Islamic State: history repeating itself? Without redeeming features?

Explaining increased British involvement in action to stop the Islamic State in Iraq, David Cameron points out that the alternative was to allow the emergence of a “terrorist state on the shores of the Mediterranean and bordering a Nato member.”

The Nato member in question is Turkey. And, curiously, seeing that region threatened by a militant Islamic movement is a repetition of history – though, as often happens when history repeats itself, the second time round is even more painful than the first.

When the prophet Mohammed died in 632, he left the Arabian peninsula united as it had never been before. His successors discovered an energy and a military drive that would astonish and, generally, overwhelm their neighbours. To their North, two great Empires had been battling with each other for centuries: the Byzantines, successors of Rome, and the Persians. Within a generation, the Persian Empire had been completely overrun by Islamic forces and the Byzantines had lost huge territories, principally in the regions that now make up Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – and Turkey.

See the repetition?

Their sudden irruption on the scene wasn’t the only remarkable aspect of the Muslim conquerors. Their behaviour after victory gave them some unusual redeeming features. Instead of massacring their defeated foes, or even crushing them, they usually recruited them. So, for example, when they’d stretched their Empire along the whole of the North African seaboard, they decided it might be worth crossing the straits into Southern Spain and trying their luck in Europe. Tariq ibn Ziyad, who led their first landing on the rock off the Spanish coast which bears his name, Tariq’s mountain, Jebel Tariq, now Gibraltar, was in all likelihood a Berber, rather than an Arab, and the son of a former prisoner of war.

Once in Spain, the Arabs made allies of the Jews, long oppressed by the Visigothic Christian rulers. Jews held the captured cities on behalf of the Muslim armies, which could therefore move on to capture some more. The tradition of coexistence with other communities inspired one of the world’s great cultural centres in Cordoba. Muslims ran the show, but Jews – who were allowed to settle in pride of place right next to the Mosque – and Christians were tolerated and allowed to debate with Muslim scholars in one of the richest periods of intellectual development in Europe.

When Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote the works that would transform Christian thinking and underpin the Renaissance, he drew heavily on the thought of the Greek pagan Aristotle, as interpreted by a Muslim scholar from Cordoba, Averroes (Ibn Rushd).

That was then. Today a new Islamic military force is threatening the borders of what were once the Persian and Byzantine Empires. Given the opportunity, it would no doubt be more than happy to take the whole Mediterranean littoral and even threaten southern Spain. However, based on their track record so far, you can be pretty certain that they wouldn’t want to found a community in Cordoba that would win an international reputation for the free exchange of ideas.

Islamic State: attempting to reproduce the Muslim conquests
but without any of the redeeming features

On the contrary, it has proved to be a life-threatening condition to be non-Muslim, or even simply the wrong kind of Muslim, in the presence of the Islamic State. 1500 Shia prisoners of war were executed in a single day; Christians or Yazidis have been murdered, enslaved or driven from their homes in huge numbers.

The militants of Islamic State are trying to reproduce the great conquests of Islam in its early days. But as I said before, the second time round tends to be less admirable, less glorious than the first.

In Islamic State’s case, a lot less admirable and a lot less glorious.

No bad thing if we can help stem their attempt to repeat history.

Dubya's Crusade Accomplished

Remember that ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner that George W. Bush put up on an aircraft carrier in 2003? It has to be one of the iconic symbols of his presidency, along with his sitting in a primary school classroom being read to by a five year old while New York was being attacked by terrorists on 9/11. His response to the attack was a tad slow, his claims of victory a tad premature, so the two events between them really define his contribution to history.

You may also recall that when he first set out to achieve his glorious victory in Iraq he called what he was doing a ‘Crusade’.

The Crusades were expeditions by the flower of Christian chivalry, travelling to the Holy Land to win over the locals, primarily Moslem, to a gospel of love and peace. So committed were they to spreading goodwill to all men that they were more than happy to put anyone who resisted them to the sword or occasionally the flame, or even both if the spirit so moved them. Indeed, to make sure no-one got left out, they didn’t limit themselves to people who resisted them and were frequently happy to massacre anyone who just happened to be there. Just like today, in fact.

In the sack of Jerusalem, for example, to underline their reverence for this holiest of sites, they wiped out most of the Moslems and also the majority of the Jews, for good measure.

But in case you were thinking that they were actuated by a desire to persecute only non-Christians, think again: they also sacked the great Christian city of Constantinople. Indeed, they did such a good job of breaking that last remaining outpost of Christendom in a region increasingly conquered by Islam, that within a couple of generations it too had fallen to the Moslems.

That pretty much sums up the Crusades: bloody, indiscriminate and ultimately counter-productive.

However, Moslem folk consciousness tends to perceive the Crusades as being directed specifically against them, ignoring the fine work they did of wiping out anybody else they could get their hands on. So it was slightly inappropriate for Dubya to use the word to describe what the Bushmen claimed was not simply an anti-Islamic action. Fairly soon he learned to drop the word.

I maintain, though, that it might actually have been perfectly accurate.

You see, on Sunday I heard a leading figure of the refugee Iraqi Christian community in London on the radio. He was appealing to other Christians in Iraq to come and join his exile in England. There is no safety, he was claiming, for Christians in his home country.

Sounds pretty much like what the Crusades achieved. In their wars against the Moslem infidels, they put an end to the last remaining Christian bulwark against the advance of Islam. So given the collapse of modern day Christianity in Iraq, maybe it’s time for Bush to put up another ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner.

After all, he seems to have accomplished pretty much the same kind of success as the Fourth Crusade.




Postscript. They used to say that there'd been a terrible catastrophe during the second Bush presidency when the White House Library was consumed by fire. What made the event so ghastly was that Dubya's book got burned. And he hadn't even finished colouring it in.


So it's fascinating to see that he's actually written one now. Or at any rate published one. I enjoyed reading accounts of Bush’s autobiography, Decision Points, though I think I might skip reading the book itself. It seems that when his mother had a miscarriage, she showed the teenage Dubya the foetus in a jar. He cites this experience ‘to show how my mom and I developed a relationship.’


Yes. Things fall into place. If that’s how he built his relationship with his mother, one can understand why it might have been a comfort that a child was reading to him when his country was under attack. The alternative of facing up to his duties as Commander-in-Chief might just have been far too painful.