Until the advent of materialism and 19th c. dogma, Western Civilisation was superior to anything Islam had developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam. Proof of this resides in the 'modern' world and the unending political-economic and spiritual poverty of Muslim states and regions. Squatting on richer civilisations is not 'progress'. Islam is pagan, totalitarian, and irrational.
FOLIO I in a new series on the Muslim Jihad against Christendom.
On the night of Thursday 30 July 2026, the border fence separating Morocco from the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta "totally collapsed," in the words of the local Civil Guard union chief. Over the following four days, Spain's Interior Ministry and Ceuta's regional government reported that close to 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into the city, most swimming or wading around the sea breakwater at Tarajal beach, others crossing overland. Video from the Associated Press showed the crowd was overwhelmingly young adult men, though families with small children were also present.
The human cost rose sharply as the crisis unfolded. Spanish authorities confirmed 9 deaths on the first night; by 31 July, the toll had reached 19, then 57; by 1 August it stood at 67–72 confirmed dead, with Ceuta's regional president, Juan Jesús Vivas, telling El País that the city morgue had received 88 bodies in total, some recovered from earlier, smaller crossing attempts over the preceding two weeks. Most deaths were drownings or crush injuries suffered while people tried to climb the breakwater and the border fence itself.
Ceuta, a city of roughly 84,000 residents, was overwhelmed. The Ceuta Business Confederation urged shops and bars to stay closed "until security can be guaranteed," fresh bread became difficult to find, and the city's patron-saint festival was suspended. Spain deployed the armed forces alongside the Civil Guard to restore order, and authorities installed a 500-metre floating barrier off the coast. More than 48,000 of the roughly 60,000 who had entered returned to Morocco within 48 hours, and by the weekend the city's cafés and terraces had reopened. The episode nonetheless triggered an emergency EU meeting, a call from 22 member states for coordinated border action, and a threat from Italy to suspend passport-free Schengen travel with Spain.
Sources: Associated Press/NPR (31 Jul 2026); Al Jazeera (30 Jul–2 Aug 2026); Euronews (31 Jul 2026); CNN (2 Aug 2026).
The 2026 crossings were not the first time Ceuta stood at a hinge point between the Christian and Muslim worlds. Under Rome and then Byzantium, the city was known as Septem Fratres, and by the late seventh century it was the last significant Byzantine, and so Christian, foothold on the North African coast, isolated after the fall of Carthage in 698 (below). Its governor, remembered in Arab and later Spanish chronicles as Count Julian, held it in an uneasy position between the advancing Umayyad Caliphate to his east and the Visigothic Christian kingdom of Hispania across the strait to his north.
Around 709–711, Julian struck an alliance with the Umayyad governor Musa ibn Nusayr and his Berber commander Tariq ibn Ziyad, and Ceuta became the staging ground for the Muslim invasion of Visigothic Spain in 711. Within a decade, the Umayyad conquest had ended nearly seven centuries of Roman, Byzantine, and Visigothic Christian rule on the Iberian Peninsula's southern and central lands. Ceuta's fall was not a violent sack in the manner of Carthage's; it was a negotiated defection. But its consequence was the same civilisational hinge the city occupies today: whoever holds Ceuta holds the door between two continents and two religious worlds.
Sources: standard histories of the Umayyad conquest of Iberia and the Maghreb (Collins, The Arab Conquest of Spain; Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests).
On 27 January 2026 the Spanish government announced an extraordinary regularisation programme, formalised by Royal Decree 316/2026 and published in the Official State Gazette on 15 April, bypassing a parliamentary vote. The scheme offered one-year residence and work permits to irregular migrants who could prove at least five months' continuous presence in Spain before 1 January 2026 and a clean criminal record. The application window ran from 20 April to 30 June 2026.
The government had projected roughly 500,000 beneficiaries. Applications instead reached nearly 1.2 million by the deadline, more than double the original estimate, about two-thirds of them from Central and South America. Madrid presented the measure as an economic and demographic necessity, citing labour shortages and an ageing workforce; critics, including opposition politicians and some Ceuta officials, characterised it as a de facto amnesty that signals to prospective migrants that irregular entry is eventually regularised. Spain's Foreign Ministry has rejected any causal link to the Ceuta surge, noting the regularisation applies only to those already resident before this year and that anyone who entered Ceuta irregularly cannot travel onward into mainland Spain or the wider Schengen area.
