon a time, in the land of la dolce vita, Catholic infidels resisted Muslim invaders by mocking their prophet Muhammad à la Charlie Hebdo. The Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna houses a king-sized fresco of Muhammad. Painted by Giovanni da Modena (ca. 1410), it portrays the prophet of Islam in hell. The painter positions Muhammad to the right of Lucifer, depicting him as an old man, naked and tortured by a demon while lying on a rock.

Modena got his inspiration from Dante’s Divine Comedy, which consigns Muhammad to the ninth circle of Hell. In Canto 28 of Dante’s Inferno, Muhammad’s body is split from end to end. His entrails dangle out amid excrement. Dante lets his pen rip when rhapsodizing on the Prophet:

Between his legs his guts spilled out, with the heart and other vital parts, and the dirty sack that turns to shit whatever the mouth gulps down.

Not afflicted by historical amnesia, the poet and painter evoked the memory of the man whose followers had ravaged the Italian peninsula from 652, just 20 years after Mohammad’s death, starting with a raid on Sicily. Muslims frequently “plundered” Sicily and Sardinia from 704. In 752-753, both islands paid jizya. Sicily’s capital, Palermo, fell in 831. Jihadis stepped up attacks on Naples, Calabria, Capua, Taranto, Bari, Benevento, and other Italian territories.

Dante and Modena would have heard tales of jihadi savagery and sacrilege. One chronicle describes Sawdan, the emir of Bari (857–71), killing over 500 Christians a day, using their piled-up bodies as a throne-cum-dining table and drinking from the sacred chalices. A Salernitan chronicler recounts a Muslim general raping Catholic girls on a church altar. The Muslim leader Benarvet ravaged churches, defiled sacred images, stole sacred vessels, and commanded his men to rape the nuns when he raided Calabria. Muslims turned key churches into mosques. In Salerno, a Muslim chief would rape a virgin nun each night on a church altar.

Islam’s early triumph was the jihad on Rome (Rūmiya) in 846. Benedict of St. Andreas chronicles the desecration of the Petrine basilica:

Rome was besieged, the city of Leo was taken, the church of St. Peter was captured and plundered, and their horses were in its monasteries and churches. The barbarians danced around the altar, waving their hands, and one of them hit the chest of the image of the Lord with a small lance, which was portrayed in the mosaic in the apse.

“There is no doubt about how the Muslims perceived the campaigns against the Christians in Italy. They were jihad, which, in those centuries, was considered a fight against the infidels in the dār al-harb (The House of War),” notes Luigi Berto. An epitaph hails the Muslim deceased as “fallen martyr, happy thou, on the field of jihad, surrounded by wretched barbarians.” Al-Muqaddasi, the 10th-century Muslim geographer, called Sicily a “place of continual holy war.”

Christians as the Quintessential Kuffar (Infidels)

The jihadis saw the Christians not just as barbarians but as infidels of the most conspicuous kind. Kafara (literally, “to cover”), the root of kufr, appears about 500 times in the Qur’an. The term “is at the center of the value system of the Qur’an” and “an essential element to all post-Qur’anic theological discussion,” Marilyn Waldman emphasizes. Toshihiko Izutsu notes that kufr forms “the very pivot round which revolve all the other negative qualities.”

In the early phase of Muhammad’s career, kufr is used to describe “ingratitude,” “unbelief,” and “those who are inimical to the Call.” It later becomes increasingly linked with shirk—the sin of associating partners with Allah (as in the doctrine of the Trinity). The third Meccan period associates the kufr with an obdurate refusal to accept the truth of Islam. In the Qur’an, it is the “greatest of all sins.” From early days, Caliph ‘Abd al-Mālik ibn Marwān (646-705) attacks shirk by stamping coins with the Qur’anic verse: “God has not begotten and is not begotten.”

Christians “cover” the truth by choosing shirk over absolute monotheism. “Hence, the term ‘kafir’ in the Qur’an is also used to refer to Ahlul Kitab [People of the Book], the Jews and Christians who do not accept Muhammad’s prophethood as the final prophet.” In a 2015 Friday sermon in Ninawa (Nineveh in modern Iraq), the Imam called Europe “the abode of original disbelief,” [kufr] distinguishing it from the “abode of incidental disbelief,” i.e., the Arab states who commit the “disbelief of apostasy after Islam.”

Islam’s response to kufara is jihad. A letter sent by the Fatimids to the Muslims in Sicily labels the Christians as Mushrikeen (people who commit shirk). It names shirk as the key driver for jihad:

…in virtue of your land’s proximity to that of the Christians (dār al-Mushrikeen), and for your struggle (jihad) against unbelief and oppressors, if God wills, I shall fill your island with cavalry and infantry of the faithful who will wage holy war for God and the duty of His jihad. Through them, God will empower the faith and the Muslims. Through them, He will overcome polytheism and the polytheists!

Christendom Saved: From Rome to Constantinople

Rome, for Muslims, was “the greatest city of Christian unbelief in Italy and the home of its imām (that is, pope).” Constantinople was the “second Rome” or “New Rome.” Medieval Constantinople had so many churches and monasteries that visitors “often resorted to hyperbolic description.” Sources document about 500 churches between the fourth and fifteenth centuries. “Since the days of [General] Mu‘āwiya’s campaigning under the caliph Uthman, the city had been the strategic goal of the caliphate.”

The 9th-century philosopher Abū Yūsuf Al-Kindī had foretold that the mahdi would conquer Constantinople after Rome: “[he] will conquer the Spanish peninsula and reach Rome and conquer it. … He will conquer Constantinople, and rule over the whole earth will be his.” A hadith in the collection of Imam Ahmad b. Hanbal, has Muhammad himself prophesying: “You will liberate Constantinople, blessed is the Amir who is its Amir, and blessed is the army, that army.” Byzantine iconodulia had further provoked Islamic ire.

Muslims first attacked Constantinople in 654, 22 years after Muhammad’s death. The Umayyads “personally directed the jihad against Constantinople.” The second Muslim siege of Constantinople lasted from 668 to 669; the third from 674 to 678. All failed. “The significance of the Byzantine victory of 678 cannot be overestimated,” writes Georgije Ostrogorsky. “In the defense of Europe against the Arab onslaught, this triumph of Constantine IV was a turning point of worldwide historical importance. The fact that it held saved not only the Byzantine Empire, but the whole of the European civilization.”

The final siege of Constantinople lasted for a year (717-718). A synaxarion (historical note read at a liturgical service) reveals how the Orthodox believed that the Muslims “intended to besiege and capture her to convert the faith of the Christians to their own error [i.e., Islam].”

If Rome had fallen in 846 and Constantinople had been conquered in 718, it would have spelled the end of Christian Europe, driving the papacy into an “uncertain exile, possibly shattering Catholic hegemony over religious dogma before it even began.” If Constantinople had also fallen, there would be “no one apostolic church, but rather multiple competing doctrines, further splintering the few remaining Christian communities of Europe,” observes Si Sheppard.

Christian dhimmis would have benefited from the golden age of Islamic achievement, Sheppard notes. But this enlightenment was itself a product of Jewish and Christian scholars. Sheppard corrects himself, noting that Christendom’s fall also meant “they would have been assimilated into the fundamentalist backlash of al-Ash‘arī, al-Ghazālī, and Nizam al-Mulk.” This would have aborted the Renaissance’s “artistic efflorescence,” without which there would have been no Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution; no separation of faith and state and hence no democracy; no abolition of slavery and no emancipation of women. “In the game of history, therefore, the siege of Constantinople was played for the highest stakes of all,” he concludes.

Christian Schism Seals the Islamic Conquest of Constantinople

When Constantinople fell in 1453, it was not because of Muslim weakness but because of Christian disunity. The Great Schism of 1054 between the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholics bitterly divided Christendom. Seeking reconciliation, the Council of Florence (1438-1445) had papered over the cracks, granting Rome cosmetic control over the Eastern churches. In Constantinople, the Orthodox rioted among themselves, with the anti-Catholic lobby accusing their pro-Catholic co-religionists of capitulating to Rome.

The Florentine reconciliation was more pragmatic than dogmatic: the Greeks wanted the Latins to help them fight the Muslims. A pact was reached. Rome sent unwilling Venetian mercenaries to defend the Greeks, who would pay exorbitant fees.

Even worse, for many Orthodox Christians, “Muslim power looked like a happy alternative to Catholic hegemony,” writes Katherine Fleming. A 1170 letter from Patriarch Michael III of Anchialos to the Emperor Manuel Komnenos illustrates how many Orthodox preferred Meccan rather than Roman rule:

Allow the Muslim to be my ruler in external things rather than the Latin rule me in spiritual things. If I am under the Muslim, at least he will not oblige me to share his faith. But if I am under Frankish [that is, Roman] rule, and united with the Roman Church, perhaps I will have to separate myself from my God.

Many Orthodox even abandoned Hagia Sophia, lamenting its desecration by the celebration of heretical Roman eucharists. Doukas, a contemporary Greek writer, narrates how the Greeks regarded a reconciliatory Orthodox-Catholic eucharist held at the Hagia Sophia Basilica in December 1452 as “no better than an abominable heathen sacrifice.”

