get to Rome, but at this point they were turned back. The
tide was starting to turn. Europe, which had so long lagged
behind the Islamic world, was catching up militarily. The
Muslims were turned away from Malta in the sixteenth
century, and failed in their first siege of Vienna in 1529. On
October 6, 1571, the naval forces of the Holy Roman
Empire won a decisive victory over the Ottoman navy at the
great Battle of Lepanto. Later, though, a Muslim army
defeated the Poles in 1672 and seized large portions of the
Ukraine — but they lost what they had gained less than ten
years later. Finally, they besieged Vienna again, only to be
finally turned back on a day that marks the high point of
Muslim expansion in Europe: September 11, 1683.(Osama
bin Laden has never said so, but it seems likely that this date
loomed large in his mind as he planned the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.)
After the defeat at Vienna, the jihads vanished into
historical memory. The European powers grew to be far
stronger than the increasingly decrepit Ottoman Empire,
until finally they were able to colonize larger portions of
what had been Ottoman domains. The poverty and cultural
and technological inferiority of the house of Islam made
jihad impossible. But the theology of jihad was set aside
only in practice, not in theory. This theology has never been
repudiated by any significant Muslim sect.
- Doesn’t the Bible (especially the Old Testament)
contain violence similar to Islam’s command for jihad?
Yes and no. The Old Testament contains a great deal of