Islam’s Inexorable Impulse by Matthew Hanley

We have ample occasion these days to be reminded that Christian martyrs can be a catalyst for a new rebirth. You know: “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” There is undeniable historical truth to that, but unfortunately there is another way, pace Tertullian, to look at it: the blood of the martyrs also builds up the house of Islam.

Some may have heard that Islam “spread by the sword” way back when. Fewer realize the extent to which the unremitting threat of bloodshed and other indignities against those who break rank has provided more than sufficient inducement for inhabitants of vast swathes subjugated territories to remain Muslim. The stunted horizons imposed upon those masses down through the generations – an attenuated form of suffering – compounds the initial iniquity visited upon the slaughtered innocents.

Indeed, some leading figures in the Muslim world openly maintain that if the death penalty for apostasy were not built into Islam, it would not have originally become so entrenched and may have even faded long ago. Even if that seems implausible, the fact that, for all its force, Islam leans so heavily on compulsion, paradoxically bespeaks a certain fragility.

The point is that once Islam gobbles up new lands (or establishes beachheads in pockets of the West today), it imposes a highly effective death grip – Iberia being the most notable reversal. And anyone who thinks that Spain under Muslim rule was a golden moment of harmonious, enlightened multiculturalism – the shibboleth most people have been fed– should read Dario Fernandez-Morera’s new goldmine of a book The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain.

When, for example, the reconquista reached Valencia (1238) and Granada (1492), there were virtually no Christian inhabitants left. Remember, it all started with a modest number of jihadists, but pressure to submit to the ways of Islam (the word sharia actually means “the way,” thereby signaling a clear departure from Christian thought) inexorably mounted when and where it could. As it always does.

How they came to subjugate and the conditions that characterized their rule will sound familiar: the beheadings, crucifixions, horrific sexual abuse, material confiscations, and so forth. It’s all there. And authoritatively documented. That alone is eye opening, but Fernandez-Morera further educates by exposing the underlying motivations for the false “model of tolerance” narrative – which mirror today’s maddening “Baghdad Bob” like denial of obvious reality in the face of self-proclaimed Islamic atrocities.

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