The very next year, Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II conquered Constantinople and converted Hagia Sophia—the world’s largest Byzantine basilica—into a mosque. Soldiers smashed the church, looted its valuables, and gouged the eyes of the icons. They placed its altar cloths on their dogs and horses and stomped on the Gospels and sacred books. Mehmet’s muezzin proclaimed the Islamic declaration of faith from the pulpit. The sultan climbed onto the stripped altar to lead Islamic prayers. The jihadis had earlier manifested their hatred for the infidels’ religion in the siege of 718, when General Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik rode into Hagia Sophia, snatched a gold cross, and rode out by fixing it upside down to the tip of his lance in an act of desecration.

Muslims plundered the city for three days, raping, slaughtering, or enslaving its residents. They killed even those who surrendered, also wanting “to terrorize the population into submission.” Women, nuns, boys, and girls were raped en masse and taken as sex slaves. Ottoman historian Tursun Beg interpreted the conquest as the sexual subjugation of a “bride” by her “groom.”

The fall of Constantinople failed to teach Christians the folly of division. On the contrary, many Orthodox viewed Islam’s conquest as “an instrument both of divine protection and divine punishment” through which God was punishing them for their “heretical” dealings with the Roman Church while saving them from papal autocracy. The Catholics viewed the defeat of Constantinople with schadenfreude—God had punished the Orthodox. For Muslims, the conquest of Constantinople vindicated Muhammad’s prophecy. It gave the Muslims enormous prestige and new momentum to conquer the world for Allah.

Europe’s Victories, Islam’s Defeats

Islam, meanwhile, was marching on Europe. The conquest of Iberia began in 711. From Gibraltar, General Tariq ibn Ziyad tantalized his jihadis with the lure of “ravishingly beautiful” Spanish women and assured them that “the word of Allah shall be exalted in his country, and that the true religion shall be established there.” Caliph Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz displayed his disdain for the Christian infidels, noting that “the non-Muslims are nothing but dirt” created by Allah “to be partisans of Satan” and upon whom “rests the curse of Allah, of the Angels and of man collectively.”

In 719, jihadis penetrated France until Charles Martel famously defeated them in the Battle of Tours (732). Ironically, Martel’s grandson Charlemagne would make the mistake of collaborating with Muslim governors in Spain in an Islamic civil war. The alliance collapsed during the failed siege of Zaragoza (778). It would take 770 years for the Spanish to drive out their Muslim conquerors (the Reconquista).

By the time of the historian al-Tabari’s death in 923, Islam had expanded from Portugal to India. The conquest of Constantinople emboldened Muslims as jihadi invasions subjugated Armenia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, and Albania, in addition to parts of Poland and Hungary. Islam’s success further spurred her zeal for proselytizing the infidels. Sultan Mehmed IV (reigned 1648–87) warred against the Habsburgs, Romanovs, and Venetians, seeking to convert Christians to Islam and “transform the sacred geography of Europe into a sanctified Muslim landscape.”

Three major battles halted Europe from being totally conquered and Islamized: Charles Martel’s victory at the Battle of Tours (732), the sea battle at Lepanto (1571), and the Battle of Vienna (1683). If Vienna were conquered, “all the Christians would obey the Ottomans,” Sultan Mehmet IV’s grand vizier, Kara Mustafa, had told him. “Lepanto became a celebrated name throughout Europe and was clear proof that the Ottomans could, after all, be beaten,” writes Robert Spencer. The Battle of Vienna, won on September 12, marked the beginning of the end of the medieval Muslim presence in Europe.

Muslims Remember, Christians Forget

It is no coincidence Osama Bin Laden chose to attack the Twin Towers on September 11. It marked the day before Islam was defeated. The Muslim collective consciousness does not suffer from historical amnesia.

In 2017, analysts warned that Al Qaeda leaders, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri, were using Spain’s past as a key element in their jihadi propaganda. Both made multiple references to recapturing Ceuta and Melilla, two Spanish enclaves in northern Morocco. Western governments ignored the red flags. On July 30, 2026, over 75,000 military-age Moroccan Muslim men stormed Ceuta. While most returned to Morocco, over 5,000 remaining illegals destabilized Ceuta and marched through its streets shouting “Takbir” and “Allahu Akbar.” “It would be logical to conclude that the accumulation of references to a given country in terrorist discourse constitutes a solid indicator of the position occupied by the country in the terrorists’ world view and, by extension, of the level of threat it faces,” Manuel Ricardo Torres-Soriano warns.

In 2016, Islamic State launched its magazine Rūmiya (Rome). Analysts suggested that naming the publication after the “center of Christendom is a way to show what you aspire to, rather than what you have lost.” ISIS English-language publications have made 432 references to Italy, the Vatican, and Rome since June 2014. “We will not rest from our jihad until we are under the olive trees of Rome,” Abu Ayyub al-Maÿri, a leader in al-Qaeda in Iraq, declared. The jihadi literature cites texts from the hadith of Sahih Muslim wherein “Rome” also refers to Constantinople, indicating that the reference is also symbolic of the Christian West. The July 2016 issue of the ISIS magazine Dābiq is titled “Break the Cross.” The article replicates the conditions imposed on medieval European infidels who are conquered and pay the jizya: they are banned from building or repairing churches, displaying their faith in public, owning weapons, selling wine, having taller buildings than Muslims, and raising their voices in church.

The magazine also features an article titled “Why We Hate You and Why We Fight You.” “We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah—whether you realize it or not—by making partners for Him in worship; you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son; you fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices,” the article states.

Muslims remember. Christians forget. Church leaders have responded to Islamic aggression by whitewashing history. In July 2020, when Turkey converted Hagia Sophia back into a mosque, Father Felix Körner, Consultor to the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims, maintained the “re-classification” of the basilica as a mosque “should not be put down to current Islamic aggression.” Pope Francis responded with just six words in Italian: “I think of Hagia Sophia and I am very saddened.”

This was despite President Recep Erdoğan citing the “foundation charter” issued by Mehmet Khan, which turned Hagia Sophia from the world’s grandest basilica into a mosque in 1453. “May the eternal curse of Allah, the Prophet, the angels, all rulers, and all Muslims be upon him and those who change this foundation charter,” Erdoğan imprecated. “The conquest of Istanbul and the conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a Mosque are among the most glorious chapters in history, particularly Turkish history,” Erdoğan told Turks.

Pope Leo XIV has continued the trajectory of historical revisionism. While returning from Lebanon, Leo claimed that Western fears about Islam are “oftentimes generated by people who are against immigration.” He insisted that Muslims and Christians can “live together to be friends” and Westerners “should perhaps be a little less fearful” of Islam. Hasn’t Leo heard of the Lebanese Civil War fought between Maronites and Muslims, which killed 150,000 and led to 900,000 mostly Christians fleeing the country?

Doesn’t Leo know that the Vatican walls were built by his namesake, Leo IV, after the jihadi sack of St Peter’s Basilica in 846? How would Leo respond to Dante’s poem on Muhammad? Perhaps he would prefer to read the new Dutch translation of the Divine Comedy, which erased Muhammad’s name to prevent the epic poem from causing “unnecessary offense” to Muslims.

And Leo, I suspect, would respond to Modena’s painting by quoting Mike Hawthorne’s quip on silencing history: “Sometimes the truth behind a picture doesn’t have to be cut out. You just have to keep quiet about it.”

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On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally became global meme fodder. Mullally conferred an interfaith award on Osama bin Laden apologist Maulana Hafiz Ashrafi. The photograph went viral. Mullally, an über-feminist who had pledged to wipe out misogyny in the Church, was caught on camera, grinning like a barracuda alongside Ashrafi and his wife, who was dressed like a sarcophagus. Ashrafi’s daughter, masked like a Ninja at a Halloween party, put the finishing touches on the comedy of the absurd.

A week later, desperate to compete with his partner in interfaith suicidal empathy, Pope Leo XIV approved a declaration titled “A Journey of Hope.” The document suffers from a diarrhea of words and a constipation of theology. It urges greater dialogue with Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and other religions. It elevates Islam to a key fraternal partner. It castigates perpetrators of “Islamophobia.” It does not preach Jesus’ uniqueness. And it reads the riot act to Christians who engage in the unforgivable sin of “proselytism.”

In effect, the declaration is Pope Leo’s ultimatum to St. Paul. “Put your aggressive proselytizing on mute,” Leo is telling Paul. “Cool the sales pitch. Cut the converts. Quit cruising around the Mediterranean persuading Jews and Greeks to follow Jesus. It’s ruining the Vatican’s interreligious dialogue with devotees of Artemis, Zeus, and Hermes and killing our fraternity with disciples of Dionysus, Isis, and Mithras.

Leo’s document does not define “proselytism,” leaving room for weaponized ambiguity. Not once does the document use the term “evangelism,” my preferred term for proselytism. One has to turn to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines “proselytism” as “the making or seeking of converts.” The root word is proserkhesthai, ‘to approach.’ You’ve got to approach someone if you wish to convert them.

European Court Affirms What the Vatican Negates

It is striking that while the Vatican anathematizes proselytism, the European Court of Human Rights approves proselytism as a bona fide manifestation of religion. The ECHR recognized this in the landmark Kokkinakis v Greece case, wherein a Jehovah’s Witness challenged his conviction for attempting to convert a Greek Orthodox Christian on a home visit. Kokkinakis was arrested more than 60 times for proselytism. He was also imprisoned several times.

The court based its verdict on the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 9), which asserts that the right to freedom of religion includes the right to change one’s religion (as does Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

“Proselytism is linked to freedom of religion; a believer must be able to communicate his faith and his beliefs in the religious sphere as in the philosophical sphere,” Judge Pettiti stated. “Believers and agnostic philosophers have a right to expound their beliefs, to try to get other people to share them and even to try to convert those whom they are addressing.”

