The Sword of Allah
July 9, 2010 8:47 PM
Muslims are moving en masse into Western Europe, aggressive legal front groups are attacking critics of Islam as "Islamophobic" bigots in the USA, advocates of Sharia law are pushing hard for their jurisprudence to be accepted as an alternative to the American rule of law, and money from our gasoline purchases is being used to fund mosques staffed by militant imams being built all over the Western world. Meanwhile, Obama, following Bush's lead, it trying to build a successful Islamic republic between Iran and India, in Afghanistan. These events and others have got me asking, "how did this all start?" I began exploring the history of the Arab Conquest, which took off the year of Muhammad's reported death, 632 C.E.
The core problem in exploring the Arab Conquest is that almost every existing document about it was written by the Arabs. The most basic of such documents, of course, is the Qur'an, whose key assumption is that there is only one god (called "The God" or Al-Lah), represented by Muhammad, his rasul. In English we often call Muhammad a "prophet" but "rasul" actually means the bearer of a message. In other words, the Qur'an is not a history book, but a message from the deity the Muslims consider to be the only one in existence.
There are scholars today who not only question the message of the Qur'an, they question when it was written, why it was written, who actually wrote it, and in fact, whether the Messenger Muhammad ever existed at all. Some even consider the Qur'an to be little more than a propaganda piece justifying Arab rule and keeping the conquered peoples under control.
However, there is absolutely no doubt that the Arabs conquered the Middle East, and then much of the rest of Eurasia and Africa, beginning in the 630's, by taking territory ruled by the Roman Empire (called Byzantine during that historical period) and the Persian Empire. The very first conquest away from the Arabian Peninsula was Iraq. It was a cakewalk.
Who was the conqueror? He has a name, and in fact he is buried in a mosque in Syria named after him. His name was Khalid, son of Walid. And so, I began my knowledge quest by learning about Khalid ibn Walid.
He could have blown it. If he had failed, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, and Indonesia would not be Muslim countries, and the Arabs might have even been a mostly Christian nation. (During Khalid's time, there were two Arab Christian peoples in northern Arabia, and one of Khalid's early military accomplishments was conquering them both.)
In other words, but for Khalid ibn Walid, or someone like him, militant Islam might never have had any kind of impact, if it existed at all, on the rest of the world.
Khalid ibn Walid had a nickname, "the Sword of Allah," which he won in an early battle in a place called Mu'tah, now in Jordan. His enemy was one of the Christian Arab peoples described above, then under the protection of the Roman Empire. Khalid did not win the battle, but he prevented a total rout, which may well have given rise to the idea that the Byzantine Romans were weak and could be conquered. Some time later, Khalid was instrumental in the Arab conquest of northern Syria, where his bones now lie. Before that, however, he was the leader of the conquest of the rest of Arabia by Muhammad's faction, including the Yemen towns of the south, and even Mecca, where Muhammad had outworn his welcome.
After Muhammad's death, Khalid ibn Walid went on to conquer the fertile plains of Iraq west of the mountains of Iran, before he was reassigned to lead the battle against the Romans in Syria. Seen as a threat, he was later relieved of his command by the second successor to Muhammad.
Khalid ibn Walid was quite a guy. In my opinion, anyone who has concern with the Bolshevik hijacking of the White House and Congress should not only learn the history of Communism, but the history of the Arab Conquest too, which was led by bold and ruthless men like Khalid who easily hijacked empires that had gone soft.