Paul Marshall’s lecture at Christianity & National Security 2023.

Paul Marshall discusses the development of Muslim empires, European colonialism, and modern radical Islamist groups. The following is a transcript of the event.

I hope you at the back have good eyesight because we will be looking at maps. My topic will be understanding Muslim-Christian conflict, lessons of history. I want to stress that theme of history because, except in South America, people don’t pay much attention to history. Whereas if you’re dealing with the Muslim majority world, people are immersed in it and speak in those particular terms. In the Gulf War or with Hamas, there are all sorts of historical illusions being made, which we miss. Indeed, a book I recommend by Ambrose Bierce, written over 100 years ago, The Devil’s Dictionary, a very cynical dictionary and actually funny. Under the heading of “War” it reads: “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Something too true to be entirely funny. The same thing could probably be said of history.

It’s difficult without the maps. We have a pattern of a particular conflict with the Muslim majority world. What term do we use for the rest? Often it’s Islam versus the West. The late Bernard Lewis said this is a peculiar conflict. It’s a religion versus a point of the compass. What are we going to say about what the West is? Without the maps, let me mention this: According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad, born in 570, was not only a religious teacher in the Western sense, but also a military leader, led armies and battles. He was a political leader. At the time of his death, they controlled an area in the middle of the… Are we getting hold on? Ah, thank you. Going back to this, I started thinking about this talk a month ago and thought I wanted to talk about Islamic things, but nobody’s interested because it’s China, China, China, properly, and then Ukraine and Russia. Obviously, with the Hamas attacks, we’re now very interested in that, but I did want to put up a couple of maps to make some of these points.

In dealing with the Middle East, you’re looking at Salafi Jihadi movements, those with a particular ideology of Islamic conquests. There may be other movements in this area interested in more local territorial matters, but this is one with overarching World historical goals. In the Middle East, South Asia, if you’re looking at different shades, the red means there are active attacks going on; others are collecting things or there are active groups. Let me just finish up. Peter Fan gave us a great introduction to Africa. This is Africa—Salafi Jihadi movement. Over half the territory of Africa, these groups are operating as far down as South Africa, and that’s been a major change in the last 20 years. This is not just a phenomenon in the Middle East but something much more widespread. Now to the historical things.

At the time of Muhammad’s birth, the controlling power in that area was the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire. All the colored areas are part of that Empire, and it survived till 1453. Going back to where I was earlier, the dark purple here, the time of Muhammad’s death, this is probably the area under the control of Muslims. The Deep Purple area is Islamic expansion by 660, 30 years later. Including very light colors here takes us to about 72, meaning 100 years after the Islamic prophet’s death, they had moved higher up, but you had Muslim Arab armies operating in central France and China and controlling all the area in between. This is quite an amazing expansion. One shouldn’t say there’s something peculiar about the Arabs in this. If the Byzantines could have done it, they would. That’s what Empires do, so you have this expansion. Here is a map with green lines: those are the areas under Muslim control by the year 1100.

Let’s move ahead to 1500, same map. You had the Reconquista in Spain, so the Muslim armies had been driven out. They’d lost that area, but expansion across the Sahara and the Sahel, right down East Africa. Controlling now most of the Indian subcontinent over into Indonesia, the map’s wrong. It should include the southern Philippines, penetration into Central Asia and Russia, and with the collapse of the Byzantines, moving into Eastern and Central Europe. This is the area of Muslim control in the 1500s. It’s not all one state, they’re fighting within each other, but that’s an area where Muslims are in charge.

If you’re a Muslim, you look at this and say the truth has won out almost from the beginning. With some pushback in Spain, the true religion has shown itself in world history by almost 1,000 years of continuous expansion. Not just militarily, this was culturally the most powerful, it was the richest, probably the most cultured in terms of literature, philosophy, and other things. You have this confidence in your religion: 1,000 years of almost continual success.

Then it changed. History doesn’t change on a dime. It happens; you start to lose some battles, then you start to lose more than you win, and the tide begins to change. If I took one symbolic date for the height of Islamic expansion, it would be September 11th, 1683. That’s arbitrary, but you will remember it because of the September 11th. At this point, Turkish Ottoman armies were laying siege to Vienna. They had done this before, but they got defeated the next day, September 12th, by Polish and other armies. It wasn’t just, “Hey, we lost a battle,” but that defeat led to further pushback and being driven out of Austria, then driven out of Hungary. What you had was a pushback by European powers down through Central Europe, pushing back through the Balkans, places like Hungary, Serbia, later on, Bulgaria, Romania. Islamic control is being lost in these areas.