According to the court, proselytism is valid since religious conversion, as permitted by Article 9, often involves being persuaded by others. “Indeed, without proselytism, the right to change religion ‘would be likely to remain a dead letter,’” Andrew Hambler, an expert in employment law, writes in his peer-reviewed article in the Industrial Law Journal.

Hambler might as well have quoted the apostle Paul. Writing to the Romans, Paul strings together a series of rhetorical questions: “How then will they call on him [Jesus] in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Romans 10:14). In this sense, proselytism has the strongest claim to legitimacy, Hambler emphasizes.

Leo’s Strategy: “Don’t Preach, Simply Wait!”

Sadly, “proselytism” bashing is now a staple of papal pontificating. During his visit to the Rimini Meeting of Friendships Among Peoples, Leo “recalled that his predecessors have repeated on several occasions, ‘the Church does not engage in proselytism,’” Vatican News reported. In a letter to the cardinals, Leo slammed “the temptation of proselytism.” Pope Francis frequently attacked proselytism. “Proselytism is solemn nonsense; it makes no sense,” he famously said.

For Rome, “the view that proselytism is the only way to engage with the other no longer make[s] sense in a world that increasingly resembles an interconnected and constantly evolving global village.” So how does one preach Christ? Sure, Rome isn’t calling for “renouncing the truth” but “proclaiming it in a manner befitting the Gospel: with esteem, listening, and charity.”

But the exaggerated emphasis on interreligious dialogue can lead to “grave confusion,” as Bishop Joseph Strickland warns. He contends that Leo’s document risks placing dialogue above evangelization, suggesting that non-Christian religions are authentic paths to God and raising doubts about the Church’s missionary mandate. The New Testament scholar Robert Gagnon observes that Leo’s document “at the very least depresses or discourages evangelism (what it calls ‘proselytism’), if not outright rejecting it.” Gagnon calls the document “utter nonsense,” adding: “It is heretical to discourage conversion to Christianity from other faiths. This Pope and his Vatican cohorts have made many missteps in a relatively short time, but this is the worst.”

I would applaud if Leo warned against using coercion, cajolery, or crookery in proselytism.

But Leo redefines evangelistic outreach as the supine expectation of a lover whose words “do not disturb others,” do not “make demands or oblige,” but “only lead others to marvel at such love.” Christians must not proactively seek to convert others but, like a lover, “simply wait[s] for them to inquire about the love that has filled his or her life.”

This is pious humbug. No great love story would be penned, or no great romantic movie would find an audience if all the lover did was to “simply wait.” Even a peacock proactively opens his feathers and dances to attract a peahen. Jesus didn’t ask his disciples to “simply wait” but to go to the very ends of the earth to proclaim the gospel.

St. Paul Didn’t “Simply Wait”

Paul did the very opposite of “simply waiting.” He went around the Mediterranean on three missionary journeys. He preached to Jews and Gentiles. Jewish and Christian scholars agree that Paul wasn’t trying to “convert” Jews to “Christianity” or to “Roman Catholicism.” Saul the Jew never became Paul the Christian. He remained a Jew to his death. In the highly fraught sectarian context of Second Temple Judaism, where the Jesus Movement emerged as one of the many Jewish sects, Paul was preaching to the Jews that their Scriptures had been fulfilled and their Jewish Messiah had come in the person of Jesus. Paul is emphatic that the gospel is “to the Jew first.” Much of his preaching takes place in synagogues. The embryonic “churches” are actually synagogue sub-groups comprised of Jewish Jesus followers who keep Torah, Paul Treblico argues in his monograph Self-designations and Group Identity in the New Testament.

Paul didn’t “simply wait” for Jews or Gentiles to enquire about Jesus. For example, in the synagogue at Thessalonica, “for three weeks he argued with them from the [Hebrew] scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Messiah.’” Luke, the author of Acts, notes that “some of them were persuaded” (Acts 17:3-4). The five verbs: arguing, explaining, proving, proclaiming, and persuading, suggest that Paul was proactively proselytizing the Jews.

In Athens, Paul “argued” in “the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the market place every day with those who chanced to be there” (17:17). Rather than “esteem” other religions, “his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols” (17:16). The Greek word for “provoked” is paroxyno, from which we get our English word “paroxysm.” In Corinth, he “argued in the synagogue every sabbath and persuaded Jews and Greeks” (18:4). In Ephesus, he “entered the synagogue and for three months spoke boldly, arguing and pleading about the kingdom of God” and “argued daily in the hall of Tyrannus” for two years (19:8-10).

Non-Jewish proselytes did indeed attend synagogues. In his magnum opus Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World, Jewish historian Louis Feldman argues that Judaism possessed a robust spirit of proselytism and attracted large numbers of converts and proselytes throughout the Greco-Roman world before the rise of early Christianity.

What’s Wrong With Conversion or Proselytism?

Ironically, while Pope Leo is shying away from proselytism, Islam is making massive inroads with dawa. In July, Muslim organizations launched aggressive proselytization campaigns using the FIFA World Cup series to recruit new converts in 16 cities of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA) kicked off its dawa at SoFi Stadium in California with banners inviting football fans to “discover Islam” as a “faith of peace, purpose, and submission to the Creator.”

MUNA missionaries offered free copies of the Qur’an in English, Spanish, Bengali, and other languages, promoting the Islamic text as a book that “has inspired billions of people for over 1,400 years” and Islam as a religion “regardless of race, language, nationality, or background.”

But scholars and ex-Muslims are warning the West that dawa is not simply the sharing of Islamic faith in the Christian sense of “evangelism.” “Dawa as practiced by radical Islamists employs a wide range of mechanisms to advance their goal of imposing Islamic law (sharia) on society,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist and former Muslim, explains in her book The Challenge of Dawa: Political Islam as Ideology and Movement and How to Counter It. “The ultimate goal of dawa is to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with the rule of sharialaw.”

Like Catholics, many evangelicals are not only failing to understand the sinister aspects of Islamic dawa but, unlike Paul, are unwilling to confront it with robust argumentation and challenge.

Am I Not Good Enough for Your Religion?

I find it difficult to comprehend why certain religious groups resent proselytizing others or having their members proselytized. If Jews tried to convert me, I’d feel honoured. In fact, I’d joyfully go with my Jewish proselytizers to the synagogue. Since I read Hebrew, I can join in the prayers. As a chaplain at a London university, I had excellent relations with hardline Muslim leaders. They’d tell me they respect me but loathe my liberal Anglican clergy colleagues. “We know you are trying to convert us and you know we are trying to convert you,” they’d say. In turn, I respected and loved them for their convictions and passion for dawa (Islamic proselytism).

My Hindu students were candid: “You’re wasting your time. Britain is a post-Christian country. We are here to convert Britons to Hinduism,” they’d say. On campus, even Buddhists, Stoics, and atheists proselytized unapologetically. It was a playground of ideas. I am richer for my interactions with the evangelists of these religions and philosophies. Likewise, my mission was to preach the gospel and pray that they would come to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. With Paul, I would remind myself daily: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16).

While I was a student in Cambridge, Catholics and Orthodox unrelentingly tried to convert me to their “one, true church.” I felt flattered. A religion that doesn’t proselytize is essentially saying: “We are a closed club. We don’t want you. You are not good enough for us.” On my part, I’ve never missed an opportunity to evangelize. I did this for eight hours while I was flying back from India to England to defend my doctoral thesis, with a Briton who had left Christianity for Buddhism, even though I desperately needed the time to prepare for my viva voce. At the end of our conversation, the Buddhist promised to reconsider the claims of Christ.

Leo doesn’t believe in proselytism because he doesn’t understand the transformative power of the gospel. In India, millions of Dalits (untouchables) have been liberated from three millennia of the caste system because missionaries proselytized them. In the Islamic world, millions of Muslims have been unshackled from the slavery of Islam because someone shared Christ with them—as my ex-Muslim colleagues at the Ideological Defense Institute would testify.

Paul said: “I’m compelled to do it, and doomed if I don’t!” (1 Corinthians 9:16, The Message). He ends his life and ministry incarcerated in Rome, “expounding the gospel [to his fellow-Jews] from morning till evening, testifying to the kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus both from the law of Moses and from the prophets” (Acts 28:23).

In the landmark Mbuyi v Newpark Childcare Ltd employment tribunal case, Sarah Mbuyi, a Christian nursery worker, framed her workplace proselytism in these terms: “I believe what I have got is a gift and a desire to share.” That’s why I love the Sri Lankan theologian D.T. Niles’ definition of evangelism as “one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.”

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By the time Muhammad was born, Persia had been one of the great civilizations of the world for eleven hundred years. Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century BC, and it became the largest state the world had yet seen, running from the Aegean and Egypt to the Indus. Its kings built Persepolis. They laid the Royal Road from western Anatolia to Susa, with relay stations for mounted messengers. They dug qanats, underground channels that carried mountain water across the desert to fields and cities, some of which still run. In 539 BC Cyrus took Babylon and let the Jewish exiles go home, and Jews have lived on the Iranian plateau ever since. Alexander burned Persepolis in 330 BC. The Parthians who followed held Persia against Rome for nearly five centuries.

In 224 AD Ardashir I overthrew the Parthians and founded the Sasanian dynasty, which lasted more than four hundred years. His son Shapur I killed one Roman emperor on the battlefield, forced another to surrender, and captured a third, Valerian, along with part of his army. The Roman prisoners were put to work on Persian bridges and dams. Rome and Persia fought over the Near East for four centuries, and Persia mostly held its own.

