'Holy Warriors' – the Arab devastation of the Mediterranean

JJ O'Neill's book 'Holy Warriors' is a must-read book for anyone wanting to get a historical perspective on the Arab destruction of the Mediterranean world during the 7^th and 8^th centuries. O'Neill's work should be standard knowledge in the West but reality is no longer taught or exalted. The really smart people boorishly drone on that Islam is peace, and civilized development. They have a hard time explaining then, the utter effacement and destruction perpetrated by the first wave and onslaught of the Muslims – that being the Arab incursions into the Eastern and former Western Roman empires. Cities, trade, agricultural areas and once forested regions such as North Africa – all literally turned into deserts. And all thanks to the Arab-Muslim irruption which castrated mankind's development and unleashed onto the world, the demonic evil called Islam.

Most Christians in the 7^th and 8^th centuries regarded the cult of Mohammed and Mohammedism, as the progeny of the devil. Mohammed was portrayed rather correctly as the anti-Christ. The post Roman empire church and its flock were nothing if not realists. No two personalities or movements in history have been so different, as that of Christ and Mohammed. Polar opposites in fact. The ultimate consequence from the carpenter from Galilee's teachings is pacifism, female equality, welfare for the poor, and hospitals. The ultimate outcome from the illiterate political-military adventurer from Mecca is holy war, Jew-hate, slave trading and female enslavement.

Such is the black and white reality of Christianity vs. Islam. Not taught in Western schools and certainly never broached by the really smart people in the media and chattering political class. To these boors, Islam is peace – no matter what the facts state.

But the facts are pretty clear. Islam is war. When the Arabs assaulted the Byzantines and defeated them in 636 AD at the Yarmuk river in Jordan, they were lucky to have found a victim weakened by over 100 years of brutal war with the Persians. The Eastern Romans never took the Arab threat seriously. For the emperor Heraclius and his legions it was the Persians and their heavy cavalry or Cataphracts, who posed the most serious threat to Eastern territory and trade. The Arabs were viewed as little more than uneducated, dirty bandits. A true appraisal sure enough, but one which negated the fanaticism of their moon-deity induced fascism, and the speed and tenacity of their irregular cavalry.

The Byzantine holdings in the Near East and North Africa disintegrated. O'Neill makes the novel claim, and one which holds a lot of common-sense and source proof, that the Arabs teamed up the Persian heavy cavalry in their conquests of Syria, the Levant, and Egypt – all completed within 5 years. The Arabs would have had no more than 30.000 men. The Persian Cataphracts would have numbered no more than 7.500. Yet the lethal combination of power and speed, might have been enough to overwhelm the weakened and dispirited and poorly led Roman forces. The impact on the Mediterranean and civilized world was enormous.

As O'Neill so correctly states, “As a matter of fact, the once-proud Eastern Rome was devastated by the Arab assaults. The same poverty and illiteracy that we find in the West we now find also in the East. Cities decline and the science and philosophy of the Greeks and Romans disappear. Indeed, just as in the West, a 'dark age' descends. In the words of Cyril Mango; 'One can hardly overestimate the catastrophic break that occurred in the seventh century.'

The Arabs were unenlightened carriers of a pre-modern Fascism. There was no Arab golden age as any serious study would make clear. The Koran, Sharia Law, the Hadiths and the actions of the mad-man Mohammed make it quite obvious that Islam was a top-down, anti-individual, non-humanist Orientalism, premised rather weirdly, on the omnipotent powers of Mohammed's family moon deity. A Muslim's only purpose was to please the moon guy and his interpreter on earth. Hardly a recipe for civilizational advancement. Expecting such a cadre of irrationality to suddenly become 'enlightened' is like expecting Russian Tsarism or Putinism to magically transmogrify to Athenian democracy. It is absurd.

Once the Arabs controlled the Eastern lands of the Mediterranean it did not take them long to control the sea lanes. By so doing they cut off all trade with both the Eastern and Western Roman states. Indeed by 650 AD Arab navies were assaulting the largest and richest city in the world, that of Constantinople. As O'Neill laments:

“Constantinople herself, the mighty million-strong capital of the East, was reduced, by the middle of the eighth century, to a veritable ruin. Mango quotes a document of the period which evokes a picture of 'abandonment and ruination. Time and again we are told that various monuments – statues, palaces, baths – had once existed but were destroyed.”

As trade with the East and with oriental markets collapsed so did the economy – itself built on exports and imports – decline markedly. Paper from Egypt was denied the Byzantines and the Western states. Parchment or animal hides was a far more expensive and laborious manner in which to create paper. Literacy and record keeping had to suffer. Coinage and the money system became defiled through inflation. Gold and silver money exchange declined markedly from the 7^th to 10^th centuries, replaced in part by bronze coinage and by barter. Worse, human slaves so coveted by the Muslims and one of the mainsprings of Islamic savagery became common place – as did littoral raids, the sackings of villages and towns and unfettered Arab piracy.

