How a Thousand Years of Jihad Were Erased from Western Memory
Marxism, Multiculturalism, Materialism, and Wokeism are conspiring against and strangling History.
Any honest and objective appraisal of Islam’s historic jihad on the Christian world must be eye-opening, to say the very least. In the first century of its existence (from 632 to 732) Islam permanently conquered, Arabized, and Islamized nearly three-quarters of the Christian world.
Europe came to be known as “the West” because it was literally the remaining and westernmost appendage of Christendom, the only area not to be swallowed up by Islam.
For roughly a millennium thereafter, Arabs, Berbers, Turks, and Tatars—all of whom called and saw themselves as Muslims—launched raid after raid, all justified (and lauded) as jihads, into virtually every corner of Europe. They reached as far as Iceland and provoked the U.S. into its first war as a nation. The devastation was indescribable; some regions in Europe, particularly in Spain and the Balkans, remain uninhabitable due to the incessant raiding. Some 15 million Europeans were enslaved during this perennial jihad and, according to contemporary records, treated horrifically.
In the words of historian Bernard Lewis,
For approximately a thousand years, from the advent of Islam in the seventh century until the second siege of Vienna in 1683, Christian Europe was under constant threat from Islam, the double threat of conquest and conversion. Most of the new Muslim domains were wrested from Christendom. Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa were all Christian countries, no less, indeed rather more, than Spain and Sicily. All this left a deep sense of loss and a deep fear [among Europeans].
In short, “if we … ask ourselves how and when the modern notion of Europe and the European identity was born,” writes historian Franco Cardini, “we realize the extent to which Islam was a factor (albeit a negative one) in its creation. Repeated Muslim aggression against Europe between the seventh to eighth centuries, then between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries … was a ‘violent midwife’ to Europe.”
Here the inevitable question arises: How could such a long, well-documented history of unmitigated Islamic aggression, that had immense repercussions on the development of Western civilization, now be presented as the antithesis of reality?
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