The state religion was Zoroastrianism, with fire temples across the plateau and a priesthood, the mobeds, that stood beside the throne. Below it lived Christians of the Church of the East, who built bishoprics and monasteries and sent missionaries toward India and China. Jewish academies in Sasanian Babylonia produced the Babylonian Talmud. The Sasanian priesthood was no friend to minorities. It persecuted Christians, and Mani, the prophet of Manichaeism, died in its custody. Nobody has to pretend old Persia was a paradise of tolerance. But it held Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians inside one state for four centuries.

Khosrow I, who ruled from 531 to 579, reformed the tax system and the army and took in Greek philosophers who had lost their patron when the emperor Justinian shut down the school of Athens. In 570 his forces drove the Ethiopians out of Yemen and made it a Persian vassal state, which is why a Persian governor was sitting in Sana’a when a letter from Arabia arrived.

His grandson Khosrow II, called Khosrow the Victorious, took the empire to its greatest extent. In 614 his armies took Jerusalem and carried the True Cross to Ctesiphon. Egypt fell a few years later. Persian troops stood across the Bosphorus from Constantinople. Then the emperor Heraclius counterattacked deep into Persia and destroyed the Persian army at Nineveh in 627. The nobles deposed Khosrow. His son Kavad II had him executed on 28 February 628.

Kavad killed his brothers and died within months. In the next four years the throne passed through more than ten rulers, including generals and two of Khosrow’s daughters. The twenty-six-year war with Byzantium had emptied both empires. In 632, the year Muhammad died, the crown went to a boy named Yazdegerd III.

Around 628 Muhammad, the head of a small city-state in the Hijaz, sent letters to the great rulers of his world: Heraclius of Byzantium, the ruler of Abyssinia, and Khosrow II, the King of Kings of Persia, whom the Arabs called Kisra. The messenger to Persia was Abdullah ibn Hudhafa al-Sahmi.

According to the Islamic sources, the letter told Kisra to submit to Islam and be safe, and warned that if he refused he would carry the sin of all the Magians, the Zoroastrians, on his own head. Sahih al-Bukhari records that the letter went through the Persian governor of Bahrain, who passed it up to the king. Khosrow read it and tore it into pieces.

In 633, before the empire had even recovered from its civil war. Khalid ibn al-Walid, fresh from crushing the tribes of Arabia, invaded Persian Iraq and beat the Sasanian frontier armies at the Chains and at Walaja. At Ullais in May 633, according to al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir, Khalid vowed that a river would run with Persian blood if God gave him the victory.

He took the captives and had them beheaded along a canal. When the blood did not fill the channel, he diverted water over the bodies so the river ran red. 70,000 Persian were killed.

The Persians beat the Muslims at the Battle of the Bridge in 634, then lost the big fights that followed. In 636 an Arab army destroyed the main Sasanian force at Qadisiyyah, killing its commander Rostam Farrokhzad. Ctesiphon, the imperial capital, fell in 637 after a three-month siege. The Arabs took the royal treasury. Among the loot was the Baharestan carpet, the royal garden carpet of the Sasanian court, too heavy for the Persians to carry away. Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas sent it to Caliph Umar in Medina, where it was cut into pieces and divided among the Muslims.

In 642 at Nahavand the Arabs beat the last great army the empire could raise. Muslim historians named it the Victory of Victories. Yazdegerd III spent his last nine years running from province to province, looking for someone who would shelter him. He was killed at Merv in 651.

Zoroastrians are not People of the Book in the Quran. Muslims gave them dhimmi status anyway, for the same reason the Sindhi idol-worshippers got it: a dead infidel pays no tax. Fire-worshippers paid the jizya, lived under the ban on building and public worship, and stood below every Muslim in court.

Those who could not pay or would not convert had one more choice, which was to leave. The Parsis of India descend from Zoroastrians who fled Persia after the conquest, and they still count their years from the accession of Yazdegerd III, the last king they had.

Over the next two centuries the tax did most of the work. Fire temples closed for want of worshippers, priests lost their income, and by the ninth and tenth centuries most of the plateau had gone over to Islam.

In 816 a man named Babak Khorramdin raised the mountains of Azerbaijan against the Abbasid caliphate. His movement, the Khurramites, mixed the old Iranian religion with revolt against Arab landlords and tax collectors, and its aim was to get the foreign rulers out.

Babak beat one caliphal army after another. Al-Ma’mun died in 833 without defeating him. His successor al-Mu’tasim sent his best general, Afshin, who rebuilt the border fortresses, bought Babak’s spies, ran supplies to his army by relay, and took the rebel stronghold of Badd in August 837. Babak fled toward Armenia, where a Christian prince, Sahl ibn Sunbat, handed him over for a reward of two million dirhams. In March 838 he was executed at Samarra, and his hands and feet were cut off first.

Persian returned as a written language in the ninth and tenth centuries, and around the year 1000 Ferdowsi finished the Shahnameh, the book of Persian kings, which carried the memory of the pre-Islamic past. Persian scribes ran the caliphate’s administration and Persian scholars wrote its books. The Persians kept their language and their poetry, but they lost their religion.

Jews, under Muslim rule in Persia, were ranked as unclean. Historians of Iranian Jewry record rules that kept them indoors when it rained, in case the water ran off them onto a Muslim. They were confined to their own quarters and periodically forced to convert, in Shiraz, in Isfahan, in Barforush.

In March 1839 a rumor that the Jews of Mashhad had mocked a Muslim holy day brought a mob into their quarter. Between thirty and forty Jews were killed. The synagogue was burned, homes were looted, and about seven Jewish girls were carried off to become child brides. The surviving Jews, some 2,400 people in roughly 300 families, were then told to convert or die. They converted. The event is called the Allahdad, “God’s Justice,” a name the forced converts gave it themselves. For generations afterward they lived as Muslims in public and practiced Judaism in secret, a community of Jadid al-Islam, “new Muslims.”

The community on the eve of the 1979 revolution numbered about 80,000, and some estimates run above 100,000. The 2016 census counted 9,826.

In the twentieth century Persia tried to turn back toward itself. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911 produced Iran’s first parliament and the idea of citizenship. Under the Pahlavi dynasty, from 1925, Iranian nationalism deliberately reached back to Cyrus, to the Achaemenids and to the pre-Islamic past, and the Shah staged a great celebration at Persepolis in 1971 to mark 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. The country presented itself as the heir of a civilization that predated Islam by more than a thousand years.

Then came 1979. The Islamic Republic made religion the government, put Islamic law into public and private life, forced women to cover their hair, and created the Revolutionary Guards. Khomeini put a universal Islamic identity above Iranian nationalism.

The revolution was not made by clerics alone. Marxists, leftist students and fundemental Muslims marched together against the Shah, joined by hatred of America and of Zionism. Khomeini crushed his leftist allies once he held power, and he kept their program.

Since 1979 the Republic has spent Persia’s oil, army and geography on a war against Israel and the United States. It built Hezbollah into an army on Israel’s northern border, armed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and organized militias across Iraq, Syria and Yemen. It calls America the Great Satan and treats Israel’s destruction as a founding goal.

The constitution of the Islamic Republic recognizes three religious minorities: Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians. Their members cannot be elected to representative bodies except in five reserved seats out of 290 in parliament: two for Armenians, one for Assyrians, one for Jews, one for Zoroastrians. They cannot serve in the judiciary or the security services. They cannot be school principals. They cannot be president, a post reserved for Shia Muslims. Public-sector job applicants are screened for their knowledge of Islam. Baha’is are not recognized at all.

Christians who were born Christian, mostly Armenians and Assyrians, are tolerated inside their own churches, where the state registers who attends and keeps Muslim converts out. Open Doors ranked Iran eighth in the world for danger to Christians on its 2023 list.

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Roman North Africa stretched to the Atlantic, and its Amazigh population absorbed Christianity so thoroughly that by the third and fourth centuries the region hosted more than three hundred bishops, a religious infrastructure denser than most of Christian Europe at the time. Carthage, in what is now Tunisia, was one of the most influential Christian centers anywhere in the ancient world. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, died a martyr under Roman persecution and became one of the faith’s most cited early voices. Augustine, the single most influential theologian in the history of Western Christianity, was born in what is now Algeria and wrote every major work of his career on North African soil. Tertullian, the man who coined “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” was North African too, a line he wrote about Roman persecutors, never imagining it would apply just as precisely to the conquerors still centuries away.

Jewish communities were established across the region long before Islam existed as a religion at all. Cyrene, in present-day Libya, had a Jewish population old enough that the man who carried Christ’s cross, Simon of Cyrene, was a Diaspora Jew making pilgrimage from there to Jerusalem when Roman soldiers pulled him out of the crowd.

The Amazigh, the indigenous people of North Africa, a name meaning “free people,” not the slur “Berber” their conquerors hung on them, a word that means “savage” in its origin, were mostly Christian before a single Arab army crossed into their territory.

Islamic military campaigns against North Africa began in the late seventh century. Uqba ibn Nafi marched west declaring open jihad against the Amazigh, and left a trail of killing and destroyed towns behind him with every step. Earlier raids into Libya had already been extracting jizya from Christian communities, and when families ran out of money to pay it, the commander Amr ibn al-As ordered them to sell their own children into slavery to cover the tax bill.

