The Supremacist Expansionism of Islam and Muhammad's "Three Sparks"
Muslims mean it when they declare their intent to conquer,
subjugate, and destroy. They mean it with a degree of fanaticism which
the modern West has long forgotten, and which the modern West thinks no
longer exists (except, perhaps, among Christian “cults”).
Muslims also are profoundly inspired and motivated by exemplars from
history: viz., the conquest of Persia and Byzantium mentioned by this
cleric.
And those exemplars, in turn, derive their profound significance and
thrilling inspiration to the Muslim due to their representation as realizations and fulfillment of the assurances in the Koran and the prophecies of Mohammed.
In this case, we are speaking of the prophecy of Mohammed recorded
in, among other places, Ibn Ishaq, when during the “Battle of the
Trench”, Mohammed helped his men dig a trench, and while his shovel (or
the 7th-century Bedouin equivalent of a shovel) struck rock in the
trench, he saw three sparks in succession:
The first spark was supposedly the revelation to Mohammed of the promise of the Islamic conquest of Arabia.
The second spark was the revelation of the promise of the
Islamic conquest of the East (for which Muslims for centuries — until
Western Colonialism ruined it — could point proudly to Persia, India,
central Asia and Indonesia: which is why the Persian Revolution of 1979,
taking back Persia for the Dar-al-Islam from Western-supported
“traitors” the Pahlavis, is so important, btw).
The third spark was the revelation of the promise of the Islamic conquest of “Rome”.
Now, we need to think medievally here — for that is the way Muslims
think. What is symbolized as “Rome” in that promise is only partially
supplied by Byzantium — for at the time the Muslims began trying
to conquer Earth beginning in the 7th century and relentlessly
proceeding from then over the ensuing centuries (only inhibited in their
eschatological project by various impediments of the real world), the
classical Roman Empire had more or less disappeared, with the locus of
power and civilization slowly shifting northward (though it would take
another century or two, by the 9th century, for the Franks to develop
the self-conception of a new “Roman Empire” under Charlemagne) — and
shifting eastward.
The eastward shift of “Rome” had begun already in the 4th century
a.d., when the Roman Emperor Constantine (who during his reign
momentously converted to Christianity, thus beginning a Christian Rome) moved the capital of the Empire to a new city far to the east, christened Constantinople.
This in many ways in the centuries after the 4th became the “new Rome”
— a center of civilization, culture, the arts, technology, philosophy
for a while surpassing the still groggy Western Europeans. And this
Jewel of the East, Constantinople, became the center of Byzantium, the so-called “second Roman Empire” in the scheme of the translatio imperii. The “third Rome” in that scheme later moved further eastward, to Moscow.
In the Muslim mind, the modern West, with America at its vanguard, is clearly “Rome” — and in our own scheme of the translatio imperii, it is in a sense the “fourth Rome”.
To get back to the white-hot present that focuses a lens on the
distant past so exigent for the modern Muslim: This Egyptian cleric is
harking back to the Islamic conquest of Byzantium — a real conquest in
which Muslims fought, killed, and won spectacularly, when in 1453
they succeeded in taking the heart and soul of “Rome”: Constantinople —
or at least what had been the heart and soul; for superiority of
civilization had already begun shifting Westward in the meantime, and
what Muslims gained dramatically in the East, they would shortly lose
dramatically in the West, when Christians took back Spain finally in
1492.
But this success in 1453 wasn’t merely the fruit of one military
assault, or even of a few attempts during a few years beforehand. It
was, as the Orientalist Louis Massignon (mentor of the Orientalist
Bernard Lewis) wrote, the fruit of centuries of literally prayerful planning — along with a stillicide of small-scale assaults and razzias lasting centuries.
As Massignon wrote in his essay, Textes relatifs à la prise de Constantinople en 1453, “Texts pertaining to the capture of Constantinople in 1453”), published in 1953 in the journal Oriens (Vol. 6, No. 1):
…in the case of the capture of Constantinople by Islam, we are in
the presence of authentic texts which, going back more than six
centuries prior, have clearly foretold that event, conceived as a sort
of Sign of confirmation of the finality of Holy War for the Muslim
World.
Massignon’s long essay makes clear that Muslims weren’t merely
sitting around convinced of a “foretelling” — they actively prayed for
centuries, and delivered and listened to sermons for centuries that
referred constantly — weekly, monthly, yearly, and for centuries — to
the promise of the conquest of this “Rome”.
