Why Aren’t the Arabs the ‘Colonizers’?

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, October 29, 2023

 

The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem sits atop the site of the Second Temple, the central place for Jewish worship before its destruction during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.

 

One wonders if any of the people braying about the alleged “settler colonialism” of Israel ever wonder how Al-Aqsa got there.

 

Did the Jews voluntarily erect a version of it in an eighth-century homage to multiculturalism? If not, how did the Muslims who built it come to be in Jerusalem in the first place?

 

These are rhetorical questions, of course. The caliphate besieged Jerusalem and took it from the Byzantines in the early seventh century.

 

Since the “decolonization” agenda is meant only to target Western nations and peoples, you rarely hear of the conquests and empire-building of the non-Western world, which is conveniently forgotten behind a narrative of pervasive victimization.

 

All of human history is a story of never-ending layers of conquest and defeat and of migration and exile. If it were to be undone, we’d need to extirpate almost all peoples everywhere, including those who are currently portrayed as the hopelessly oppressed.

 

The earliest phase of the seventh-century Arab expansion was truly explosive, and then it continued at a slower but still impressive clip.

 

Indeed, it is one of the most sweeping acts of conquest and successful exercises in colonialism in world history. This wasn’t the Mongols driving all before them and then receding to leave little in their trace, or the Normans getting absorbed into the England they conquered. No, the Arabs followed up their military conquest with a cultural imperialism still felt today.

 

The Arabs would gobble up Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. They chipped away at the Byzantine Empire and launched a no-kidding effort to conquer it wholesale that fell short after two epic sieges of Constantinople. They basically took all of the Persian empire. Eventually, they assembled an empire with the greatest territorial extent since the Romans, encompassing 80 percent of the population of the Middle East and North Africa and reaching to the south of France.

 

Dan Jones writes in his history of the Middle Ages, Powers and Thrones, “Syria was one of the first major triumphs of a new power that was about to sweep across the world, branching out to the borders of China and the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, establishing an Islamic state that covered more than twelve million square kilometers.”

 

Its armies “appeared everywhere from central Asia, through the Middle East and north Africa, throughout the Visigothic Iberian Peninsula, and even into southern France.” Everywhere they conquered, they put in place “Islamic governments and introduced new ways of living, trading, learning, thinking, building, and praying.”

 

And of speaking and writing. The caliph Abd al-Malik imposed Arabic as the official language of the empire, an act of the highest cultural significance, since Arabic and Islam were so intertwined. “Arabization,” Jones writes, “was gradually followed by conversion across the Muslim-held territories—a shift that can still be seen, felt, and heard in almost every part of the old caliphate in the twenty-first century.”

 

Once they had Islam foisted on them, these territories, by and large, never went back, except in the cases of Spain, Portugal, and Sicily.

 

In the Levant, in particular, as the archaeologist and historian Alex Joffe writes, there was an imperial project that included bringing in new people. Settlers came of their own volition or were moved there by political authorities, Joffe notes, including Egyptians in the early 19th century and Chechens, Circassians, and Turkmen at the hands of the Ottomans later in the century.

 

A Hamas official once said, “Half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”

 

Should all this shuffling of population be reversed? Should the land conquered by the Arabs so long ago go back to the Byzantines or Persians, or their legatees? What do Ben and Jerry think?

 

Obviously, the decolonizers don’t care about any of this, or the fate of the Kurds, Assyrians, and Amazighs, peoples who have suffered more recently from the Arabization of the broader region.

 

What they really favor is another act of Arab colonization to eliminate the Jewish people, who must succumb, finally and completely, to the long tide of Islamization and Arabization “from the river to the sea.” This isn’t a principled adherence to the rights of indigenous people or a respect for ancient homelands, but Lenin’s notorious formulation, “who whom,” in a different context.

 

The work begun in the seventh century, in other words, is still incomplete.