Conquest of what is now Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco took decades of continuous war, not a single triumphant campaign, because the Amazigh did not surrender. The medieval historian Ibn Khaldun, an Islamic source, recorded that the Amazigh apostatized from Islam twelve separate times: forced conversion after forced conversion, each one abandoned the moment the army that imposed it marched away, until Musa ibn Nusayr finally broke the cycle by force.

Al-Kahina, known to her own people as Dihya, an Amazigh Christian queen who led the fight against the Muslim invaders and personally killed Uqba ibn Nafi in battle, was leading the resistance. It took Musa ibn Nusayr, and atrocities on a scale even Islamic chroniclers struggled to describe without awe, to finally finish what Uqba had started. Ibn Khaldun’s history records that Musa enslaved roughly 120,000 Amazigh, girls and boys alongside the men, an entire generation of a free people shipped east in chains to the caliphate in Damascus as human tribute.

Ibn Kathir, another Islamic source wrote: “Islam had never heard of captives like the captives of Musa ibn Nusayr, emir of the Maghreb.”

Churches across the region were torn down. By the tenth century, Christianity had been erased from North Africa almost in its entirety, over roughly three centuries of continuous military and religious pressure.

Under Idris I, founder of Morocco’s first Islamic dynasty, Jews, Christians, and remaining pagans were eliminated on a large scale, a purge the medieval historian Ibn Idhari recorded. What followed for the next thousand years was a recurring cycle of humiliation, forced conversion, and mass killing that returned again and again whenever a new dynasty took over.

In ninth-century Tunisia, a Muslim judge ordered Jews to wear identifying patches sewn onto their shoulders, one stitched with the image of a monkey, the other a pig, and had the same animals marked onto the doors of Jewish homes, so that a Jewish household could be identified by any passerby at a glance. Under the Almohads, Jews were forced into black clothing specifically chosen to mark them out in public.

Under the caliph Abd al-Mu’min ibn Ali, Jews who refused conversion were executed in the public squares of Marrakesh, Fez, and Meknes, in front of crowds. Rabbi Yusuf ibn Amram was forced to convert under that pressure; a hundred and fifty other Jews who chose to stand beside him and refuse were put to death rather than accept Islam.

Rabbi Yehuda HaCohen ibn Susan was burned alive under the Almohads for refusing to convert to Islam. In 1595, more Jews were executed and burned, among them a man named Said Sawwad.

Mass killing on a civic scale struck twice at the same city within four centuries. In 1033, the Fez massacre killed more than 6,000 Jews in a single episode, a number large enough that it represented a substantial fraction of the entire Jewish population of the region at the time, wiped out in one coordinated act of violence. In 1465, a second massacre hit the same city on an even larger scale; by some estimates only a handful of the city’s Jews survived the killing, with thousands slaughtered in an event that essentially reset the Jewish population of Fez back to almost nothing.

This Is Not Ancient History

Minorities in North Africa found no durable safety until French colonial rule arrived centuries later and did, for the first time since the seventh century, build churches, however limited, and protect Jewish communities from the recurring mob violence and state-sanctioned killing that had defined their existence for a thousand years.

Today, Jews have all but vanished from North Africa. Their numbers sit close to zero in Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya. Morocco retains a few hundred, the last visible remnant of a community that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands before the mid-twentieth century, most of whom left for Israel in the years following its founding.

None of these countries permits Christianity to spread among its own citizens. Churches, where they exist, are built for foreigners, diplomats, expatriate workers, tourists, never for the native population, because native conversion is not accepted regardless of what the constitution says about religious freedom on paper. Citizens are Muslim by law in these states, and are barred, whether by explicit statute or by unwritten but absolute social and legal custom, from converting to Christianity.

In Algeria, tens of thousands of Christians exist today, likely more than official counts admit, concentrated especially among the Amazigh, descendants of the very people Musa ibn Nusayr enslaved by the hundred thousand, still practicing a faith their ancestors held before Islam ever arrived. The state persecutes them methodically: shutting down churches and religious gatherings under the pretext that they lack proper licensing, and prosecuting people accused of proselytizing under a 2006 law that criminalizes possessing Christian materials capable of being used for missionary purposes. More than forty local churches have been shut down under this regime. More than fifty Christians have stood trial for the crime of their own faith.

Tunisian Christians, overwhelmingly converts, practice in secret, because open practice invites similar persecution.

Morocco offers no better ground. Christians meet in secret gatherings inside private homes, practicing rites in hiding out of fear of both their own communities and the state itself. They cannot legally give their children Christian names. They cannot marry according to Christian rites with any legal standing. They cannot even be buried in a Christian cemetery when they die.

Libya and Mauritania have simply written the old punishment back into law rather than leaving it to mobs and custom: apostasy from Islam carries the death penalty in both countries. In Libya today, roughly nine people currently sit on death row for exactly that.

The infidels of North Africa share a grave with the infidels of Egypt, the infidels of the Levant, the infidels of Arabia, and the infidels of South Asia. Different names, the same sword.

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Forget everything your textbook told you about Islam’s “golden age of tolerance” in India. Forget the Sufi poetry, the spice-route romance, the multicultural Mughal miniature paintings hanging in museums funded to whitewash the brutal Islamic conquest. None of that built the second-largest Muslim population on Earth out of a subcontinent that was overwhelmingly Hindu, Buddhist, and animist for thousands of years before a single Arab horse crossed the Indus. The sword did, sieges did, mass executions did, burned and beheaded idols did, a poll tax engineered to starve the infidel into submission did.

Historians who launder Islamic barbarity into a story about traders and intermarriage are fraudsters.

Sindh: The First Blade, 711–712

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By the fourth century, Egypt was one of the intellectual and spiritual capitals of the Christian world. Alexandria stood alongside Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, and Jerusalem as one of the five great patriarchal sees of Christendom. It was in Alexandria that Origen and Clement built the first great Christian catechetical school, that Athanasius fought the Arian heresy and helped write the Nicene Creed, and that the Desert Fathers, Anthony, Pachomius, the monks of Scetis and Wadi Natrun, invented Christian monasticism itself, a movement that would later spread to Ireland, to Gaul, to the whole of Christian Europe.

The native population spoke Coptic, the last living form of the ancient Egyptian language, written in a script adapted from Greek. The word “Copt” itself comes from the Greek Aigyptios, “Egyptian”, filtered through Arabic into Qibṭ. The Copts were not a minority in Egypt. They were Egypt. The word for the people and the word for the Christians of the country were, for centuries, the same word.

The Conquest: 639–642 AD

In December 639, an Arab army of perhaps 4,000 men under Amr ibn al-As crossed the Sinai into Egypt on the orders of the Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab. This was an invasion of a province that had been Christian for over three centuries, launched seven years after Muhammad’s death, as part of the same wave of conquest that had already torn Syria and the Levant away from Byzantium at the Battle of Yarmouk in 636.

Amr’s forces took Pelusium after a month-long siege, then moved on Babylon Fortress (the core of what is now Old Cairo), which fell after a siege of roughly seven months. Alexandria itself, the jewel of the eastern Mediterranean, capitulated in November 641 under a treaty that saw Byzantine forces withdraw by sea. The Byzantines briefly retook the city in 645 before Amr crushed the counter-attack and secured Egypt for the Caliphate permanently in 646.

Egypt’s Muqawqas, the Byzantine governor who negotiated Alexandria’s surrender, was reviled in later Coptic tradition as a traitor. Within a generation, the new rulers had a name and a legal category for everyone who had not converted: dhimmi, literally “the protected,” but protected on terms decided entirely by the party doing the conquering.

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On July 7, French president Emmanuel Macron visited the “Umayyad Mosque” in Damascus alongside Ahmed al-Sharaa/Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the new, self-appointed president of Syria, who is the former head of the Syrian Al Qaeda.

The so-called “Umayyad Mosque” is a former Christian Byzantine cathedral that was demolished by Arab Muslim invaders in the 8th century.

Macron’s visit of the “mosque” with a former Al Qaeda leader was one of the many demonstrations of how some Western leaders are enabling the Islamic conquest of the Western world and abandoning the persecuted Christians of the Levant.

The Levant is a historical and geographic region in the Eastern Mediterranean. It roughly corresponds to Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), the Gaza Strip, Jordan, and often Cyprus and Hatay/Antioch (province) of Turkey.

This region was once majority-Christian. Today, the entire Levant, with two notable exceptions (Israel and the free part of the Republic of Cyprus), are in Muslim hands. Approximately 36 percent of the territory of the Republic of Cyprus is under illegal Turkish military occupation. The Republic of Lebanon, which used to be majority-Christian, is now majority-Muslim. In addition, the terror group Hezbollah significantly undermines Lebanon’s sovereignty through military, social, and political roles.

This report discusses how Levantine countries and regions fell to Islam and has become majority-Muslim.

Syria

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“Please tell the American Christians that we need their help.”

I heard those words in 2005 from an Assyrian woman who had been displaced from her home in Baghdad by Islamic attacks against religious minorities in Iraq. Even across the airwaves, I could sense the exhaustion in her voice, both emotional and physical.

I promised her that I would deliver her message. Before we ended the conversation, however, she posed a question that stopped me in my tracks:

“Do you understand that the destruction we have endured will reach your country as well? When it does, ask your American friends what help would they need from us, the Christians of the Middle East.”

I never spoke to her again. Yet her chilling words transcended time and distance, remaining with me to this day. Her message was not only a personal warning, it foreshadowed an existential threat that has infiltrated the political, social, economic, and religious dimensions of our society.

