Islam's First Hundred Years of Violence

When Edward Gibbon introduced the prophet Muhammad in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he observed that the rise of Islam was “one of the most memorable revolutions, which have impressed a new and lasting character on the nations of the globe.” Gibbon saw that Islam did not just inaugurate a religious revolution. Its unparalleled expansion changed the course of history by altering the map of the world.

No event was as consequential to Christianity in the 600-700's as the rise of Islam. Islam rose with great swiftness and disruption. In the span of less than a hundred years after its founding, Arab commanders made their way from the edge of Egypt along the North Africa until they reached the Atlantic Ocean. From the Arabian Peninsula they also advanced northeast through Persia and across the Asian steppes to India.

Within the space of a century, the movement inaugurated by the prophet Muhammad had planted a permanent political and religious rival to Christianity in historic Christian lands. Its advance both to the West and to the East meant that a large part of the globe was claimed for Islam, fulfilling the words of the Qur’an: “We appointed you successors on the earth after them.”
By the year 750, a hundred years after the conquest of Jerusalem, at least 50 percent of the world’s Christians found themselves under Muslim hegemony. In some regions, most notably North Africa, Christianity went into precipitous decline. At the time of the Arab conquest there were more than three hundred bishops in the area, but by the tenth century Pope Benedict VII could not find three bishops to consecrate a new bishop. Today there is no indigenous Christianity in the region, no communities of Christians whose history can be traced to antiquity. Though originally conquered by the sword, most of the subject peoples eventually embraced the religion of their conquerors.

By the eleventh century, however, Christianity had begun a long demographic decline in its eastern homeland, and, carried by the militancy of the Turks, Islam resumed its relentless drive westward. The end of the eleventh century also marked the beginning of the First Crusade.

Consider some statistics. In the eleventh century, the population of Asia Minor was almost wholly Christian. By the sixteenth century, Muslims constituted 92 percent of the population. During those centuries, the Church lost most of its property, its ecclesiastical structures were dismantled, and its bishops prohibited from caring for their dioceses. At the beginning of the period, there were four hundred bishops; by the end, 97 percent had been eliminated.

Most of the territories that were Christian in the year 700 are now Muslim. Nothing similar has happened to Islam. Christianity seems like a rain shower that soaks the earth and then moves on, whereas Islam appears more like a great lake that constantly overflows its banks to inundate new territory. When Islam arrives, it comes to stay—unless displaced by force, as it was in Spain.

Nothing from its earliest years has changed. Islam is still a religion bent on conquest.