“Trevor-Roper goes on to describe the vast wealth accumulated by the Muslim Caliphate....What the Muslims wanted above all, was 'eunuchs and slaves'. He continues: 'It was one of the functions of the Vikings to supply those goods. Half traders, half pirates, they ranged all over northern Europe, ... and kidnapped human beings. For preference they dealt in heathen Slavs, since Christian states had less compunction in handling a slave-trade in heathen bodies...”

The Vikings in the north and the Arabs and Muslims in the south. Both seeking booty, women and slaves. The Vikings or Varangians depopulated the major river systems of Eastern Europe, disrupting what was once very profitable and necessary trade with the Byzantine empire. They also engaged in mass pillage and wanton annihilation throughout Western Europe, sending captured slaves south to Muslimized Spain in exchange for gold. The Arabs ranged over the entire middle-sea – now an Arab lake – not allowing, as Ibn Khaldun an Arab writer much loved by the revisionists, 'a Christian plank on the sea'.

The horrific devastation visited by the Arabs upon the Mediterranean civilizations, which were far superior to anything that the Arab mind could even conjure up, was massive. Millions of slaves taken. A concerted attack in conjunction with the Vikings against Christendom. Piracy, rapine, and pilfering on a simply colossal scale which would not be equaled until the Turks invaded the Balkans and Eastern Europe in the 15^th century. North Africa denuded of forests, flora, irrigation systems and Roman created urban centers. All of it destroyed and turned to desert. The once great granary of Rome which sustained many millions of men, was now, from Egypt to Algeria, by the 9^th century a wasteland.

As O'Neill relates, “Muslim rulers began to systematically plunder the ancient monuments of Egypt, and an official department existed whose purpose was the location and despoilation of the pharaonic tombs....Saladin, the Muslim hero lionized in so much politically-correct literature....began the process by the exploitation of the smaller Giza monuments.....His son.....went further, and made a determined effort to demolish the Great Pyramid itself. He succeeded in stripping the outer casing of smooth limestone blocks...”

Muslims always destroy monuments from non-Islamic cultures. It goes on even today. The Giza Pyramids were once covered with dazzling white limestone emblazoned with precious inscriptions and script. The Arabs were so ignorant, that they neither knew why the Pyramids were built, or by whom, and did not care. Islamic theologians even came up with theories that the moon deity, Ali-ilah had them built as monuments to Islamic glory. So much for being enlightened.

Thanks to Arab rapacity engendered by holy war, and the lust for gold, women and comforts, we have the extraordinary civilisation of the Jewish-Christian and Graeco-Roman regions of the Near East, North Africa, Sicily and Spain over-run by pagan Muslims who were illiterate, uncivilized and pre-Roman in their barbarity. The results were predictably catastrophic. Islam turned back the entire evolution of man and the creation of the modern world, by centuries:

“The truth, however, is that early Islam was neither tolerant, nor enlightened.....It was a system that....breathed new life into the institution of slavery and introduced into Europe a...lethal form of anti-semiticism.”

Slavery, racism, superstition, endless warring, bi-annual raids and destruction. These were the derivatives of the Arab disaster which swept the middle-sea world during the 7^th century.

It is clear that any serious study would reveal that the classical Romano-Graeco civilization did not end in 476 AD with the 'fall' of Rome. That is of course a myth. The Gallo-Gothic-Roman empires which replaced the empire of the Caesars developed into wealthy, sophisticated societies. The same was true of Byzantium. In fact, O'Neill makes the cogent point that the West was becoming 'Byzantinized' during the 5^th and 6^th centuries before the Arab onslaught. We know this from archeology, the types of structures being built in both the East and West, the purity of the coins in circulation, the images on the coins in circulation, and the great stocks of libraries, letters and civilizational accouterments – all of which hint strongly at nascent neo-Roman empire recombining the entire middle sea world. Than came the Arabs and devastation followed.

Most university educated people today know nothing about the Arab annihilation of Greco-Roman civilization in North Africa and around the Mediterranean basin. People in general just simply believe that these lands have 'always been Muslim'. They were at one time centers of a wealthy and sophisticated Western civilization – one which never 'lost' the teachings of antiquity but had built a series of states better off, wealthier and more advanced than the Roman empire. Mankind was set back by centuries when the most illiterate barbarians imaginable, fueled by the pagan fascism of a moon cult, set about to not only conquer, but to efface these states of advanced civilization.

A fact never taught in either the media, or the educational systems.