And during that time of “pious” prayer that attuned their collective
psyche toward the goal of militaristic conquest, Muslims also poked away
at the superior tegument of the Byzantine Empire, in hundreds of
attacks along its border, over the centuries incrementally winning one
piece of land after the other, slowly but surely encroaching upon its
land, and slowly but surely, through savage terror attacks at the slowly
shrinking borders, weakening the resolve of at least some of the
Christians.
It would be instructive at this juncture to examine how the
analogical comparison of the Islamic conquest of the “second Rome” fails
to correspond exactly to the current Islamic desideratum to conquer the
“new Rome” — the modern West:
1) First and foremost, the relative parity of the Empire and its
Attackers differs in the two cases: the modern West is astronomically
more superior in every way to Muslims today, than Byzantium was during
those centuries to the Muslims of their day.
This is true notwithstanding the obvious fact that Byzantium was
sufficiently superior to Muslims to be able to withstand conquest for
the approximately 600 years during which Muslims were trying to chip
away at it in order to conquer it. Were Muslims at any point, from the
8th century clear up through the 15th century, able to launch a major
military invasion of Byzantium in order to conquer it, they would have
done so. They evidently realized, both intellectually and
pragmatically, that a frontal assault was impossible — at least during
the initial centuries: the frontal assault finally became possible by
the middle of the 15th century: and it was spectacularly successful, and
Constantinople, the jewel of Christian Rome, became Istanbul, the jewel
of the Islamic Caliphate for all of the world’s Muslims — right up
until it was dismantled in 1923 by the Westernized Turk, Ataturk (and
also due to Western pressure in the wake of the restructuring of the
Third World by the West after World War One).
2) Because of #1, Muslims realize they cannot chip away at the
superior tegument of this relatively new Enemy in the same way they
chipped away at Byzantium.
In the case of Byzantium, they chipped away through a long series of razzias (the Islamic equivalent of Blitzkrieg commando raids — think Mumbai, for a grimly modern comparison). These razzias
did not necessarily intend to actually succeed in taking land: one
function they had was simply to terrorize the populace of the region,
and over time, and successive razzias, to wear down their morale,
in preparation for assaults of more military earnest. Both types were
deployed in the protracted centuries-long invasion of Byzantium. With
its new Enemy, the modern West, Muslims so far can only do a modern
variation on the razzia — the “terrorist attack”. This type must
be further modified from the medieval version of commando raids — for
which modern explosives, unavailable in those former centuries — are all
too perfectly suitable. When it comes to markedly less superior
cultures — such as India, Africa, SE Asia, central Asia — Muslims
currently in our time are able to deploy commando raids and even
outright military assaults in addition to terrorist attacks. But
against the modern West, Muslims so far have only been able to deploy
terrorist attacks.
3) In addition to poking away at the superior modern West with
terrorist attacks here and there, Muslims are also deploying another
style of invasion they probably never deployed before against any other
enemy of the past (at least not on this scale of magnitude): massive
ostensibly peaceful immigration of Muslims into the West.
One major reason why Muslims probably never deployed this particular
style before in history is probably because they didn’t have to, since
commando raids in preparation for military assaults were doable then —
as they are now with regard to relatively backward regions of the Third
World, as mentioned above: for the societies the Muslims were trying to
conquer were not so astronomically superior to Muslims as the modern
West is now.
Another major reason why Muslims probably never deployed mass
immigration into superior civilizations they intended to conquer in the
past was because pre-modern civilizations weren’t as stupid as the
modern West in allowing millions of Muslims to settle into their
societies.
Muslims for at least the last quarter-century if not half-century
have realized that massive immigration of Muslims into the West is one
way to weaken the West (cf. the infamous Boumedienne speech at the U.N.
in 1974). That immigration has only been increasing with each passing
decade, and ironically, even post-911, and even during the Bush years,
it continued to increase.
