Most Westerners know Islam only as a religion that prays five times a day and forbids pork, or as a faith sometimes associated with violence on the news. But Islam is far more than a personal creed; it is a civilization-shaping force — a fusion of religion, law, and empire that, for fourteen centuries, has defined the political map of the Middle East and much of the wider world. To understand today’s ideological and spiritual conflicts, we must return to the desert where it began.
Revelation and Resistance
In 610 CE, a merchant named Muhammad ibn Abd Allah claimed to have received a revelation from the angel Gabriel while meditating in a cave near Mecca. The message was simple at first: there is one God — Allah — and Muhammad is His messenger. He preached moral reform and charity, urging his city to abandon its idols. For twelve years he gathered only a small circle of followers, mostly family and friends. The Meccan elites resisted; his monotheism threatened their religious business at the Kaaba shrine.
After facing continued rejection, Muhammad left Mecca and traveled north to Yathrib (later known as Medina) in 622. This migration, called the Hijra, marks the first year of the Islamic calendar. By this time, Muhammad had gained a cult following of approximately 70 to 80 people who decided to join him despite — or due to — their earlier rejection in Mecca.
In Medina they met tribes of Jews and pagans, and at first sought their recognition by mimicking some Jewish customs — fasting, daily prayer, dietary laws. But when the Jews realized Muhammad was a false prophet and rejected his spiritual authority, his tone changed sharply. Early peaceful verses like “there is no compulsion in religion” (Surah 2:256) gave way to calls for struggle and subjugation (Surah 9:5; 9:29). Islam was no longer only a religious cult; it became a theocratic movement backed by arms.
From Messenger to Ruler
In Medina, Muhammad became not only a prophet but a statesman and a general. He organized tribes into a single community (ummah) bound by faith and allegiance to him personally. He authorized raids on Meccan caravans, rewarding his fighters with spoils — a pragmatic incentive that soon multiplied converts. By 630 he returned to Mecca at the head of an army; the city surrendered without major bloodshed. The idols of the Kaaba were destroyed, and Islam was declared triumphant.
For those who opposed him, however, tolerance ended. Jewish tribes in Arabia — Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, Banu Qurayza — were expelled or massacred. Henceforth, Jews and Christians could survive only as dhimmis, protected but inferior subjects who paid the jizya tax “with willing submission” (Surah 9:29). Thus, Islam absorbed earlier monotheists, not as equals but as a conquered class.
The Dhimmi World
For over a millennium, life under Islamic rule followed this pattern. Dhimmis could keep their religion privately but not publicly; they could not build new churches or synagogues, ring bells, carry weapons, or hold power over Muslims. They were often distinguished by identifying clothing — Jews wearing yellow badges (a practice the Nazis later adopted rather than originated), and Christians with belts. Tax collection was a ritual of humiliation, conducted kneeling before the Muslim governor. This system institutionalized inequality and survived across dynasties, from the Umayyads to the Ottomans.
Expansion by the Sword
After Muhammad’s death in 632, his successors, the Caliphs, launched an impressive military campaign of conquest known as jihad. Within a century, Muslim armies had conquered Syria, Egypt, Persia, North Africa, and Spain — an empire larger than Rome’s. These wars were justified by revelation: “Fight them until religion is for Allah alone.” (Surah 8:39) Islamic law — Sharia — joined religion and politics into a single totalitarian system. Conversion could bring safety; refusal brought taxation, slavery, or death.
To many historians, this fusion of faith and empire marks Islam’s defining difference from Christianity. While Christians focused on the kingdom of Heaven (John 18:36), Muhammad forged a kingdom in this world — a political theology where the state itself was the instrument of salvation.
The Crusades and Counter-Crusades
By the eleventh century, Muslim control of the Holy Land made pilgrimage highly dangerous. In 1095, Pope Urban II called Western Christendom to liberate Jerusalem. Thus began the Crusades — often caricatured today as imperial aggression but originally framed as defense and rescue. For less than a century, Christians held Jerusalem before Saladin retook it (1187). Thereafter, the city remained under Muslim rule until 1967, when modern Israel restored free worship for Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike.