There is a metaphorical and inexplicable blindness that has overtaken our society, but before we are cast into the absolute darkness of the abyss, we are forced to witness the murder of our children before our eyes, as though the sight of their stolen innocence is meant to be the final image etched into our memory; we remember the twenty-three-year-old Iryna Zarutska and the twelve-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, both savagely murdered, their young lives extinguished before our very eyes.

We are witnessing our values being mocked even as we are told that Socialist and Islamic ideologies seek to occupy our homes and communities. We are forced to watch our Jewish citizens bullied and stabbed, churches surrendered to a foreign ideology or reduced to ashes, and the memory of our heroes desecrated through vandalism of war memorials. Even our American story is being re-written before our eyes as historical monuments are torn down.

Horror that No Longer Horrifies

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Sayyid Qutb was one of contemporary Islam’s most important theorists, and one of the most consequential shapers of Muslim Brotherhood ideology. His view of America is the Muslim Brotherhood’s view of America. His view is also the view of every modern Islamic movement. And it remains, to this day, the view of most Muslims, not their view of America alone, but of the entire West, with America at its head.

If we want to understand how the collective mind of the Middle East was programmed against America, we have to study what the films did, what the media did, what education did. Qutb’s thought is the model on which the media and the education systems of the Arab world were built over the last century.

Qutb had a project. It was built on hatred of the West: a Brotherhood project, an Islamic project, a project for a state, a project for the whole Middle East, a project to raise generations on hatred of the West and hatred of America. This is the Muslim Brotherhood’s project, it is Qatar’s project, it is Al Jazeera’s project, it is the project whose consequences we are living with today.

Who Was Sayyid Qutb?

Qutb was born in Egypt in 1906. He graduated from Dar al-Ulum University in Saudi Arabia in 1933, and then worked as an Arabic teacher, later as an inspector, and then in Egypt’s Ministry of Education. In 1948, Qutb was sent on an educational mission to the United States, funded by the Ministry of Education. He returned in 1950 and left the ministry in 1952.

Some people hold to a conspiracy theory that it was America that made him a radical; that the trip is what turned him. This is false, and the historical record refutes it. According to the historian Muhammad Shafiq Ghurbal, it was he and Ismail al-Qabbani who proposed to place Qutb on the mission, even though he was unqualified, because he had been causing problems at the Ministry of Education. Qutb was forty-two, in poor health, with bad eyesight and other ailments. Neither his age nor his health would ordinarily qualify a man for such a mission.

The ministry of Education was moving in the direction of adopting Western curricula in education, and Qutb was among those who opposed this. He was not alone; there was a group of opponents. They sent him to the United States in the hope that his outlook would broaden and change, that he would see America for himself, do some comparison of educational curricula, observe how they were run there, and return reassured that Egypt should adopt what America had.

What actually happened is that he already hated America before he went there. He did not become a radical after his visit. He went as a man who already hated America, hated the West, hated Western curricula, wanted to overhaul the Ministry of Education. He had even started a journal, al-Fikr al-Jadid (The New Thought), before he left for the United States, with Muslim Brotherhood funding: al-Hajj Muhammad Helmy al-Minyawi, a Brotherhood member, was its financier. Qutb’s ideas already aligned with those of the Brotherhood, though he had not yet joined the organization formally, that came only later, in 1952.

Qutb joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1952, two years after his visit to America. He was arrested in 1954 accused of conspiring to overthrow the Egyptian government. He served ten years and was released in 1964. He was re-arrested in 1965 for leading a Muslim Brotherhood effort overthrow of what he saw as non-Islamic governments. He was tried and executed in 1966, sixty years ago this August 29.

In 1952, in al-Risala magazine he wrote:

“We will not be able to overcome this colonialism, unless we destroy it in our own feelings, and destroy with it the machinery that crushes our faith in ourselves: the machinery represented by the Ministry of Education and the institutes of pedagogy, and the treacherous, deformed pens.”

In his view, no pen that praises Western civilization or says it is superior to Egypt can be permitted. The curricula must go; the Ministry of Education must be destroyed.

“We must crush this machinery that once sang the praises of France, or England, or America, any one of them; we must grind them down.”

Did Qutb succeed? Look at the level to which education in Egypt has now sunk. Look at the extent of the hatred of the West and of Christianity. The Muslim Brotherhood project succeeded in destroying education in Egypt and across the Arab world. What Qutb himself could not do, they are doing now, and have done after him.

“Our First Enemy: The White Man”

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When you walk into the grand Casino du Liban in Jounieh, you are immediately transported back to a lost era. The walls of the entrance hall and main galleries are lined with large black-and-white photographs from the 1960s and early 1970s. There is President Camille Chamoun greeting foreign dignitaries; Charles Helou smiling beside international statesmen; Fairuz performing at the height of her fame; Hollywood stars and European royalty mingling with Lebanese elites at lavish parties; images of a confident, glamorous Beirut filled with elegance, possibility, and modernity. As you stand there, it is almost impossible not to pause and ask: What happened to Lebanon?

In the early 1960s, Israel’s Ministry of Tourism dispatched a high-level delegation to New York. Their mission was to sit down with one of America’s most prestigious advertising agencies and figure out how to transform Tel Aviv into another Beirut on the Mediterranean.

At that moment, Beirut stood as the undisputed crown jewel of the Middle East, a city routinely called “the Paris of the Orient.” In the 1960s, it was the financial capital of the Arab world. Gulf oil money flowed through its sophisticated banks, making Lebanon the region’s premier financial hub. It was the medical capital, home to the finest hospitals and specialist clinics, attracting patients from across the Middle East and beyond. It was the educational capital, anchored by the American University of Beirut, an institution so renowned that it was often described as the Harvard of the Middle East. Its campus, perched on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean, produced generations of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and intellectuals who would go on to shape the region.

Beirut’s streets hummed with cosmopolitan energy. Elegant French architecture lined the Corniche. Nightclubs, theaters, and cafés stayed open late. Fashion houses, art galleries, and publishing firms flourished. Tourists from Europe and the Gulf mingled with local elites. Lebanon’s economy boomed. Its currency, the Lebanese pound, was one of the strongest in the developing world. Its press was the freest in the Arab region. Its universities attracted the brightest minds. For a brief, glittering window, Beirut represented what the Middle East could have been: prosperous, open, and modern.

Lebanon’s Maronite Christians, along with substantial Greek Orthodox, Melkite Catholic, and Protestant communities, had built and sustained the country’s most vital institutions. They had established the banking system, and nurtured the leading educational centers. They had built the hospitals that earned Lebanon its reputation, and cultivated a legal and political culture that allowed for greater freedom, pluralism, and economic dynamism than anywhere else in the Arab Middle East.

The Decline

While Lebanese Christians poured their energy into building, large segments of the Muslim population remained preoccupied with religiously motivated causes that had little to do with Lebanon. For many Muslims, Lebanon was never an end in itself. It was viewed as part of a larger Islamic ummah. The ultimate loyalty was not to the Lebanese republic but to the broader struggle against perceived enemies of Islam, chief among them the emerging Jewish state.

When the Arab-Israeli War broke out following Israel’s declaration of independence, Lebanon was under strong pressure from the Arab League to join the military coalition against the new Jewish state. Christian leaders, particularly the Maronites, were deeply reluctant. Many saw no strategic reason for Lebanon, a small, fragile, multi-confessional country, to risk its stability in a distant ideological conflict. Yet the Muslim political class, backed by pan-Arab sentiment and pressure from Cairo and Damascus, insisted that Lebanon must participate.

In the end, Lebanon sent only a token force, a single infantry battalion that saw limited action, but the decision to join the Arab coalition, however symbolic, marked the first time the young republic subordinated its own interests to a broader Islamic cause. Christian politicians, wary of being labeled traitors to the Arab nation, acquiesced. It was the beginning of a pattern that would repeat for decades: Christians compromising their own vision of Lebanon in the name of national unity, while Muslim leaders treated that unity as a tool to advance larger ideological objectives.

The pattern accelerated dramatically in the 1950s and 1960s under the influence of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism presented itself as a secular, modernizing ideology. In reality, it served as a powerful vehicle for reasserting Islamic identity and political goals under a more palatable banner. Nasser’s radio broadcasts, his calls for Arab unity, and his fiery anti-Western and anti-Israel rhetoric resonated deeply with Lebanon’s Muslim population. For many Muslims, Nasser’s movement was not merely political; it tapped into long-standing religious sentiments about restoring Muslim power and dignity against historical enemies.

Christian leaders initially tried to accommodate this wave. They hoped Arab nationalism could be domesticated within Lebanon’s confessional system. Instead, it systematically undermined Christian political dominance. In the 1958 crisis, Muslim demands for greater power and closer alignment with Nasser’s United Arab Republic nearly tore the country apart. President Camille Chamoun, a Maronite, was forced to call in American Marines to restore order.

By the late 1960s, the arrival of armed Palestinian militias, the fedayeen of the PLO and other factions, and under intense pressure from Nasser’s Egypt and radical Arab states, the Lebanese government signed the Cairo Agreement. This infamous pact effectively granted the PLO extraterritorial rights inside Lebanon. Palestinian camps became sovereign enclaves beyond Lebanese army control. The south of the country was transformed into “Fatahland”, a de facto launching pad for cross-border attacks on Israel.

