In order for you to understand why Western civilization is very different than the Islamic world, you need to understand the history of Islam.
When Prophet Muhammad supposedly revealed his revelation from the angel Gabriel that he is supposed to be the last of the prophets in the early 600s, he started preaching in his own city, Mecca. He tried to recruit friends and followers to be able to spread his religion.
And he tried for 12 years and failed. And after 12 years, he was only able to recruit his immediate family and friends. So he decided, if I go to Medina, which was the Jewish hub of Arabia, the business hub where the Jews lived, if I go there and preach my religion to them, if they accept me, that will buy me respect and stature between my own people and they will accept me.
So Prophet Muhammad started borrowing a lot from the Old Testament to make his religion more palpable to the Jews, to make it a lot similar. This is why you see a lot of similarities between Judaism and Islam. For example, Jews don’t eat pigs, Muslims don’t eat pigs.
Jews pray a few times a day, Muslims pray a few times a day. Jews fast on Yom Kippur, Muslims fast on Ramadan. And this is why you started seeing a lot of good writing in the beginning of the Qur’an when Prophet Muhammad was saying all the good things about the people of the book.
He took his message and went to Medina trying to recruit the Jews, talking about the people of the book, talking about how similar the two religions are.
When they refused to accept him and follow him as the last of the prophets, that’s when he turned against them and started killing them and started expelling them.
That’s when Islam went from a spiritual movement for the first 12 years of Islam into a political movement cloaked in religion after the year of the Hijra, after Muhammad went to Medina and the Jews did not accept him.
He became a military warrior and declared war on them and started expelling them. Jews and Christians became dhimmi, or second class citizens. They were only allowed to stay alive and not be killed only by paying the jizya or the protection tax.
So they had a choice, convert to Islam or if you want to stay alive, you have to pay the jizya or protection tax living as dhimmi in the Islamic nation. Christians and Jews could not ring church bells. Jews could not blow the shofar.
Christians could not ring church bells. They could not pray publicly. Christians and Jews could not gather together and build new churches or new temples.
And the way they paid the jizya or the protection tax was in a monthly ceremony where they would get together downtown and the Jew would kneel on his knee and hand his goods to the mullah who would take the goods as the price for buying the protection.
And in many areas Jews and Christians were given necklaces to wear as a receipt that they paid their jizyaor their protection tax. Jews considered najis under Islam.
Najis is bodily fluid. Najis is garbage. Najis is dogs.
Najis is dirty. So Christians and Jews were treated as second class citizens. Islam continued to grow.
As Islam grew, more people became dhimmi or second class citizens. Jews and Christians were given identifiable clothing. The yellow star which was given to the Jews that most people think is a German invention.
It was actually an Islamic invention in the 9th century in Iraq by the second khalif, khalif al-mutawakkil of Iraq, who invented the yellow star for the Jews to be identified as they walked down the street.
Because Jews were considered najis, if a Muslim man or a Jew walked on the same side of the street, the Jew had to cross the other side so the Muslim man can walk so he’s not dirtied by the filth of the Jew.
Christians were given the zunar, the belt, which most of you men are wearing right now.
That was an Islamic invention for the Christians. Islam continued to grow. They went all the way to Jerusalem.
They conquered Jerusalem. Christians couldn’t ring their church bells in Jerusalem. The Pope in Rome in 1090 told the Christians, how could you sit idly by and allow your brethren to suffer like this in the Holy Land? You need to go liberate the Christians.
You need to go help the Christians. That’s why the Crusaders were launched. The Crusaders were not launched because they just felt like waking up in the morning and going and converting a bunch of Muslims or beheading them.
The Crusaders were launched to liberate Jerusalem. And they were able to liberate Jerusalem for less than 100 years before Saladin took it back and Jerusalem remained under Islamic control until 1967 when the State of Israel liberated Jerusalem where Christians, Jews, and Muslims could pray under the same sky.
The Crusaders continued fighting Islam and for 300 years they tried and failed.
And by the 1300s the Crusaders disappeared because they could not win against Islam. Islam continued to expand. They went all the way to Central Europe.
They went all the way to China. They went to India. They conquered Spain.
They changed the name of Spain from Spain to Andalusia. And they started as they advanced, as they conquered more nations, more people paid the jizya or the protection tax. And this is how the Islamic Empire grew.
It went all the way until they were stopped at the gates of Vienna on 9-11. 9-11 is not a date that Osama Bin Laden just picked out of a hat. 9-11 is a symbolic date in the Islamic calendar.
By the 1600s Islam had covered more of the Earth’s surface than the Roman Empire did at its peak. Between the 1600s and the 1800s the Europeans were experiencing the European Industrial Revolution where the Europeans were able to invent products on factory lines where they are able to make money and sell products which gave them the money to build a strong army in order to fight the Muslims.
And that’s how they were able to stop them at the gates of Vienna on 9-11.
The Europeans started the pushback against Islam. They pushed them out of Europe. They pushed them all the way to the Middle East and North Africa.
By 1924 the Islamic Empire ended.
In 1924 the Islamic Caliphate ended in Turkey by President Ataturk who was a secularist. He ended the Islamic Empire and he gave women rights to vote.
He gave women a right to an education. A right to work. A right to choose a husband.
He forbid women from wearing the hijab. He forbid men from wearing the beard. The Muslims hate him so much that they consider him a Jewish agent because they believe that his mother in her bloodline was Jewish and that was the influence on Ataturk.
By the time the Islamic Empire or the Islamic Caliphate or the Islamic State ended in 1924 the Islamic Caliphate had existed for 1400 years and it ended less than 100 years ago.
In this piece, I will bring you a part of a very long speech by a scholar and lecturer on this subject.
Here below it begins:
By the time the Islamic Caliphate ended in 1924 270 million people around the world were killed by Islam. 270 million.
And we didn’t have weapons of mass destruction and there was nuclear weapons. All of these people were killed, butchered by the sword.
The material above was an excerpt from an address by
Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese-American conservative activist, author and lecturer, and critic of Islam.