A second wave of Europeans, or as Muslims would see it, Christian expansion and imperialism. First, the pushback in Europe but then around the peripheries. Russia moving into Central Asia, taking control of places we now call Kazakhstan, Turkistan, Uzbekistan, and so forth. Then the European powers take over portions of Africa. Italy, France, and Spain begin to take over these areas. The British move into Nigeria and other areas. The British take over India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The Dutch take over Indonesia. The British take over Malaysia. What is happening with the phenomenon called colonialism is a takeover of these areas around the Muslim world. They were taking over from Muslim rulers, who were dominant in India at the time. You’re getting a wholesale change of European Christian powers displacing Muslim rulers throughout the world.

After a thousand years of stunning success, you start to get these things. Here is a map illustrating all the areas of the world at one time under Muslim rule, not necessarily a majority Muslim population, but Muslims were in charge. Then you get a shrinkage. This is 1925. Where are Muslims? What are the Muslim-majority places run by Muslims? As mentioned with India, Indonesia, places in Asia, Africa, they’re being run by Christians. In the Middle East itself, the British are ruling Egypt and Yemen. The places maintaining independence were Central Arabia, soon to become Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. You had Iran, but it’s getting secular. Turkey, extremely secular, makes France look Ultramontane Catholic. They may be majority Muslim, but there’s nothing Islamic about the government. Who is actually running this place? Union Jack, Union Jack, France, Spain. That’s who’s running the Middle East.

So you have this Christian expansion: first pushing back out of Europe, expansion into the Islamic periphery—Central Asia, Africa, Asia—and finally, a takeover of the Islamic heartland itself. If you’re a Muslim, what do you think? Why are people angry? They took us over with colonialism. As an aside, I think colonialism is a misleading word because it tries to take European expansion and present it as distinct from other imperialism. It was distinct in one respect: it was largely done by sea, whereas most empires expand by land. So colonialism wrenches out European imperialism as if it were distinct, other than by the fact it was maritime.

We have the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire. We don’t call it that, but Russia expanded for several centuries about 50 square miles a day, all the way to the Pacific. Lots of imperialism going on. But if you’re a Muslim, the response is: you took over our countries, you dominated them. A response could be, let’s go back to the earlier maps. “You did it to us first.” You’ll probably know “you did it first” is not effective, but still, the pattern is Muslim Islamic success followed by crippling failure at the hand of Europe, the West, or Christendom. This has caused tremendous resentment in the Islamic World. There’s a debate about this. One is that we became close-minded, we refused to learn, we lost critical thinking, science, and culture, and became primitive. That’s why we lost to the European powers. Another response is the opposite. We became bad Muslims. When we were truly faithful, followed the prophet, disciplined, committed, we were successful. But now we have gone after false gods, imitated the West, brought in heretical doctrines like nationalism or democracy or critical thinking. That’s what destroyed us. What do we need to do? We need to get back to a pure Islam, Salafists, the original followers of Muhammad. We need a purified Islam, and then we can go back to this again and carry on.

Let me give some examples of this. Hizb, which is a radical movement, has been violent in some places, not in others. But this is their map of the caliphate. Looks very familiar to the red one you just looked at. This is ISIS. This is their map. These are movements saying we need to get back to Pure Islam, to recapture the Muslim World from these Infidel controllers, and then get back with the program and continue our expansion. And when you’re getting more radical forms of Islam, including, but not restricted to terrorism, this is the sort of agenda and underlying picture you see. In terms of the historical examples, it’s not a stupid view of History. If you read through, say, Osama bin Laden, he describes these particular things.

Where does that leave us? We’re dealing with ISIS, as you can see from the earlier maps, very widespread. Al-Qaeda and the original map of Africa. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other groups are extremely active in the Indian subcontinent and also in the Middle East. Some comments, and then I’ll open to questions. Where does Hamas fit in this? It is a group like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, not only in its tactic but in its worldview. It is not a Palestinian nationalist movement. It believes nationalism is a heresy; people should not be organized according to particular nations but according to Islam. It is not a movement for democracy; democracy is a heresy. It’s explicit in its charters. It is one of these types of movements and commits itself not to negotiate but to wage war. When you see people saying Hamas is fighting against colonialism, settlers, or whatever, Hamas may use this for public consumption in the West, but they’re explicit in Arabic writings that this is an Islamic agenda, to restore control west of the Jordan River and to continue that expansion and to get rid of groups not with the program, such as the PLO. It killed the PLO representatives in Gaza.

As we look at increasing tensions in the Middle East, throughout Africa, the Indian subcontinent, even in the southern Philippines—it was little reported, but ISIS-affiliated groups took over a town of 250,000 people in the southern Philippines, now about four years ago, and held it for two months. So, this is going on throughout the world. Be aware of this extent in terms of understanding much of the Muslim world, to get some sense of this history of success and failure but also being victimized, which they were. We need to acknowledge that. So, there’s that history behind us and that continual conflict. The question before us is, how do we end this? The first step is to realize what this cycle has been and what this history has been, and not keep projecting more recent secular mindsets on a conflict with strong religious roots. Let’s open it up to questions. Thank you.