Sources: La Moncloa (Spanish government) press releases, 14 & 16 April 2026; Migration Policy Institute; InfoMigrants.
A second, more technical development sits behind the scale of the July crossings. On 29 June 2026, Spain's Supreme Court ruled that "hot returns" — the summary, on-the-spot expulsion of migrants without individual due process — cannot be applied to people intercepted at sea while trying to reach Ceuta or Melilla by swimming. The Court reasoned that the law authorising summary return refers specifically to migrants who cross physical border infrastructure (fences, barriers); those who swim around the breakwater have not crossed that infrastructure, and so must instead go through the ordinary immigration and asylum procedure, which is slower and affords more legal protection.
The case originated with an Algerian national intercepted at sea in 2024 and returned to Morocco without any individual assessment. Ceuta's regional authorities have publicly linked the ruling to the July surge, arguing it created an incentive to attempt the sea route rather than the fenced land route, where summary return still applies. Some Moroccan human-rights activists have disputed that migrants were even aware of the ruling, suggesting economic desperation, not legal calculation, drove the numbers.
Sources: CNN, "The Supreme Court ruling at the center of Spain's Ceuta migrant crisis" (1 Aug 2026); Euronews, "Spain's legal dilemma behind Ceuta's record migrant arrivals" (31 Jul 2026).
Several factors converge to suggest the July crisis was not a one-off. The sea-route loophole created by the Supreme Court ruling remains in force pending any legislative fix Madrid has only promised to "examine." Spain's own Interior Ministry recorded close to 3,000 crossings into Ceuta by land and sea in the first half of 2026 alone, before the July surge began, indicating already-elevated baseline pressure. Two mass regularisations in recent years, most recently drawing nearly 1.2 million applicants against a projected 500,000, have demonstrated to migrants and smuggling networks alike that prolonged irregular presence in Spain carries a realistic prospect of eventual legal status.
Add to this the precedent of a comparable, though smaller, crisis in May 2021 (roughly 8,000–9,000 crossings amid a Spain–Morocco diplomatic dispute), and Ceuta's exposed geography as one of only two land borders the EU shares with Africa, and officials across the EU are treating repetition, not a single anomaly, as the working assumption: Italy's threat to suspend Schengen travel with Spain and the EU's emergency session both reflect a bloc bracing for further surges rather than closing the file on this one.
Sources: Spanish Ministry of Interior migration statistics; Al Jazeera, "Why has the EU called an emergency meeting on Spain migrant surge?" (2 Aug 2026).
The parallel this folio sets out to examine reaches back roughly 1,300 years, to the last Christian stronghold on the Mediterranean's African shore before Ceuta itself: Carthage.
By the second half of the seventh century, the armies of the Umayyad Caliphate had swept west across Byzantine North Africa, through Egypt, Cyrenaica, and Tripolitania, into the Exarchate of Africa, whose capital was Carthage. Carthage was no minor provincial town: it was one of the most important Christian centres of the Mediterranean, the city of Tertullian, Cyprian, and, in nearby Hippo, Augustine, and it had for two centuries been a bulwark of Latin Christianity in Africa.
Arab campaigns against Byzantine Africa had gone on intermittently for decades under commanders such as Uqba ibn Nafi. The decisive phase came under Hasan ibn al-Nu'man al-Ghassani, appointed by Caliph Abd al-Malik. Hasan's forces took Carthage in 695; Byzantine naval power briefly recaptured it; and in 698, after defeating both the Byzantine fleet and Berber resistance led by the queen known as al-Kahina, Hasan's army took the city for good, ending Byzantine rule in Africa.
Sources: Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests; Wikipedia, "Hassan ibn al-Nu'man" and "Battle of Carthage (698)", cross-checked against standard reference histories.
