Exactly 225 Years Ago Today — Jihad Declared on America
Today in History
Today in history, May 14, 1801, Yusuf Karamanli, the Muslim ruler and pasha of Tripoli, declared jihad on the United States in dramatic fashion — ordering his men to chop down the American consulate’s flagpole, sending the Stars and Stripes crashing to the ground.
Thus began newborn America’s very first war since becoming a nation 25 years earlier—the First Barbary War.
To understand the full significance of this important but largely forgotten episode of American history, we must travel centuries earlier, when the Barbary States of Muslim North Africa—especially Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis—were thriving on the slave trade of Europeans, abducting them from virtually every corner of coastal Europe, including England, Ireland, and Iceland.
Islamic Slavers
Barbary slave raids were so successful that, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast,” to quote American historian, Robert Davis.
The treatment of these European slaves was exacerbated by the fact that their Muslim masters saw them as “infidels” deserving nothing but hate (per Koran 60:4). As Robert Playfair (b.1828), who served for years as a consul in Barbary, explained, “In almost every case they [European slaves] were hated on account of their religion.” Three centuries earlier, John Foxe (b.1516) had written in his Book of Martyrs that, “In no part of the globe are Christians so hated, or treated with such severity, as at Algiers.”
If the generic treatment of European slaves was marked by contempt and cruelty, the punishments they received for real or imagined offenses beggared description. Writes Foxe:
If they speak against Mahomet [blasphemy], they must become Mahometans, or be impaled alive. If they profess Christianity again, after having changed to the Mahometan persuasion, they are roasted alive [as apostates], or thrown from the city walls, and caught upon large sharp hooks, on which they hang till they expire.
Any European rebuffing the homosexual advances of their masters—“male slaves were often used for sexual purposes”—were especially brutalized by their disgraced would-be rapists. According to Playfair:
A young Christian on one occasion killed his master under provocation so gross as fully to justify the act [a subtle reference to attempted sodomy]. He was dragged to the place of execution over the rough and pointed stones, subjected to the insults of an excited and brutal crowd. On his arrival there each of the spectators seemed to take a pleasure in assisting at the work. He was crucified against the wall with four large nails; a red hot iron was thrust through his cheeks to prevent him from speaking, and, in this condition, he was slowly burnt to death with fire brands. Such acts of cruelty were by no means uncommon.
America: Fresh Meat
After Barbary’s ability to abduct coastal Europeans had waned in the mid-eighteenth century, its energy was spent on raiding infidel merchant vessels. Instead of responding by collectively confronting and neutralizing Barbary, European powers, always busy quarrelling among themselves, opted to buy peace through tribute (or, according to Muslim rationale, jizya, e.g., Koran 9:29).
Fresh meat appeared on the horizon once the newly born United States broke free of Great Britain (and was therefore no longer protected by the latter’s jizya payments). In 1785 Muslim pirates from Algiers captured two American ships, the Maria and Dauphin, and enslaved their crews. Considering the aforementioned treatment of white slaves, when Captain O’Brien of the Dauphin later wrote to Thomas Jefferson that “our sufferings are beyond our expression or your conception,” he was not exaggerating.
In an effort to ransom the enslaved Americans and establish peaceful relations with all Barbary States, Jefferson and John Adams—then ambassadors to France and England respectively—met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain, Abdul Rahman Adja. Following this diplomatic exchange, they laid out the source of Barbary’s animosity in a letter to Congress dated March 28, 1786:
We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their [Barbary’s] pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
One need not conjecture what the American ambassadors—who years earlier had asserted that all men were “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”—thought of their Muslim counterpart’s answer. Suffice to say, because the ransom demanded was over fifteen times greater than what Congress had approved, little came of the meeting.
Back in Congress, some agreed with Jefferson—“it will be more easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe them”—including General George Washington: “In such an enlightened, in such a liberal age,” he wrote a friend, “how is it possible that the great maritime powers of Europe should submit to pay an annual tribute to the little piratical States of Barbary? Would to Heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into nonexistence.”
The majority of Congress, however, agreed with John Adams: “We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.”
Considering the perpetual, existential nature of Islamic hostility, Adams was probably more right than he knew.
Congress settled on emulating the Europeans and paying off the terrorists, though it would take years to raise the demanded ransom.
American Submission
When Muslim pirates from Algiers captured eleven more American merchant vessels in 1794, the Naval Act was passed and a permanent U.S. naval force established. But because the first war vessels would not be ready until 1800, American jizya payments—which took up 16 percent of the federal budget—began to be made to Algiers in 1795.
In return, over 100 American sailors were released—how many died or disappeared is unclear—and the Islamic sea raids formally ceased, but only because the U.S. agreed to pay off the other Barbary pirates, including Tripoli and Tunis.
Over the following years, these ongoing American payments and “gifts” caused the increasingly emboldened pirates to respond with increasingly capricious demands.
One of the more ignoble instances occurred in 1800, when Captain William Bainbridge of the George Washington sailed to the pirate-leader of Algiers, with what the latter deemed insufficient tribute. Referring to the Americans as “my slaves,” Dey Mustapha ordered them to transport hundreds of black slaves to Istanbul (Constantinople).
Adding insult to insult, he commanded the American crew to take down the U.S. flag and hoist in its place the Islamic flag—one not unlike ISIS’ notorious black flag. And, no matter how rough the seas might be during the long voyage, Bainbridge was required to make sure the George Washington faced Mecca five times a day to accommodate the prayers of Muslims onboard.
By this point, the young United States had no choice but to decide whether it would remain a tributary state—or become a naval power.
If you value unflinching, historically grounded analysis that mainstream outlets soften or ignore, consider upgrading. Paid subscribers get:
Several new, full-length articles every week.
Carefully researched pieces you won’t find elsewhere.
Full access to the complete premium archive
Archive of in-depth writing, research, and commentary — all in one place.
Entry into the subscriber chat
A private space for serious readers and thoughtful discussion.
