I’ve occasionally given readers a hint towards what I think of Islam, and particularly the third great wave of Islamic conquest that attacks Europe now, mostly via immigration. I haven’t read the Koran, don’t ever intend to enter a mosque without automatic weapons, and certainly haven’t attended a madrassa. My knowledge of and interest in Islam comes entirely from the perspective of an infidel who would very much like to keep them out of my lands. What goes on in Muslim lands doesn’t concern me: that’s their business. Close the mosques, send the immigrants back, and reconquer Constantinople. They can keep Antioch, Damascus, and Baghdad.
Over the last couple of years I realised that I’ve been treating Islam the same way Cold Warriors used to treat the Soviet Union, as a vast faceless monolith. Knowing that the white peoples of Europe consider themselves a multitude of nations with many variations in national character [1] I knew, deep down, that Islam isn’t one army all of a single purpose. For a long time this awareness just pecked at the edges of my main interest in reconquista. Little things here and there:
- Banging a few Muslim girls who hadn’t the slightest interest in jihad, and who drank beer.
- Reading Nassim Nicolas Taleb’s tweets about Levant culture and it’s historic opposition to Gulf culture.
- Seeing how little support ISIS actually had beyond a few goat-fucking longbeards and the Iranian mullahs.
- Hearing about how many Taliban fighters were recruited because the Taliban was the one organisation in Afghanistan that didn’t rape little boys.
I grew increasingly interested in learning a little more about the trends, divisions, and schools of thought within Islam. Reading Time Life’s March Of Islam is the first time I’ve become wise to Islam’s history and I dare say I’m rather surprised. Here are three learning points:
- Muhammad wasn’t a jihadi.
- Life under early Islamic rule was preferable to Byzantine, Sassassian, Turkic, Hun or Egyptian rule
- The first great wave of Islamic expansionism wasn’t the total war I thought it was.
Here’s the rise of Islam as I understand it from this book: For most of early history, Arabia was irrelevant. The Egyptians built pyramids, farmed the Nile valley, and created a vast empire. The Greeks and then the Romans built up massive cities, advanced the arts, and campaigned across the known world. Persians too. This whole time, the Arabs were riding camels from oasis to oasis and living under tents down in the desert scrub of what is now Saudi Arabia. The one exception to this was the flatter, greener coastal areas where thriving small towns built up at key sailing ports along the Chinese Silk Road through the Red Sea, as this was the most convenient route to the Mediterranean.
The first thousand years, basically
Muhammad comes off somewhat like Jesus. Of low birth, he grew up among the raider-trader Arab nomads and with it was imbued with their ascetic lifestyle and clannish value system. Upon moving in to Mecca he gained in prominence as a wise head so he set up in the courtyard of his modest home and dispensed both worldly and spiritual advice, and with time came to adjudicate disputes [2]. The rulers of Mecca thought him too big for his britches and chased him out. He settled again in nearby Medina, doing the same as before. But now he was pissed at the Mecca lads and, utilising his desert raider upbringing, he formed a small gang of bandits to raid the caravans between Mecca and Medina. Before long he was strong enough that Mecca bent the knee and let him back.
And that’s it. Soon after he died.
My overwhelming impression of Muhammad is that he was a hard-bitten desert nomad and wise sage who limited himself to his local area. No expansionism. No conquest. No jihad. He didn’t build palaces nor hoard gold. Didn’t take many wives. I suspect he’d have been as outraged with the pomp, arrogance and greed of the Ottoman Court as Jesus would be with the satanist pedophiles bishops who live in opulence in the Vatican today.
Muhammad was so small-scale. No-one outside the Arab peninsula even heard his name until he was long dead.
This would suit the Byzantines more than the first Muslims
Yes, yes, I’ve heard about him marrying a six-year-old girl. I’ve heard there is rather bloodthirsty advice in the Koran about stoning women and beheading infidels. Thing is, by the standards of the time (e.g. what the Persians, Olmecs, Chinese, Huns, and even Christians were getting up to those days) it’s mostly par for the course.
Squabbles over succession led to the Sunni-Shia split that remains to this day and in the next few hundred years of Islam, the hawkish Muslims were more concerned with fighting sectarian battles than conquering Europe. This book argues that the first great wave of Islamic expansionism was mostly peaceful [3]. The main reason they were able to spread so fast was because Islamic rule imposed such a light burden upon the conquered, and thus many found the Islamic yoke lighter than the Byzantine, Roman, Persian, or Egyptian yoke. These lands had spent 1,000 years passing between empires so they expected it to be someone’s yoke.
The Byzantines would tax you mercilessly, convert you to Orthodox Christianity, conscript you in their army, and it seemed a pretty oppressive rule all around. The first Muslims asked just five things of you:
- Worship Allah, with Muhammad the messenger
- Pray towards Mecca five times a day
- Give 2.5% of your money to charity
- Fast during the month of Ramadan
- A pilgrimage to Mecca one time in your life
But how should we fast, m’lord?
That’s really not a lot is it? Especially as you’re allowed to dodge the pilgrimage if too poor or infirm. So a conquered people need only nod their head when the Imam is banging on about Allah, spend a few minutes doing Allah-ballahs, pay a very light tax [4], save your eating for the evening and…. not much is it? If you put some heavy cavalry behind those preachers and send them into lands already riven with strife you can see how they’d sweep all before them.
Later caliphs acquired a taste for empire and became as vicious, grasping, and indulgent as the Roman emperors but for the first couple hundred years it seems like Islam was a very different beast to the likes of Erdogan or the Mullahs now. As an aside, this makes the theatrics of ISIS make more sense. I’d always found it odd that the ISIS goat-fuckers proudly trumpeted such an ascetic lifestyle, but I see that in this respect at least they were closer to Muhammad than the perfumed gold-bedecked Sultans of Istanbul.
So, while I still want the mosques closed and the kebab removed, I’m at least clearer about the Islamic world being no more a bunch of jihadis than the USA is a bunch of Neo-Cons.
If the ascetic nomadic lifestyle and dreams of conquest appeal to you, you should shed your materialistic opulence and give alms of £79 to the Church of Daygame Infinite and buy final absolution through Daygame Overkill for the very reasonable price of $200.
[1] French are slimy, Germans are aspy, Belgians are a joke nation, Spanish are lazy, Italians are greasy, Welsh are sheep-shaggers, Irish are dumb, and the porridge wogs of Scotland like Jews in girl’s skirts. The English stand alone without flaw.
[2] Written records of these sessions were later collected together to create the Koran.
[3] Again, by the bloodthirsty standards of the time
[4] Perhaps the most surprising thing of all in reading world history is that levels of taxation that live in infamy and led to revolutions back then are way lower than what the average European pays under yoke of the European Union thieves today.
