Emmet Scott’s very good book, ‘The Impact of Islam’, will never be used as a teaching aid. You won’t hear the English historian quoted by academics, or on the BBC, defending Henri Pirenne’s thesis that Islam greatly contracted Mediterranean life, economy, civilisation and thanks to its barbarous obsession with Jihad (Spain, Italy, France), White slaves, destruction and rapine, helped disrupt European life to such an extent, that it gave a simple-minded pretext for anti-Catholics to declare a ‘Dark Age’ from 500-1500 A.D.
This calumny is oft repeated, and a lie spouted by the ignorant, including such atheist luminaries as Voltaire and Diderot. The simple-minded sloganeering could have at least, given their ‘intellectual’ pretensions, looked for ‘root causes’ as to why life may have been forcibly contracted in Europe post the advent of the Muslim Jihad. For most anti-Catholics proof is optional, and of course, those saintly, revered Muslims are immune to any form of critique.
The illiteracy of the ‘Dark Age’ myth, is anti-Catholicism. This in turn means an ‘ennobling’ of the ‘noble savages’ of Muhammad’s cult. As Scott writes (edits are mine):
The source of this “Islamophilic” viewpoint is a frankly anti-Christian mindset which first appeared during the Enlightenment and thereafter spread inexorably throughout Europe and the Americas. This anti-Christian bias has now become the default mode of thought in academic circles in the West: As Christianity was “talked down” so it became, as the twentieth century progressed, more and more the custom to “talk up” Islam.
Take for example the following quote from Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle Eastern studies at Princeton, whose 2001 book What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, looked at the decline of the Islamic world vis à vis the Christian, from the Middle Ages onwards: “It is often said that Islam is an egalitarian religion. There is much truth in this assertion. If we compare Islam at the time of its advent with the societies that surrounded it – the stratified feudalism of Iran and the caste system of India to the east, the privileged aristocracies of both Byzantine and Latin Europe to the West – the Islamic dispensation does indeed bring a message of equality. Not only does Islam not endorse such systems of social differentiation; it explicitly and absolutely rejects them. The actions and utterances of the Prophet, the honored precedents of the early rulers of Islam as preserved by tradition, are overwhelmingly against privilege by descent, by birth, by status, by wealth, or even by race, and insist that rank and honor are determined only by piety and merit in Islam.” (p. 82) Furthermore, “… though this pristine egalitarianism was in many ways modified and diluted, it remained strong enough to prevent the emergence of either Brahmans or aristocrats and to preserve a society in which merit and ambition might still hope to find their reward.
Lewis and other academics are absurd in their claims of Muhammad ‘brotherhood’, equality and tolerance. The cult was spread by fire, sword and death. Non-Muslims lived as Dhimmis or non-citizens with no rights, an obligation to pay Jizya or a poll tax along with other onerous taxes and duties; and defined within Muhammadan society as inferior, akin to livestock, the women used in harems and for pleasure, the men in a form of bondage working for their Muslim masters or marched off within Muhammadan armies to war.
The reality is that the three groups identified by Lewis as not sharing in the general beneficence of Islamic egalitarianism and freedom – women, slaves, and non-Muslims – suffered, throughout the centuries, indescribable hardships at the hands of their Muslim masters; and two of these groups, women and non-Muslims, continue to suffer to this day. That there are no more slaves in Islam (or very few, officially, at least), is due entirely to the efforts of Westerners during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The myth of Islamic tolerance is in fact one of the most pernicious to have gained currency in Western belief over the past century. In fact, Jews and Christians were anything but “protected” under the aegis of Islam. The dhimmi communities, as Bat Ye’or has shown in great detail in her excellent series of books on the subject, was subject to a whole raft of humiliating and degrading laws which rendered their lives almost intolerable: One of these was the compulsory wearing of distinctive clothing – an endearing feature copied by the Nazis in their persecution of the Jews during the twentieth century.
Academics are usually in thrall to Totalitarianism. They have defended mostly en-masse, Nazism, Communism, variant strains of Socialism, Covid Totalitarianism, GlobaloneyWarming, and other ideologies in which power, might and human debasement are essential elements of the program. It is not a coincidence that most academics, the ‘scientists’, the news-readers, the editors, the text-book writers and Wikipedia editors are Islamophiliacs. It is simply part of the pattern. As Scott notes, these lustrous ‘experts’ miss the entire point of the Koran-Muhammadan cult: enslavement of non-Muslims.
A fundamental precept of Islamic law – again, underlining its political nature – is that Muslims occupy a privileged position and have a right to live off the labor of infidels – whether they be dhimmis living under Islam or unconquered infidels living outside the House of Islam’s borders. As may be imagined, such a teaching could only breed a parasitical and lawless attitude which positively encouraged robbery and piracy.
The effects of enslavement of civilised non-Muslims leads to civilisation’s decline.
No Christian or Jewish communities could possibly prosper under such a pernicious system; and there are very good grounds for believing that it was this very system which turned vast areas of formerly fertile agricultural land in the Middle East and North Africa into semi-desert within a few decades during the late seventh century: Incoming Arab nomads grazed their goats and camels on the cultivated fields of the conquered Christians and Jews, and these dared not complain.
Muslim hordes spread across civilised Christian lands from Arabia to southern France. They squatted on rich Byzantine Eastern Christian lands (the Levant, Syria, North Africa) and rich Arian-Catholic lands in Spain (the Visigothic empire). These Christianised areas were some of the richest on the planet. All forms and manner of culture, technology and advances were being made. Algebra for example is a 2nd century Greek-Christian invention (Diophantes et al), and was simply renamed by ignorant Arabs. Advanced economies used complex irrigation systems, trade routes were extended, money fuelled exchange and refined products impressive in diversity and scale. The Arabs had none of this. They simply came, overwhelmed and squatted.
Indeed, the process of importing new technologies into the West had begun in the sixth century, before the appearance of Islam, with the appearance there of such Oriental technologies as the stirrup and silk-making. The spread of these eastern ideas seems to have been disrupted for three centuries by the arrival of the Arabs, and then resumed in the latter tenth century. And we should note than even those things which did originate in the Middle East, such as alcohol distillation, algebra, the windmill, etc., were rarely, if ever, the work of Arabs or even Muslims. Almost invariably they were ideas deriving from the work of Persians, Syrians, or Egyptians, who were permitted to continue their work for a short time after the Arab conquests. Once again, it is safe to say that these things would have arrived in the West irrespective of whether Islam existed or not.
What did Muhammadans actually bring? Destruction.
What Islam did bring to Europe was war and slavery, on a massive scale. The House of Islam in the tenth century had little use for any of the produce and natural resources of Europe, except one; the bodies of the Europeans themselves. Young women and boys were preferred, but during the tenth century Europeans of almost any age or class, and in almost any part of the continent, could find themselves in chains and on a ship bound for North Africa or the Middle East.
Scott rightly documents the culling of White slaves for the Muhammadan cult, with the predations of Vikings. The onslaught of the North-men is directly connected with obtaining and selling White slaves to Muslims. Dublin and many other cities were founded to provide a locus for the aggregation and sale of White slaves, many of them ending up in Muslim markets.
For the whole Viking phenomenon, which saw Scandinavian pirates wreak havoc throughout the north of Europe for several centuries, was a direct result of the Muslim demand for European slaves. The majority of slaves sold by the Scandinavians to the caliphate were Slavs from east of the Elbe, and indeed the word “slav” implies “slave” in most European languages to this day.
But since White Lives Don’t Matter, no one cares about this do they? More to come from Scott’s book.