99Muslim triumphalism and intolerance are modern
ones. I know that modern Islamism learned a trick
or two from Eu ro pean fascism, but when Muslim
armies were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683,
the world had witnessed a thousand years of jihad—
which had spread the faith from Portugal to the
Caucasus to India to sub- Saharan Africa. Islam was
spread primarily by conquest, not conversation.
Infi dels were forced to convert or die. “ People of
the book”— Jews and Christians— were given the
option of paying a protection tax (jizya) and living
in an apartheid state (as dhimmi). In fact, Muslim
historians recorded in assiduous detail the num-
bers of infi dels they slaughtered or enslaved and
deported.^18
It seems to me that a po liti cally correct my thol ogy
is replacing history on many of these topics. Con-
sider the Crusades. The Christians are often de-
picted as barbarian aggressors and the Muslims as
their highly cultured victims. But the Crusades
were primarily a response to 300 years of jihad
( whether the crusaders were aware of the Islamic
doctrine or not). They were a reaction to Muslim
- Some of this material has been gathered in Andrew
Bostom’s book The Legacy of Jihad.
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