Transcription
If you had to put forward a thesis about how the West should think about Islam, what would it be?
The thesis would be that Islam is, um, not just another religion. It's an entire coherent political system. A lot of people are approaching Sharia, which is usually loosely translated as Islamic law, and they have no problem condemning it. A lot of Americans, you know, Greg Abbott, Trump, Abbott said there's no room for Sharia in, um, in Texas, for example. And that's all well and good, but I think as people start learning, well, guess what? Sharia and Islam are inherently the same. You know, one, I call one Islam the descriptive name of the religion, and Sharia is the prescriptive application. So that's, I guess, that would be my ultimate thesis, which is, you know, maybe you see what Sharia is, maybe you don't like it, maybe you find it incompatible with the West, but guess what? That's not just some weird accretion that some radicals do. That is Islam.
All right. So, when I'm reading the stuff you write, when I hear you talk on the internet, there feels like a sense of a warning that you're giving the West about Islam, that we're not taking it seriously enough. Something along those lines. Does that feel fair?
From the very beginning of Islam in the 7th century, after Muhammad dies and Arabia is consolidated under the banner of Islam, they go on the jihad according to Islamic teaching. And in one century, from the death of Muhammad, 632 to 732, they literally have conquered three-quarters of the Christian world, which most people have no idea about.
When people hear of countries like Egypt and Syria or Turkey, they just have in their mind this vague idea that they were always either Muslim or kind of Eastern.
Yeah. No, they were actually, if you went in the seventh century, that was Christianity was more ingrained in Egypt, in [snorts] Turkey, in Syria, in Morocco, Mauritania, and in Tunisia. You know, the father of Western theology, Augustine. He's from Tunisia. He's a North African. He was a Berber. Okay? And most of the, the early fathers were Egyptians and Syrians and so forth. And, uh, you had five seas, five major centers. One was Rome. The other four, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, all got conquered by Islam. So it was a long, constant war that went on literally for over a millennium, okay? Century after century, whenever Muslims could. Obviously, there were times when it was an ebb and flow and due to the vicissitudes of circumstances and Muslims weren't strong enough, they wouldn't attack. But any such time that they were strong, they conquered. So I just told you, I gave you the date 732, one century, because that's the Battle of Tours, and that's where Islam is finally stopped in the center of France. Spain has now been conquered. All of North Africa has been conquered. The greater Middle East has been conquered, and then later Turkey gets conquered, which is one of the most ancient Christian regions. That's where St. Paul sent many of his letters. It features in the book of Revelation. There was a long, constant war and annexation of Christian territories by Islam historically, just as a fact.
And why did they do it? So even if you find a historian who is willing to talk about this, they'll give them their national names, okay? They'll talk about the Arab conquest. They'll talk about the, the Moors in Spain. They'll talk about the Turks and they'll talk about the Tatars and the Mongols. They'll call them Saracens. And when you hear it that way, as I did in college, you're prone to just think, okay, these are different warring groups, just like in Europe. The French and the English are warring. It's not, there's no ideological component necessarily. But if you dig into the sources as I have, the primary sources, including from the Muslim sources, they see themselves not necessarily as Turks or Arabs, but as Muslims first and foremost, and their rationale for war on whoever, let's say Christians, is you're an infidel, and, uh, you know, that's the rule of Islam, and we have to attack you and give you the three choices: convert, die, or pay tribute and be a second-class citizen, etc., etc. So my point is, it was a long, constant, massive war that went on that swallowed up most of the Christian West.
Okay. You know, we call it the West because it's west of what? Well, west, it, it was when we think of the West now, it has its own kind of connotation, but historically in the medieval era, it was, it was west because it was the westernmost portion of Christianity that didn't get conquered. Okay? It was the final appendage, Europe, and there was a constant warfare, constant struggle that went on. You know, Islamic pirates would go as far as Iceland in the 16th century for raids, and they would come back with loads of slaves. America's first war, most people are unaware, as a nation following independence from Britain, was with Muslims who were again, again using the same logic. And it's interesting because it comes out in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, um, you know, this paragon of enlightenment, who had, of course, obviously forgotten about those Muslims and didn't really understand what was going on. But they were enslaving American sailors in their vessels. That would raid the pirates, Muslim pirates from Barbary. And Adams, John Adams and Jefferson met with one of the, um, ambassadors from Barbary and basically, and we have the existing letter where, where Jefferson wrote a letter to Congress saying what happened in the meeting, and he says, we told him, look, can't we just be friends? We have nothing against you. You can do your religion, and let's, let's engage in trade, let's help each other. And then Jefferson writes, and the man answered us and said, it's in our Quran, you're the enemy, you're the infidel, we must wage war on you, etc., etc. Okay. So I tell you all that by way to answer your question about the warning. Okay. So this has been going on for, uh, over a millennium.
This being, we are ideologically driven. We are going to wage warfare to conquer the infidel.
And we've have conquered.
Bring back the fight. Bring back the flame. Bring back the fire and the righteous name.