The massive influx of Muslims into the West helps the Islamic project of the conquest of this “new Rome” in several ways:
a) through the obtrusive stillicide of Muslims arrogantly asserting
themselves — and their alien, hostile and anti-liberal ideology — into
our societies in myriad ways which collectively and cumulatively can
have the effect of wearing down our psyches and resolve to resist Islam —
this effect augmented by our own society still laboring under the
delusion that Muslims are just one more “culture” we must accept and
integrate in order to demonstrate our “tolerance” for “the Other”
b) closely related to (a), through the increasing insinuation of
demands for ever more pieces of the puzzle of Sharia Law to be
integrated into the sociopolitical textures of the West — a process
that, of course, could never be fully realized since Sharia Law is
diametrically and profoundly antagonistic to most Western laws and
liberal mores: the process is less a project of attempting successfully
to supplant Western laws with Shariah than it is an attempt to assault
the psyches of Westerners as part of the broader project of weakening
their resolve (a project for which violent terrorism is a necessary
adjunct) in preparation for the day when the West will be, at least in
the minds of Muslims, sufficiently weakened to enable Muslims to prepare
outright commando raids and military assaults.
c) One element in (b) clues the reader into this third function of
Islamic immigration: namely, the need for violent terrorist attacks as
part of the overall project of weakening the West over time: terrorist
attacks on such a superior civilization as the modern West require
patient planning and deep infiltration. The latter is facilitated by
the massive immigration of Muslims, and further enabled by our own
Western PC MC tendency to trust Muslims and invite them more deeply into
our societies. While the tactic of innumerable seemingly random terror
attacks (even by Muslim “lone wolves” who seem unconnected to Islam at
large) have the effect of demoralizing the collective psyche of
Westerners, we should bet that Muslims are also planning grander attacks
in the future — attacks that would make 911 pale in comparison. Deeper
and deeper infiltration will, thus, enable Muslims to plot and
successfully deploy those grander terrorist attacks within the West —
likely using one flavor or another of WMDs (chemical, biological,
radioactive).
This third function also helps highlight a difference, among some
similiarities, between the Islamic strategy to conquer Byzantium, and
its current strategy to conquer us: the Muslims during the centuries
they were chipping away at the superior civilization of Byzantium were
unable to deploy terror attacks within the heart of Byzantium, in any of the major cities, and certainly not Constantinople. The reason they were unable was because Muslims had not been allowed to immigrate in mass numbers.
We, the modern West, by contrast, have allowed Muslims to immigrate in
mass numbers — and that is precisely why Muslims have been able to
attack the Constantinople of the 21st Century: New York City (along with
other major cities of this “new Rome” — London and Madrid; and we know
they have been trying to attack Paris, Berlin and Rome for years).
Muslims also are profoundly inspired and motivated by exemplars from history: viz., the conquest of Persia and Byzantium mentioned by this cleric.
And those exemplars, in turn, derive their profound significance and thrilling inspiration to the Muslim due to their representation as realizations and fulfillment of the assurances in the Koran and the prophecies of Mohammed.
In this case, we are speaking of the prophecy of Mohammed recorded in, among other places, Ibn Ishaq, when during the “Battle of the Trench”, Mohammed helped his men dig a trench, and while his shovel (or the 7th-century Bedouin equivalent of a shovel) struck rock in the trench, he saw three sparks in succession:
The first spark was supposedly the revelation to Mohammed of the promise of the Islamic conquest of Arabia.
The second spark was the revelation of the promise of the Islamic conquest of the East (for which Muslims for centuries — until Western Colonialism ruined it — could point proudly to Persia, India, central Asia and Indonesia: which is why the Persian Revolution of 1979, taking back Persia for the Dar-al-Islam from Western-supported “traitors” the Pahlavis, is so important, btw).
The third spark was the revelation of the promise of the Islamic conquest of “Rome”.
Now, we need to think medievally here — for that is the way Muslims think. What is symbolized as “Rome” in that promise is only partially supplied by Byzantium — for at the time the Muslims began trying to conquer Earth beginning in the 7th century and relentlessly proceeding from then over the ensuing centuries (only inhibited in their eschatological project by various impediments of the real world), the classical Roman Empire had more or less disappeared, with the locus of power and civilization slowly shifting northward (though it would take another century or two, by the 9th century, for the Franks to develop the self-conception of a new “Roman Empire” under Charlemagne) — and shifting eastward.
The eastward shift of “Rome” had begun already in the 4th century a.d., when the Roman Emperor Constantine (who during his reign momentously converted to Christianity, thus beginning a Christian Rome) moved the capital of the Empire to a new city far to the east, christened Constantinople. This in many ways in the centuries after the 4th became the “new Rome” — a center of civilization, culture, the arts, technology, philosophy for a while surpassing the still groggy Western Europeans. And this Jewel of the East, Constantinople, became the center of Byzantium, the so-called “second Roman Empire” in the scheme of the translatio imperii. The “third Rome” in that scheme later moved further eastward, to Moscow.
In the Muslim mind, the modern West, with America at its vanguard, is clearly “Rome” — and in our own scheme of the translatio imperii, it is in a sense the “fourth Rome”.
To get back to the white-hot present that focuses a lens on the distant past so exigent for the modern Muslim: This Egyptian cleric is harking back to the Islamic conquest of Byzantium — a real conquest in which Muslims fought, killed, and won spectacularly, when in 1453 they succeeded in taking the heart and soul of “Rome”: Constantinople — or at least what had been the heart and soul; for superiority of civilization had already begun shifting Westward in the meantime, and what Muslims gained dramatically in the East, they would shortly lose dramatically in the West, when Christians took back Spain finally in 1492.
But this success in 1453 wasn’t merely the fruit of one military assault, or even of a few attempts during a few years beforehand. It was, as the Orientalist Louis Massignon (mentor of the Orientalist Bernard Lewis) wrote, the fruit of centuries of literally prayerful planning — along with a stillicide of small-scale assaults and razzias lasting centuries.
As Massignon wrote in his essay, Textes relatifs à la prise de Constantinople en 1453, “Texts pertaining to the capture of Constantinople in 1453”), published in 1953 in the journal Oriens (Vol. 6, No. 1):
…in the case of the capture of Constantinople by Islam, we are in the presence of authentic texts which, going back more than six centuries prior, have clearly foretold that event, conceived as a sort of Sign of confirmation of the finality of Holy War for the Muslim World.
Massignon’s long essay makes clear that Muslims weren’t merely sitting around convinced of a “foretelling” — they actively prayed for centuries, and delivered and listened to sermons for centuries that referred constantly — weekly, monthly, yearly, and for centuries — to the promise of the conquest of this “Rome”.
And during that time of “pious” prayer that attuned their collective psyche toward the goal of militaristic conquest, Muslims also poked away at the superior tegument of the Byzantine Empire, in hundreds of attacks along its border, over the centuries incrementally winning one piece of land after the other, slowly but surely encroaching upon its land, and slowly but surely, through savage terror attacks at the slowly shrinking borders, weakening the resolve of at least some of the Christians.
It would be instructive at this juncture to examine how the analogical comparison of the Islamic conquest of the “second Rome” fails to correspond exactly to the current Islamic desideratum to conquer the “new Rome” — the modern West:
1) First and foremost, the relative parity of the Empire and its Attackers differs in the two cases: the modern West is astronomically more superior in every way to Muslims today, than Byzantium was during those centuries to the Muslims of their day.
This is true notwithstanding the obvious fact that Byzantium was sufficiently superior to Muslims to be able to withstand conquest for the approximately 600 years during which Muslims were trying to chip away at it in order to conquer it. Were Muslims at any point, from the 8th century clear up through the 15th century, able to launch a major military invasion of Byzantium in order to conquer it, they would have done so. They evidently realized, both intellectually and pragmatically, that a frontal assault was impossible — at least during the initial centuries: the frontal assault finally became possible by the middle of the 15th century: and it was spectacularly successful, and Constantinople, the jewel of Christian Rome, became Istanbul, the jewel of the Islamic Caliphate for all of the world’s Muslims — right up until it was dismantled in 1923 by the Westernized Turk, Ataturk (and also due to Western pressure in the wake of the restructuring of the Third World by the West after World War One).
2) Because of #1, Muslims realize they cannot chip away at the superior tegument of this relatively new Enemy in the same way they chipped away at Byzantium.