Fearing that Byzantium, still a formidable naval power, might retake the city as it had in the 690s, Hasan's forces did not simply occupy Carthage — they dismantled it. Chroniclers describe a deliberate scorched-earth policy: the walls were torn down, the aqueducts that supplied the city's water were cut, the harbours were made unusable, and the surrounding agricultural land was laid waste. The churches, libraries, and civic institutions that had made Carthage a rival to Rome and Alexandria as a seat of Christian learning were left in ruins, and much of the population was killed, enslaved, or scattered into the surrounding countryside.
The broad facts of demolition, depopulation, and the extinguishing of Carthage as a functioning city are well established, but granular claims about the precise conduct of the conquering army rest on later and less complete testimony. As with other large metropolis’ destroyed by the Muslim Jihad, one can assume 40.000 dead civilians and an equal or greater number enslaved, not including the thousands of rapes and the stocking of harems.
Rather than rebuild Carthage, Hasan ibn al-Nu'man founded a new city a short distance away the following year, 699: Tunis. The site was chosen partly for strategic reasons — an inland-facing lagoon harbour less exposed to Byzantine naval raids than Carthage's open port — and partly, historians argue, to make a clean break with the Roman and Christian past the old city represented. Hasan brought Coptic artisans from Egypt to help build and settle the new town, and its Great Mosque, the Zaytuna, was founded within a few years.
Carthage's abandoned stone, marble, and columns became building material for Tunis, a common practice of architectural reuse (spolia) across the medieval Mediterranean but one that, here, quite literally repurposed the fabric of a Christian metropolis into the foundations of its successor. Tunis went on to become the political and economic capital of the region — Ifriqiya, then the Hafsid sultanate, and later the Ottoman-era Beylik of Tunis — a role it has held ever since.
Centuries later, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli — the three great regencies of what Europeans called the "Barbary Coast" — became the operating bases of corsair fleets that preyed on Christian shipping and coastal towns across the Mediterranean and beyond. The most-cited scholarly estimate, from historian Robert C. Davis (Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, 2003), puts the number of European Christians enslaved by Barbary corsairs between 1530 and 1780 at roughly one million to 1.25 million — a figure higher than earlier estimates and one some historians treat as an upper bound, but which is broadly accepted as placing the trade's scale in the hundreds of thousands at an absolute minimum.
Raiders struck hardest at Italy, Spain, Portugal, and southern France, but coastal raids reached as far as Ireland, Britain, and even Iceland. Captives were sold into galley labour, domestic service, artisanal trades, or concubinage; a smaller number were ransomed, often through the work of Catholic religious orders such as the Trinitarians and Mercedarians, who specialised in raising funds to buy Christian captives out of North African bondage.
Sources: Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Ohio State University research summary; History News Network.
Tunis's own corsair fleets, under the Muradid beys and later the Husainid dynasty, operated alongside — and in periodic rivalry with — the more famous corsairs of Algiers (associated with the Barbarossa brothers) and Tripoli. Tunisian raiders took ships and captives across the western and central Mediterranean, and captives passed through the city's slave markets before being distributed to labour, ransom, or household slavery across Ottoman North Africa. The trade brought Tunis substantial wealth and shaped its urban and mercantile life for nearly three centuries.
The corsair era declined through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries under mounting pressure from European and, later, American naval power (the Barbary Wars of 1801–1805 and 1815 involved the young United States directly), and it ended formally with the French bombardment and eventual French protectorate over Tunisia established in 1881.
The pattern this folio sets out is real at the level of geography: Ceuta and the North African coast beyond it have functioned, across 1,300 years, as a hinge between the Christian and Muslim shores of the Mediterranean, first as the launch point for a wave of outward Muslim conquest and, centuries later, corsair predation reaching deep into Christian Europe, and now as a route for northward civilian migration running in the opposite direction.
The fall of Carthage in 698 was the culmination of a directed military campaign by a unified caliphate pursuing explicit territorial conquest, executed by professional armies under state command.
The July 2026 crossings into Ceuta involved unarmed civilians, moving individually or in informal groups for reasons that, on the testimony of migrants and aid workers on the ground, were overwhelmingly economic rather than religious or political; more than 80 percent of those who entered left again voluntarily within two days once the acute crisis passed. Or so this is what is claimed. The open border, the lack of police or military opposition to the invasion has set a precedent and guaranteed and endless recurring cycle of invasion and violence.