The Crusader failure did not end the conflict; it only set its boundaries. Islamic civilization had become the dominant power from India to Spain, defining law, religious practice, and politics across three continents.
Islam in Europe
Muslim expansion pressed deep into Europe. Spain became al-Andalus, a Muslim province celebrated today for its culture yet built on dhimmi labor and periodic persecution. In 732, Charles Martel stopped further advance at the Battle of Tours, preserving Christian Europe. Later, the Ottoman Turks carried the banner of Islam to new heights, capturing Constantinople (1453) and threatening Vienna until their defeat on September 11, 1683 — a date jihadists later invoked when striking New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. For them, 9/11 was not random; it was a jihadist statement.
Decline and Reform
By the nineteenth century, European industrial progress and internal corruption left the Muslim world lagging. The Ottoman Caliphate crumbled after World War I, and in 1924 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished it entirely. He secularized Turkey, granted women education and suffrage, banned the veil in government, and restricted clerical power. Islamists reviled him, calling him an agent of Jewish influence. Yet his reforms temporarily opened a window of modernity in the Islamic world.
Two later developments rekindled the old dream of global caliphate:
- The discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, giving the Wahhabi establishment immense wealth to export its puritanical Islam worldwide; and
- The Iranian Revolution (1979), when Ayatollah Khomeini fused theology and totalitarianism, birthing modern Islamist politics.
Jihad Reborn
Movements such as al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and ISIS are not anomalies but heirs of Medina’s model. They quote the same verses commanding believers to fight “until all religion is for Allah” (Surah 8:39). They justify deceit through taqiyya (Surah 3:28) and emulate Muhammad’s Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, signed and broken once he was strong enough to crush his opponents. Their war is not only territorial; it is eschatological — a vision of an end-time victory when Islam rules the earth. The caliphate that fell in 1924 lives again in their imagination.
The Cost of Conquest
Historians estimate that Islamic wars and slave trades have taken more than 270 million lives across 1,400 years. These include Africans sold in Saharan markets, Hindus massacred in India, and Christians enslaved in the Balkans. Islamic expansion was never bloodless; it was violent, systemic, enduring, and justified by divine sanction. Even today, in regions once Christian — Syria, Iraq, North Africa — the ancient Christian churches have nearly vanished.
Why History Matters
Western classrooms seldom address this history, while universities — often supported by Islamic funding — reinterpret it through relativism and “anti-colonization” narratives. Muslim journalists often portray it as a “golden age of tolerance.” However, history isn’t meant to serve ideology; it serves as a warning. When civilizations forget what shaped them, they repeat the same errors. The Qur’an’s political logic — faith fused with rule — still drives conflicts from Gaza to Nigeria, from Paris to Kabul. To confront it honestly is not hatred; it is moral clarity.
Islam’s strength lies in its jihadist dedication and focus. This does not mean all Muslims are violent, nor that every Muslim society is oppressive. Millions of Muslims long for peace and freedom. But the theological roots of Islamic conquest remain alive, unchallenged by much of the West’s willful ignorance known as the “woke” ideology.
Lessons for Our Time
When the modern West dismantles its moral foundations in the name of tolerance, it creates a vacuum that militant ideologies rush to fill. A culture embarrassed by its own Judeo-Christian roots cannot stand against a faith that still believes history is divinely directed. The result is confusion — nations apologizing for defending themselves, politicians excusing terror, churches preaching moral relativism while ignoring persecuted believers.
But history is not finished. Its Author is still at work. And the Bible reminds us that God raises and lowers empires according to His purposes (Daniel 2:21). The question for our generation is whether we will learn the lesson or repeat it. Either way, God will use it.
Conclusion
The story of Islam is not just some ancient tale; it is the ongoing conquest and contest between revelation and reason, domination and freedom. If the Church forgets its story and the West forgets its values, then Islam’s story will simply keep repeating — because, as Scripture says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” (Hosea 4:6)
Understanding this history is not about hate. It is about love for truth. Only truth can expose deception. Only truth can set free.
This was an excerpt from my book “Trojan Religion: The Woke Fallacy of Tolerating Religious Intolerance“:
