XPost: sci.military.naval, soc.history.war.misc, soc.history.medieval
Why Aren’t the Arabs the ‘Colonizers’?
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/why-arent-the-arabs-the-colonizers/
By RICH LOWRY
October 29, 2023 6:30 AM
523 Comments
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A history of conquest and cultural imperialism is ignored.
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The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem sits atop the
site of the Second Temple, the central place for Jewish worship before
its destruction during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.
One wonders if any of the people braying about the alleged “settler colonialism” of Israel ever wonder how Al-Aqsa got there.
Did the Jews voluntarily erect a version of it in an eighth-century
homage to multiculturalism? If not, how did the Muslims who built it
come to be in Jerusalem in the first place?
These are rhetorical questions, of course. The caliphate besieged
Jerusalem and took it from the Byzantines in the early seventh century.
Since the “decolonization” agenda is meant only to target Western
nations and peoples, you rarely hear of the conquests and
empire-building of the non-Western world, which is conveniently
forgotten behind a narrative of pervasive victimization.
All of human history is a story of never-ending layers of conquest and
defeat and of migration and exile. If it were to be undone, we’d need to extirpate almost all peoples everywhere, including those who are
currently portrayed as the hopelessly oppressed.
The earliest phase of the seventh-century Arab expansion was truly
explosive, and then it continued at a slower but still impressive clip.
Indeed, it is one of the most sweeping acts of conquest and successful exercises in colonialism in world history. This wasn’t the Mongols
driving all before them and then receding to leave little in their
trace, or the Normans getting absorbed into the England they conquered.
No, the Arabs followed up their military conquest with a cultural
imperialism still felt today.
The Arabs would gobble up Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. They chipped away at the Byzantine Empire and launched a no-kidding effort to conquer it wholesale that fell short after two epic sieges of
Constantinople. They basically took all of the Persian empire.
Eventually, they assembled an empire with the greatest territorial
extent since the Romans, encompassing 80 percent of the population of
the Middle East and North Africa and reaching to the south of France.
Dan Jones writes in his history of the Middle Ages, Powers and Thrones, “Syria was one of the first major triumphs of a new power that was about
to sweep across the world, branching out to the borders of China and the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, establishing an Islamic state that covered
more than twelve million square kilometers.”
Its armies “appeared everywhere from central Asia, through the Middle
East and north Africa, throughout the Visigothic Iberian Peninsula, and
even into southern France.” Everywhere they conquered, they put in place “Islamic governments and introduced new ways of living, trading,
learning, thinking, building, and praying.”
And of speaking and writing. The caliph Abd al-Malik imposed Arabic as
the official language of the empire, an act of the highest cultural significance, since Arabic and Islam were so intertwined. “Arabization,” Jones writes, “was gradually followed by conversion across the Muslim-
held territories—a shift that can still be seen, felt, and heard in
almost every part of the old caliphate in the twenty-first century.”
Once they had Islam foisted on them, these territories, by and large,
never went back, except in the cases of Spain, Portugal, and Sicily.
In the Levant, in particular, as the archaeologist and historian Alex
Joffe writes, there was an imperial project that included bringing in
new people. Settlers came of their own volition or were moved there by political authorities, Joffe notes, including Egyptians in the early
19th century and Chechens, Circassians, and Turkmen at the hands of the Ottomans later in the century.
A Hamas official once said, “Half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and
the other half are Saudis.”
Should all this shuffling of population be reversed? Should the land
conquered by the Arabs so long ago go back to the Byzantines or
Persians, or their legatees? What do Ben and Jerry think?
Obviously, the decolonizers don’t care about any of this, or the fate of
the Kurds, Assyrians, and Amazighs, peoples who have suffered more
recently from the Arabization of the broader region.
What they really favor is another act of Arab colonization to eliminate
the Jewish people, who must succumb, finally and completely, to the long
tide of Islamization and Arabization “from the river to the sea.” This isn’t a principled adherence to the rights of indigenous people or a
respect for ancient homelands, but Lenin’s notorious formulation, “who whom,” in a different context.
The work begun in the seventh century, in other words, is still incomplete.
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