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November 26, 2003

Egypt and Syria were Once Christian Nations.

I found this surprising. But given that Christianity came from the Middle East originally, perhaps it shouldn’t be so unexpected.

Thomas F. Madden, associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University, discusses the History of Islam and of the Crusades.

Islam has always added converts via military conquest.

For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggressionan attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianityand for that matter any other non-Muslim religionhas no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades.

One of the biggest questions we are currently addressing is, how ingrained is this bias towards war in the Islamic nations of today? Are there enough peaceful devotees of Islam for the voice of reason to prevail, ultimately, in their own nations?

Daniel Pipes has made a brilliant contribution to finding the answer to this, by suggesting questions that may be asked of Muslims to assess their standing on key issues of war and peace.