Lebanese Christians watched as their country was turned into a base for a foreign guerrilla war. The Palestinian cause was never really about Palestinian statehood in the eyes of Muslims; it was part of the larger Islamic struggle against the “Zionist entity.” Once again, Muslim leaders in Lebanon pressured the Christian political class to accept this arrangement in the name of Arab solidarity. Christians, still clinging to the dream of coexistence, compromised. The result was catastrophic. The PLO’s presence radicalized Lebanese Muslims, destabilized the south, and provoked Israeli retaliation. What began as “tolerance” for a supposedly secular nationalist cause became the vehicle for embedding a religiously driven war inside Lebanon itself.

After Israel’s 1982 invasion forced the PLO’s expulsion from Beirut and southern Lebanon, the underlying dynamic did not disappear. It simply mutated. In the power vacuum left by the departing Palestinians, a new force emerged: Hezbollah inherited the mantle of “resistance.” Unlike the PLO’s secular façade, Hezbollah presented its war against Israel not as jihad but as legitimate “national resistance”, a cause that even some secular Lebanese could be pressured to support.

Once again, parts of the Lebanese political class, including some Christians, were drawn into accommodating or at least not confronting this new actor. Hezbollah gradually entrenched itself in Lebanon’s institutions, built a parallel state in the south and the Shiite suburbs, and used the country’s resources, territory, and political system to pursue its religiously motivated objectives.

The pattern that destroyed Lebanon was always the same: Christians, driven by a genuine desire to build and coexist, repeatedly compromised with groups whose ultimate commitments were theological and expansionist. Muslims, whether under the banner of Arab nationalism or Palestinian liberation or “resistance,” consistently subordinated Lebanon’s national interest to a larger civilizational and religious struggle, with Israel as the central symbol of that struggle. Each concession was sold as pragmatism or unity. Each time, it further eroded the Christian-built foundations of the state.

The New Lebanon

The Christian-built West is being systematically transformed into the new Lebanon. What is happening today is a coherent process in which Islamic political causes, rebranded as secular and humanitarian struggles, have been granted entry into the very institutions Christians once created. The result is a coalition of convenience in which disparate groups, each with its own agenda, have converged on a common project: using the West as a launching pad against Israel while simultaneously hollowing out the West itself.

What was once openly declared as jihad now travels under more palatable banners: “Palestinian rights,” “anti-colonial resistance,” “global justice,” “intersectional liberation,” and “human rights.” These slogans allow Islamic supremacist goals to infiltrate Western universities, media, NGOs, political parties, and even churches without triggering the instinctive alarm that would have been raised in earlier generations. The cause remains the same, the theological and civilizational rejection of Jewish sovereignty and, by extension, of the Christian West that supports it, but the packaging has been updated for Western consumption.

This rebranding has proven extraordinarily effective at recruiting non-Muslim allies who would never openly embrace Islamic theology. The coalition is broad and seemingly contradictory, yet it holds together because each partner gains something vital from the weakening of the existing order.

Younger Westerners, particularly those educated in the last three decades, have been steeped in a narrative of civilizational guilt. They have been taught that their own societies are irredeemably racist, colonial, and oppressive. For them, aligning with the “oppressed”, currently embodied in the Palestinian cause, offers moral absolution and a sense of purpose. They do not see themselves as participants in a religious war; they see themselves as fighting for justice. Their hatred is not of Jews per se, but of the civilization that produced them. Israel becomes the perfect symbol of everything they have been conditioned to despise: Western success, military strength, and unapologetic particularism.

Traditional antisemites, both on the far right and among certain segments of the old left, have discovered in anti-Zionism a socially acceptable vehicle for their ancient hatred. What was once confined to fringe conspiracy theories or outright neo-Nazism can now be expressed in the respectable language of human rights reports, academic conferences, and street protests. Anti-Zionism has become the acceptable modern form of antisemitism, one that allows respectable people to traffic in the same tropes their grandparents would have recognized.

Communists and hard-left ideologues see in the Palestinian cause a continuation of their historic project. For them, Israel is the last outpost of Western capitalism and imperialism in the Middle East. Bringing it down is a necessary step toward dismantling the broader liberal order. They do not care about Islamic theology; they care about power. The alliance with Muslims is purely tactical, useful idiots on both sides, each believing they will ultimately prevail.

Globalists and one-world-order advocates view strong nation-states with distinct civilizational identities as obstacles. National sovereignty, cultural particularism, and the Judeo-Christian moral framework that undergirds the West stand in the way of their vision of borderless governance and homogenized humanity. By eroding the West’s confidence in its own foundations, they accelerate the transfer of power to supranational institutions and global norms. The Palestinian cause, with its universalist framing, serves as a useful battering ram against the particular.

And then there are the Muslims themselves, those operating from an explicitly Islamic framework. For them, the cause is theological. From the river to the sea is not a slogan about borders; it is a statement of eschatological intent. They are not seeking a two-state solution. They are advancing the same civilizational project that motivated the PLO, Nasserism, and now Hezbollah and Hamas: the eventual submission of the West to Islamic dominance, with Israel as the immediate and symbolic obstacle.

What makes this coalition so dangerous is that it is not coordinated from a single command center. It does not need to be. Each group brings its own institutional power, cultural capital, and demographic weight. The left controls the universities and much of the media. The globalists dominate international organizations and large foundations. Muslims provide the foot soldiers, the demographic momentum, and the uncompromising ideological core. Together, they have achieved what no single faction could have managed alone: the capture of Western moral language, the weaponization of Western institutions against the Jewish state, and the gradual erosion of the West’s will to defend itself.

The process mirrors Lebanon with eerie precision. In Lebanon, Christians believed they could contain and domesticate the forces arrayed against them. They compromised again and again in the name of unity. Each concession further empowered the very groups that ultimately destroyed the state they had built. Today, the West is making the identical mistake, only the stakes are global. The same tolerance that allowed Palestinian militias to turn southern Lebanon into “Fatahland” now allows ideological enclaves to function as bases for a larger civilizational assault.

The destruction is not coming through tanks and artillery this time. It is coming through lawfare, demographic transformation, institutional capture, and the steady hollowing out of cultural self-confidence. The West is being turned into a platform, a new launching pad, from which the war against Israel, and ultimately against the Christian civilizational order that made the modern West possible, can be waged more effectively than ever before.

And like Lebanon before it, the West is financing its own demise. Its universities train the activists who march against it. Its media amplifies the narratives that delegitimize it. Its legal systems are being used to shield those who seek its replacement. Its political class, terrified of being called intolerant, continues to extend the very tolerance that is being weaponized against it.

The Christian-built West is repeating Lebanon’s error on a civilizational scale. The question is how far it will be allowed to go before the realization comes, too late, as it did in Beirut.

Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

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Why is the greatest civilization in history so insanely intent on committing collective seppuku? Why has the West regressed from a super-civilized society into the great herd of Gadarene swine stampeding wildly and drowning itself in the sea as in Mark’s Gospel?

Since James Burnham penned his landmark Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism in 1964, historians, sociologists, and philosophers have spilled barrels of ink attempting to answer the enigma of Western self-immolation. As it happens, the “suicide of the West” is now a genre in its own right.

Gad Saad, an evolutionary psychologist who has become a social media sensation because he can speak in a style accessible to the commoner, straddle East and West with the dexterity of a cheetah, but most importantly, because his two-word diagnosis of the West’s hara-kiri has gone viral. For Saad, the psychotropic intoxicant fueling the West’s lunacy is “suicidal empathy.”

Shortly after Saad’s book hit the stands in mid-May, “suicidal empathy” rapidly became a byword to explain Western irrationality. Remarkably, each time I pen a piece on some new lunacy pushed by Western governments, academia, the medical establishment, or even Pope Leo XIV and send it to friends, they almost always chime back with two words: “suicidal empathy.”

Saad’s Jewish family was forced to flee Lebanon and emigrate to Canada to escape the Islamic Jew-hatred plaguing the land of his birth. With Canada now leading the West in pathological empathy, there couldn’t be a better illustration of “out of the frying pan into the fire.” Saad is writing from inside the furnace: it’s what gives his book its evocative voice and diagnostic depth.

The British historian Arnold Toynbee had already postulated that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Saad’s key contribution is to field the question of civilizational kamikaze from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. He builds on his 2020 book The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, which explored how human cognition can misfire when it becomes “zombified by ideological rapture.”

Saad defines suicidal empathy as the “orgiastic misfiring” of empathy, one of our most noble virtues. Our evolutionary mechanism has hardwired us to be empathetic whether in romantic mate choice, making friends, or in the caring professions like nursing.

While psychopaths lack empathy, there are also psychiatric disorders involving a display of indiscriminate hyperempathy. Our empathy system could also be “hijacked in suboptimal ways” without necessarily being concomitant with a mental disorder, Saad warns, as in the case of “compassion fatigue.”

Similarly, suicide can be viewed through an evolutionary lens “as the activation of evolutionary-based forms of altruism.” It could be understood as noble and virtuous—Saad cites examples of a radical commitment to one’s belief system (death cults), ultimate devotion (Romeo and Juliet), a means of expiation (seppuku), or an alternative to something far worse (Jews at Masada).

“Suicidal empathy” is the bastard child of Mr. Virtuous Martyrdom and Mrs. Orgiastic Compassion. The suicidally empathetic person engages in this form of ritual disembowelment as the supreme path to attaining and parading one’s virtue. Like Narcissus, they take hubristic pride in their superior virtue. The disorder then spreads like a contagion through society. “Suicidal empathy is a deadly contagion of one of our most noble virtues,” Saad warns. “If not properly contained, it will destroy the West.”

