Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West

395 Pages·2018·19.91 MB·English

by  Raymond Ibrahim

Copyright
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Victor Davis Hanson
Epigraph
Preface
The Westward Expansion of Islam Map
INTRODUCTION Jihad: The Roots of Conflict
CHAPTER 1 Islam Takes Christendom by Storm: The Battle of Yarmuk, 636
CHAPTER 2 The Jihad Reaches an Eastern Wall of Stone: The Siege of
Constantinople, 717
CHAPTER 3 The Jihad Reaches a Western Wall of Ice: The Battle of Tours, 732
CHAPTER 4 Islam’s New Champions: The Battle of Manzikert, 1071
CHAPTER 5 Christendom Strikes Back: The Battle of Hattin, 1187
CHAPTER 6 The Crusade Victorious: The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, 1212
CHAPTER 7 Muhammad’s Dream: The Siege of Constantinople, 1453
CHAPTER 8 The Rise and Fall of Islam: The Siege of Vienna, 1683
POSTSCRIPT Muslim Continuity vs. Western Confusion
Photos
Bibliography
Notes
Index
For Shechild, Minitaur, and Alfred.
FOREWORD
BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
RAYMOND IBRAHIM’S SWORD AND SCIMITAR IS A MUCH-NEEDED HISTORY of landmark
battles between Islam and the West. Ibrahim offers eight representative
engagements across time and space from France to the Middle East, and over a
millennium from 636 to 1683.
The study is first and foremost riveting military history. It offers blow-by-
blow concise accounts of the eight battles, and interprets them in the context of
the times—or rather, takes seriously what contemporary leaders claimed were
their intentions and how they worked out their strategies. Such a first-hand
approach requires extensive work in untranslated Arabic and occasional Greek
sources, as well as a general background in comparative military history. For
example, in his discussion of the pivotal battle of Yarmuk (near the current
Syrian and Jordanian border), Ibrahim—who previously worked with various
languages and manuscripts at the African and Middle Eastern division of the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.—marshals together a diverse body of
sources to offer a more accurate reconstruction of the battle that makes sense of
how the numerically superior Byzantines suffered such an inexplicable and
catastrophic loss.
Beyond its value as a meticulously researched chronicle of the major (and
many minor) engagements between Islam and the West, the book advances
larger cultural and religious arguments. Ibrahim’s purpose is not to suggest
inherent Western or Islamic cultural dynamism; indeed, he has selected four
exemplary Western defeats (the fall of Constantinople, Hattin, Manzikert, and
Yarmuk) balanced by four victories (second defense of Constantinople, Las
Navas de Tolosa, Tours, and Vienna). Instead, Ibrahim’s evidence reveals
certain recurring themes about the interaction between Islam and the West—an
entity rarely any more defined as Christendom—that are presently either often
ignored or underappreciated.
First, in most cases Islamic armies saw themselves as expansionary and
messianic, eager to engage the West and annex its territory and convert its
people. Inasmuch as Western armies were on the offensive, it was in the context
of their belief that they were reclaiming areas of the Middle East, Northern
Africa, Southern Europe, and Asia Minor that had been Roman or earlier
belonged to the Hellenistic Greek world for over a half millennium before the
birth of Islam. This may seem a self-evident point, but Ibrahim locates the
tensions in the context of the times, in which Muslim forces at least saw
themselves as absorbing formerly Westernized states and Western armies saw
themselves as retrieving land that had been Roman or Greek for centuries.
Second, while there were localized and intramural political and tribal
rivalries, Muslim armies went to war against the West more often as religious
rather than as national or ethnic forces, and their warring against the Westerners
was so seen as mostly a monolithic struggle against Christendom rather than
particular European states. In turn, Western armies, while fragmented and
marked by factions and political rivalries, still saw their common bond of
Christianity as the only way to unite to fight off Islam.
Again, respective religious chauvinism seems another obvious observation,
but quite often contemporary historians have tried to downplay any notion of a
religious “clash of civilizations.” In this context of religious tensions, Ibrahim
often investigates diverse epochs and cultures rarely associated with the
traditional theaters of conflict between Islam and Christendom, such as the
lasting bitterness that followed in Russia from the so-called years of the Tartar
yoke, and the Ottoman impediments to overland trade from Europe to the East
that were catalysts for the Portuguese and Spanish voyagers to the New World,
who initially had sought ways to squeeze Islam from both the West and new
outposts in Asia.
Third, Ibrahim sees a continuity between past and present; that is, Muslim
religious leaders and jihadists have characteristically seen Christianity as both
antithetical to the Islamic world and inherently ripe for conquest or conversion.
Westerners, in turn, have likewise over the centuries concluded that Islam was
inconsistent with Christian values, and have seen tension and conflict rather than
conciliation and peace as the more normal state of affairs. If current Islamists
reflect age-old antipathies—compare the messaging of the Islamic State, their
zealotry intentionally patterned after the dogma of their predecessors—so too
Western reactions to them are far from sudden outbreaks of prejudice and
xenophobia, but rather the self-defensive mechanisms of nearly 1,400 years.
Similarly, Ibrahim goes to some length to highlight little known
methodologies of Muslim historiography—either due to linguistic difficulties or
because criticism of them is considered politically incorrect. His critique is not
that Muslim historiography is necessarily more or less reliable than Western
sources of past conflict. Rather, Ibrahim argues that study of the craft of Muslim
historians reminds us of how the Islamic world’s account of religious tension
with the West is remarkably consistent across time and different from the
Western approach.
Fourth, often Muslims enjoyed as much, if not more protection living in
Christian lands than did Christians in Islamic lands—and often without special
taxes and levees predicated on their non-Christian status. In his descriptions of
these battlefield collisions, Ibrahim demonstrates an asymmetry that is not just
culturally relative, but instead reveals absolute different notions of forbearance.
His point is not that Christians were saints and Muslims sinners, but that over the
centuries, and with ample moral latitude given to the times, there was less of a
Sermon on the Mount tolerance inherent in Islamic fundamentalism than in its
Christian counterpart—and such antithetical customs were apparent before,
during, and after battle with obvious ramifications for eventual outcomes.
Sword and Scimitar is first-rate military history and a product of solid
scholarship and philological research. It characteristically offers candid appraisal
of a rivalry that has now taken on quite different incarnations and played out on
different fronts—from contemporary immigration to terrorism—but still in many
ways remains an ancient existential struggle nonetheless.
Victor Davis Hanson
The Hoover Institution, Stanford
University
May 1, 2018
What was, will be; what was done before, will be done again. There is
nothing new under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes 1:9