- Al-Baladuri’s ninth century book on the rise of Islam was translated into
English as The Origins of the Islamic State (Columbia University Press,
London and New York, 1916). This book tells of the wars and conquests
of the Arabs from the time of Mohammed in seventh century Arabia to
the wars and conquests in the ninth century across Europe, Africa and
Asia.. It covers the conquests of lands from Arabia to Egypt, North
Africa, and Spain in the west, and in the east to Iraq, Iran, and Sind (the
latter of which is part of Pakistan). The Origins of the Islamic State
begins with Mohammed arriving in Medina (confirming that the Islamic
calendar is coterminous with the attempts of Muslims to rule over non-
Muslims everywhere). From this point in his life Mohammed was
regarded by western experts as having transitioned from being “a
prophet” to being “a statesman” (‘statesman’ is an overly-polite word for
someone who set about robbing and killing, someone who in the twenty-
first century we would expect to be executed for war crimes). Dr. Hitti,
the translator of The Origins of the Islamic State, ended up as Professor
of Semitic Literature at Princeton University until 1954. He was involved
in several famous political exchanges with Albert Einstein, and Hitti
played a role in setting up the United Nations. In 2015, nearly 100 years
after Hitti’s translation, Robert Hoyland, a professor at New York
University, published In God’s Path: the Arab Conquests and the
Creation of an Islamic Empire, a book which reconfirms the history of
wars and conquests as told in The Origins of the Islamic State. Yet as far
as the discourse of journalists, politicians and clergy was concerned,
Islam was still “a religion of peace”, even as the reformed Islamic State in
Syria and Iraq was issuing Koranic justifications for its war, for its
obscene executions, and for the reintroduction of Islamic sex-slavery. As
far as most public discourse in the West in the twenty-first century was
concerned, it was as if books like The Origins of the Islamic State and In
God’s Path (and scores of scholarly books in between) had never been
published. In the last three decades of the twentieth century Bat Yeʼor
published multiple books (translated from French into English and
Russian) on the subjugation of Jews and Christians under Islam and in
dana p.
(Dana P.)
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