Saad cites the classic illustration of suicidal empathy from Aesop’s fables: an orgiastically compassionate farmer sees a viper freezing to death and tucks it into his coat to keep it warm. The snake bites the farmer as soon as it recovers. One of the many human tales of orgiastic empathy in the book is that of Karsten Nordal Hauken, a Norwegian man raped by a Somali immigrant. When a Norwegian judge decided to deport the rapist back to Somalia, Hauken was traumatized, worrying that his rapist might lead a difficult life in his homeland.

A central argument of Saad’s book hinges on a paradigm shift in Western epistemology (the theory of knowledge). For centuries, Western civilization was predicated on the rigour of the scientific method—the epistemology for seeking truth. It is what contributed to Western greatness and superiority. Jettisoning an epistemology of truth in favour of an epistemology of care leads to a grotesquely perverse epistemological empathy: “I empathize, therefore I am.”

Saad explains how the West was built on deontological principles. Misguided empathy, however, uses consequentialist rather than deontological ethics. Progressive academia, for example, censors “forbidden knowledge” by banning sensitive research topics lest they lead to “negative consequences” for “marginalized” communities. If research on a topic finds Blacks superior on a given task, it is celebrated. If the results find whites superior, it must be binned. One must, of course, be empathetic to serial plagiarism if practised by Black academics like Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Saad’s book was released just before the scandal of Cambridge University’s Jason Arday.

Paradoxically, “marginalized” communities like Muslim migrants may be intent on destroying the host community that welcomes them. But the host refuses to distinguish between embracing the in-group while remaining cautious of the out-group. We do not mete out our “empathy equally to all,” Saad writes. “Suicidal empathy eradicates this evolutionary-based calculus.” In this twisted scheme, there are, nevertheless, out-groups like the Jews who, despite their status as an “out-group,” must never be the recipients of empathy.

Saad applies the construct of “suicidal empathy” to the entire gamut of Western brain sickness, showing how it demonstrates a preferential option for the diversity, inclusion, and equity cult over meritocracy, illegal aliens over citizens, criminals over victims, squatters over homeowners, transwomen over biological women, drag queens over children’s innocence, Hamas over Zionists, socialism over capitalism, wanton foreign aid over judicious reciprocity, and Islam over all other religions.

Saad draws on a range of diverse scholarship, from economist Thomas Sowell’s book on how self-congratulation becomes a destructive basis for policymaking to ethicist Peter Singer’s idea of expanding our moral circle to animals. The book is packed with hair-raising illustrations of the catastrophic cancer of suicidally empathetic policies that are rapidly devouring the West.

Readers who reject evolutionary biology or psychology can still benefit from Saad’s conclusions, while remaining hermeneutically suspicious of his methodological tool. In a later edition, Saad might perhaps delve deeper into the question of why the West has a unique penchant for suicidal empathy. Can evolutionary biology explain this phenomenon?

Why is it that the 57 member states in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation or the 22 Arab countries are unwilling to display the same level of empathy and rehome Gazan refugees? Why do Singapore, Japan, or India not exhibit extravagant empathy as do Germany or Sweden?

Would a metaphysical explanation of how the West is rooted in biblical ethics of compassion and love for the Other, even the enemy, offer a better way to understand the West’s madness by positing that in a post-Christian context it has turned the biblical imperative to love the other into a heresy?

G.K. Chesterton defined heresy as “a truth taught out of proportion.” In his book Orthodoxy, he elaborated: “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” In a West that has rejected its biblical foundations, it is almost as if a hubris-filled collective is enthroning itself as divine by replicating what the God of the Bible has done for humanity by dying for us “while we were his enemies,” as the Jewish rabbi Paul would write to the Romans.

The Messiah suffered and died to save us in the “out-group” by atoning for our sins—a concept Jesus derived from the Servant Songs of the prophet Isaiah. Godless Westerners reject the Gospel, yet with a self-affirming messianism and savior complex, they believe they are saving the ‘marginalized’ other by ‘dying to be kind’ and becoming self-canonized martyrs.

Policymakers, pastors, and Pope Leo XIV would benefit from reading this book. It might stem the nauseating tide of saccharine suicidal empathy oozing from politicians and pulpits of many churches and from platitudinous papal disquisitions that read as if Greta Thunberg had ghostwritten them. A health warning: do not take the book with you on a beach holiday. It contains too many horror stories of how the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Rev. Dr. Jules Gomes is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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The West, Aleksandr Dugin says, has mistaken its own historical experience for a universal model. Individual rights, liberal democracy, freedom of conscience, these are not truths applicable to all of humanity. They are the products of one particular civilization that has arrogantly imposed itself on the rest of the world. His multipolarity is presented as the cure: let Russia be Russia, let Iran be Iran, let China be China. The West has no right to demand that you become like it.

It sounds, on the surface, like a defense of diversity. It is not. It is a philosophical project to abolish the only principles that have ever given ordinary people, inside Russia, inside Iran, inside China, the standing to resist the power of those who rule them. What Dugin calls the cage of Western universalism is, for the dissident in a Moscow prison, the only key that exists.

Western civilization produced a specific set of ideas about the relationship between the individual and power. Every human being possesses an inherent dignity that no ruler, state or collective can erase, not earned through service to the state, not granted by government in exchange for loyalty, but existing before the state and placing limits on what it may do. Law stands above rulers. The king is not the source of law. He is subject to it. Conscience precedes political authority. What a person believes, how he worships, what he says, these are not gifts from the government, revocable at its pleasure. They belong to the person before any government exists. Rights are not granted by states. They are recognized by states. If rights come from the state, the state can take them back. If they exist before the state, its only function is to protect them.

These ideas were encoded in the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence. Dugin’s argument depends on a claim that these principles are Western, historically contingent products of one civilization’s experience, with no more universal validity than any other civilization’s arrangements. The claim is false.

There is a reason more than 175 nations adhere to civil and political rights treaties manufactured in the West. The non-Muslim in an Islamic country and the Shudra in India are protected, theoretically, at least, by those laws, not by their religious or caste standing. Because if they were left to the traditions of any other civilization, they would have no protection at all: their own traditions are precisely the thing the treaties protect them from.

Western civilization globalized its Judeo-Christian principles. The intrinsic value of the human being, the premise adopted by all those signing nations, comes from Genesis: if man bears the image of God, then his worth comes from God, not from his religious affiliation or social rank. No caliph grants it; no caste assigns it; it arrives at birth, from above every throne.

The limitation of power comes from the same source. If God stands above every ruler, then the ruler answers to a law he did not make. In Deuteronomy the king is commanded to write out the law with his own hand and read it all the days of his life, “that his heart be not lifted up above his brothers,” the king as the law’s copyist, not its author. The ruler is not the source of law. He is its subject.

And freedom of conscience comes from there too: if conscience is the place where the individual stands alone before God, then no political authority can legitimately occupy that space.

These ideas did not originate in London or Philadelphia, they originated in Jerusalem. The West translated them, through centuries of legal development, through the Reformation’s insistence that Scripture stands above rulers, through the Enlightenment’s rendering of theological claims into political language. John Locke wrote that the reason no one may harm another is that human beings are “the workmanship of one omnipotent Maker.” The verse on the Liberty Bell, “proclaim liberty throughout the land”, is from Leviticus. The Declaration of Independence grounds rights not in the wisdom of the founding generation but in a Creator.

Dugin is therefore not attacking Western preferences. He is attacking the political consequences of a theological claim about the nature of the human person, a claim that preceded the West and will outlast it.

Dugin presents multipolarity as liberation. Each civilization, freed from Western universalism, organizes as it likes. Russia can be Eurasian, Iran can be Islamic, China can be Confucian, or Marxist-Leninist, or whatever civilizational identity the Party finds convenient that decade.

What does that mean for the human beings actually living under each civilization? In Russia, journalists are imprisoned for reporting on the war in Ukraine under laws that criminalize the word “war” itself. Alexei Navalny died in February 2024 in an Arctic penal colony above the polar circle, because his fate was decided by the principles of a non-Western civilization.

In Iran, women who remove their headscarves face arrest, torture and death. Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police in September 2022, and the young women who took to the streets afterward, who cut their hair and burned their hijabs, did not appeal to Shia jurisprudence. They appealed to the right to determine what happens to their own bodies, to freedom of conscience, to the proposition that no government owns the person. These are Western impositions.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban erased women from schools, universities, parks, and finally from windows, a 2024 edict ordered that new buildings deny women even a view of the street. The girls studying in secret basements are not appealing to Islam. They are appealing to an idea that the West globalized.

There is a reason the peoples of the world aspire to the Western model: it is universal. It is the destination, for justice, liberty, equality before the law, rather than one culture among many. If the totalitarian governments of the world achieve Dugin’s dream, each “civilization” decides what is good and what is evil, which means the men holding power decide. They will decide whose life outweighs whose: the believer’s over the infidel’s, the Party member’s over the peasant’s, the ruler’s clan over everyone else.

Multipolarity delivers every human being to whoever rules the ground he stands on. This is not the liberation of civilizations. It is the liberation of governments from their people.

Dugin calls Western universalism a cage, but in reality for the people inside the civilizations he celebrates, the cage is the multipolarity he is building. No one smuggles himself toward Tehran, no one crosses an ocean on a raft bound for Pyongyang. The migration of the modern world runs overwhelmingly in one direction, toward the societies built on the very ideas Dugin describes as parochial.

Ali Siadatan is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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