In the case of Byzantium, they chipped away through a long series of razzias (the Islamic equivalent of Blitzkrieg commando raids — think Mumbai, for a grimly modern comparison). These razzias did not necessarily intend to actually succeed in taking land: one function they had was simply to terrorize the populace of the region, and over time, and successive razzias, to wear down their morale, in preparation for assaults of more military earnest. Both types were deployed in the protracted centuries-long invasion of Byzantium. With its new Enemy, the modern West, Muslims so far can only do a modern variation on the razzia — the “terrorist attack”. This type must be further modified from the medieval version of commando raids — for which modern explosives, unavailable in those former centuries — are all too perfectly suitable. When it comes to markedly less superior cultures — such as India, Africa, SE Asia, central Asia — Muslims currently in our time are able to deploy commando raids and even outright military assaults in addition to terrorist attacks. But against the modern West, Muslims so far have only been able to deploy terrorist attacks.
3) In addition to poking away at the superior modern West with terrorist attacks here and there, Muslims are also deploying another style of invasion they probably never deployed before against any other enemy of the past (at least not on this scale of magnitude): massive ostensibly peaceful immigration of Muslims into the West.
One major reason why Muslims probably never deployed this particular style before in history is probably because they didn’t have to, since commando raids in preparation for military assaults were doable then — as they are now with regard to relatively backward regions of the Third World, as mentioned above: for the societies the Muslims were trying to conquer were not so astronomically superior to Muslims as the modern West is now.
Another major reason why Muslims probably never deployed mass immigration into superior civilizations they intended to conquer in the past was because pre-modern civilizations weren’t as stupid as the modern West in allowing millions of Muslims to settle into their societies.
Muslims for at least the last quarter-century if not half-century have realized that massive immigration of Muslims into the West is one way to weaken the West (cf. the infamous Boumedienne speech at the U.N. in 1974). That immigration has only been increasing with each passing decade, and ironically, even post-911, and even during the Bush years, it continued to increase.
The massive influx of Muslims into the West helps the Islamic project of the conquest of this “new Rome” in several ways:
a) through the obtrusive stillicide of Muslims arrogantly asserting themselves — and their alien, hostile and anti-liberal ideology — into our societies in myriad ways which collectively and cumulatively can have the effect of wearing down our psyches and resolve to resist Islam — this effect augmented by our own society still laboring under the delusion that Muslims are just one more “culture” we must accept and integrate in order to demonstrate our “tolerance” for “the Other”
b) closely related to (a), through the increasing insinuation of demands for ever more pieces of the puzzle of Sharia Law to be integrated into the sociopolitical textures of the West — a process that, of course, could never be fully realized since Sharia Law is diametrically and profoundly antagonistic to most Western laws and liberal mores: the process is less a project of attempting successfully to supplant Western laws with Shariah than it is an attempt to assault the psyches of Westerners as part of the broader project of weakening their resolve (a project for which violent terrorism is a necessary adjunct) in preparation for the day when the West will be, at least in the minds of Muslims, sufficiently weakened to enable Muslims to prepare outright commando raids and military assaults.
c) One element in (b) clues the reader into this third function of Islamic immigration: namely, the need for violent terrorist attacks as part of the overall project of weakening the West over time: terrorist attacks on such a superior civilization as the modern West require patient planning and deep infiltration. The latter is facilitated by the massive immigration of Muslims, and further enabled by our own Western PC MC tendency to trust Muslims and invite them more deeply into our societies. While the tactic of innumerable seemingly random terror attacks (even by Muslim “lone wolves” who seem unconnected to Islam at large) have the effect of demoralizing the collective psyche of Westerners, we should bet that Muslims are also planning grander attacks in the future — attacks that would make 911 pale in comparison. Deeper and deeper infiltration will, thus, enable Muslims to plot and successfully deploy those grander terrorist attacks within the West — likely using one flavor or another of WMDs (chemical, biological, radioactive).
This third function also helps highlight a difference, among some similiarities, between the Islamic strategy to conquer Byzantium, and its current strategy to conquer us: the Muslims during the centuries they were chipping away at the superior civilization of Byzantium were unable to deploy terror attacks within the heart of Byzantium, in any of the major cities, and certainly not Constantinople. The reason they were unable was because Muslims had not been allowed to immigrate in mass numbers. We, the modern West, by contrast, have allowed Muslims to immigrate in mass numbers — and that is precisely why Muslims have been able to attack the Constantinople of the 21st Century: New York City (along with other major cities of this “new Rome” — London and Madrid; and we know they have been trying to attack Paris, Berlin and Rome for years).
For more on the invasion and conquest of Byzantium by Muslims, see The Conquest of Constantinople: A Jihad Planned in Prayer for Centuries