Bruce Thornton skewers the intellectual myopia and inertia that prevents us, four years from 9/11, from properly assessing the challenge we face in this review Andrew Bostom's magnificent and essential Legacy of Jihad at VDH's Private Papers:
Four years after 9/11 the postmortem of that disaster continues to focus on the institutional failures of our intelligence agencies and government bureaucracies. Yet the larger intellectual and cultural corruption that in part made possible many of those misjudgments and mistakes does not receive the public attention it deserves. The politicizing of the academy, for example, that accelerated in the sixties had compromised the study of Islam and the Middle East long before Islamic terrorism appeared on our cultural radar. Because of this ideological distortion, centuries of consensus about the aggressive, intolerant, and expansionist nature of Islam –– an agreement reflecting both the facts of the historical record and the words themselves of the Koran and Muslim theologians and jurists –– were discarded in the service of an anti-Western political and ideological agenda.In this politicized narrative, the West is the arch-villain of history, and its primal sins of colonialism and imperialism are the engines of oppression responsible for all the world’s ills. With regard to Islam and the Middle East, the West’s scholars are accused of creating “orientalism,” a collection of degrading myths and stereotypes that masqueraded as scholarship and provided the intellectual grease for the wheels and gears of colonial and imperial exploitation. With some few notable exceptions, the myth of orientalism has corrupted many of the scholars studying Islam in American and European universities. The result has been a reduction of history to a melodrama in which a noble, tolerant, cultured Islamic world had been unjustly attacked by an intolerant, greedy West addled by Christian bigotry and racist stereotypes of blood-thirsty jihadist warriors. All the problems in the Middle East today, in this Orwellian rewriting of history, thus derive not from anything dysfunctional in Islam or Arab regimes but rather in the sins of the West and its Middle Eastern minion, Israel.
Among the brave scholars who have worked to correct these distortions –– Bernard Lewis, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Bat Ye’or, Ibn Warraq, to name just a few––Dr. Andrew G. Bostom has recently been one of the most tireless. In his columns at American Thinker, Dr. Bostom has exposed the politicized interpretations, half-truths, and outright lies that our enemies and their Western enablers have used to obscure the truth about the struggle we are in. Now Dr. Bostom has compiled an invaluable collection of primary documents and scholarly commentary concerning jihad. This compendium shows that Islamic jihad has for fourteen centuries meant exactly what bin Laden, Zaraqawi, and every other so-called “Islamic fundamentalist” says it means: a war to compel the whole world to embrace Islam, die, or live under intolerant, humiliating restrictions designed to force the unbeliever every day to acknowledge his own inferiority and the superiority of his Islamic overlords.
Read it all.
I read this excellent article over at VDH. It's well worth reading and Bruce Thronton is becoming one of my favorite commentators on Islam.
About the Muslim slave network, Thornton writes:
"And let’s not forget the millions of Europeans kidnapped and sold into slavery by Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean, or the African men cruelly castrated to provide eunuchs for harems and government service, or the Balkan Christian boys, perhaps as many as one million, taken from their parents, forcibly converted, and made to serve the Ottoman regime."
What about the regions to the East which Islamic Jihad conquered? Did Muslim conquerors also include Central Asiatic peoples, Hindus, Persians, and SE Asians in their vast slave network? How many? What sources are available which examine this?
Dangerous assumption concerning Muslim immigrants:
"Maybe they will become moderate."
Thornton writes: "The 17th-century Muslim historian al-Maqqari is quite explicit about the intended effect of this terror: “Allah thus instilled such fear among the infidels that they did not dare to go and fight the conquerors; they only approached them as suppliants, to beg for peace.” "
Never in their wildest dreams did all the Muslim theorists over the ages, up to the 20th century Sayyid Qutb, ever predict that the great Western civilization would evolve a major culture of irrationality that, while quite capable of recognizing and investigating its own historical faults, is incapable of recognizing and investigating Islamic Jihad.
Praise Allah for the two gifts of the 20th century: oil and Western irrationality!
Robert Segal wrote a fairly useful book called
Islam's Black Slaves, the other diaspora.
See it at Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0374227748/qid=1126503262/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-5578856-7912733?v=glance&s=books
The book has its flaws but it does recount a side of Islamic history of which very few people are aware.
Thornton mentions that Islam is "intolerant." Curiously, Karl Marx [yes, that Karl Marx] also once wrote that Muslims were "intolerant." This appears in his article on the origins of the Crimean War, in the New York Daily Tribune, 15 April 1854. In fact, he wrote that the Muslims [Mussulmans, he called them] in Jerusalem showed "intolerance" precisely to the Jews there!! Show that to a Leftist today. In the same article, Marx writes about the dhimma system in the Ottoman empire, using the word rayah for the Greek Orthodox dhimmis, and describing how the millet system created a system of corruption in the Greek church from which the Ottoman overlords also profited. [long excerpts from this article can be found by Googling: "mussulman oppression and intolerance"]. Speaking of the Greek church, Jules Dassin, the director, made a movie about the Greek dhimmi experience in Anatolia, before the 1922 expulsion of the Greeks from Anatolia. This story is little known in the West today --it seems to me-- even by people who consider themselves well-informed. Dassin's movie, called He Who Must Die, is based on a Kazantzakis novel. I saw it many years ago. I am not sure whether it succeeds as a movie, but the opening scenes of the Muslim-dhimmi relationship were powerfully graphic. Now, getting back to Thornton's remark that we are commonly presented with a falsified, sweetened and embellished version of Arab and Islamic history, one example of this is that Dassin's movie is not available in DVD form nor in video cassette. I'm not even sure that it can be rented. It's one of those things that disappear from the cultural landscape because they are unfavorable to the sweet and pretty tableau of Islamic and Arab history that has long been --and is still being today-- disseminated. Yet Dassin is considered an important director. The film Justine directed by George Cukor [based on a Durrell novel] never got the acclaim that I believe it deserved, especially for its full version. This film too depicts the dhimmi-Muslim relationship. Maybe that's why the film got so many bad reviews, though there were good ones too. So the historical falsifications take place not only in Academe but in the art and entertainment worlds.
Thornton mentions that Islam is "intolerant." Curiously, Karl Marx [yes, that Karl Marx] also once wrote that Muslims were "intolerant." This appears in his article on the origins of the Crimean War, in the New York Daily Tribune, 15 April 1854. In fact, he wrote that the Muslims [Mussulmans, he called them] in Jerusalem showed "intolerance" precisely to the Jews there!! Show that to a Leftist today. In the same article, Marx writes about the dhimma system in the Ottoman empire, using the word rayah for the Greek Orthodox dhimmis, and describing how the millet system created a system of corruption in the Greek church from which the Ottoman overlords also profited. [long excerpts from this article can be found by Googling: "mussulman oppression and intolerance"]. Speaking of the Greek church, Jules Dassin, the director, made a movie about the Greek dhimmi experience in Anatolia, before the 1922 expulsion of the Greeks from Anatolia. This story is little known in the West today --it seems to me-- even by people who consider themselves well-informed. Dassin's movie, called He Who Must Die, is based on a Kazantzakis novel. I saw it many years ago. I am not sure whether it succeeds as a movie, but the opening scenes of the Muslim-dhimmi relationship were powerfully graphic. Now, getting back to Thornton's remark that we are commonly presented with a falsified, sweetened and embellished version of Arab and Islamic history, one example of this is that Dassin's movie is not available in DVD form nor in video cassette. I'm not even sure that it can be rented. It's one of those things that disappear from the cultural landscape because they are unfavorable to the sweet and pretty tableau of Islamic and Arab history that has long been --and is still being today-- disseminated. Yet Dassin is considered an important director. The film Justine directed by George Cukor [based on a Durrell novel] never got the acclaim that I believe it deserved, especially for its full version. This film too depicts the dhimmi-Muslim relationship. Maybe that's why the film got so many bad reviews, though there were good ones too. So the historical falsifications take place not only in Academe but in the art and entertainment worlds.
Dr. Pepper
For India see;
Lal, K.S. 1994 Muslim Slave System in Medieval India, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi
and:
Goel, Sitaram. The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India
Thanks Nicephoras, much obliged.