What is also not in dispute is the recurrence of the location itself. Whatever forces are at work — imperial ambition in the seventh century, corsair economics in the seventeenth, migration and asylum law in the twenty-first — the same narrow strip of African coast keeps reasserting itself as the place where the Christian and Muslim Mediterranean worlds meet, unsettled, and where the terms of that meeting keep being renegotiated by force, by law, or by the sea itself.
On August 7th, 1571, the Ottoman Empire captured the city of Famagusta, Cyprus from the Venetians after an almost year long siege. Pope Pious V had created the Holy League which consisted of the Spanish Empire, several Italian city-states and the Knights of St. John to rescue the city but they had set out too late. Wanting revenge for Famagusta, The League came up with a plan to lure out and defeat the Ottoman Navy.
At dawn on October 7th, a small galley belonging to The League spotted the Ottoman Navy off the coast of Lepanto. The Holy League had 212 ships and 65k men(30k sailors and 35k soldiers) and was led by Don John of Austria. The Ottomans had 278 ships and 67k men(37k sailors and slaves, and 30k soldiers) and was led by Müezzinzade Ali Pasha. The Europeans had an advantage over the Turks as their forces were modernized with all soldiers armed with firearms and ships having many more cannons on board, where as the Turks were still mostly using bows and arrows and most ships having few cannons.
Before the battle began the entirety of the League's forces prayed the rosery and the Blessed Sacrament was administered to everyone. The Ottomans made the opening move and advanced their fleet towards the League's formation. The wind initially favored the Ottomans, but during their advance miraculously changed direction in favor of the League severely slowing the Ottomans' advance. The League's ships then opened fired on the Ottomans sinking or disabling many of them. As the Ottoman ships approached the Europeans began angerly shouting "Famagusta!" at the Turks. The Ottoman left wing struck the League's left wing first and after hard fighting the League sunk or captured all of the Ottoman ships. The Ottoman center then struck the League's center. As Müezzinzade's flagship was advancing it became separated from the rest of the formation. The League's ships noticed this and surrounded the flagship and boarded it. Müezzinzade was then killed in melee combat and his ship captured. The Ottoman center then fell apart with ships being captured, sunk, or fleeing the battle. The League then combined their center and left and attacked the Ottoman right wing which was winning against the League's right. Realizing he was now badly outnumbered the remaining Ottoman captain Uluj Ali ordered his ships to retreat. The League pursued the Ottomans, but eventually they got away. The battle lasted around 4 hours.
The League lost 13 ships and 7.5k men the Ottomans lost 50 ships and over 30k men. The League also captured over 120 Ottoman ships and freed over 10k European galley slaves. Very few prisoners were taken as word of the horrific treatment of Europeans fleeing Famagusta had reached the League, so Ottomans were simply executed upon surrendering. The Battle of Lepanto marked a turning point in Europe's struggle against the Ottoman Empire and dispelled the myth of "Ottoman invincibility" at sea as well as being one of the last naval battles that rowing galleys were used in.
Christians in Nigeria have faced sporadic persecution since the 1950s, but the past 25 years have seen a wave of violence that is swiftly becoming a slow-motion genocide. Despite that, the international community has for the most part turned a deliberate blind eye on the weekly killings; when pressed for comment, everything from conflicts over grazing land to climate change have been cited as the real reasons behind the ongoing persecution.
Persecution of Christians in Nigeria began to spike after 1999, when 12 northern states adopted Sharia law; the rise of the terrorist group Boko Haram in 2009 marked a dramatic escalation. Famously, Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls in 2014. Christian girls were targeted for forced conversion and marriage to Muslim fighters; 87 of the girls are still cited as “missing” 11 years later.
In addition to Boko Haram, attacks on Christians are carried out by the Islamic State West Africa Province and radicalized Fulani herdsman. According to one Nigerian NGO, over 50,000 Christians have been killed since 2009 alone – and not because of “climate change.”