ISLAM'S SUCCESSFUL ORIGINS
What we are going to talk about today is the role of Islam in history yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The Islamic revolution is the greatest religious revolution in the history of the world. In a mere 200 years, Islam came out of the desert and became the most important religion on the planet. The majority of the world's Christians converted to Islam. At the same time in the East, Islam absorbed and superseded Zoroastrianism in Iraq and Iran as it knocked out the Sassanid Persian Empire. In the battle of Talas in 751 in central Asia the armies of the Caliph defeated the armies of the Chinese Emperor. The end result of that was that Islam superseded Buddhism in central Asia. These are all permanent changes. They have not been reversed. So this is a historical event of enormous significance. From the years 700 to 1700, Islam was the dominant religion on the planet.
ISLAM IS NO LONGER THE DOMINANT RELIGION TODAY
Today it is not. Christianity is the dominant religion on the planet and in conjunction with that is a kind of atheist secular worldview that dominates a good part of the West, and technically communism is the official so to speak religion of China, the largest nation in the world. So Islam is not the dominant religion today though it is the second largest.
MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT ISLAM
How did Islam come to be so successful in its thousand years in power? There's a lot of misconceptions about this perpetuated by lies from the West. And again we have to be careful in discussing this. It doesn't mean that everything the West did was bad and everything Islamic states did were good etc. But there are huge lies perpetuated against Islam, particularly starting in the diabolical Crusades where so-called Christian armies invaded the Middle East, massacred Jews, and committed all sorts of atrocities while claiming they were doing wonderful things. Let's get a couple of things straight. The Quran very specifically states that there should be no compulsion in religion. As Napoleon observed, you cannot rule by bayonets. You can you can't force people to believe in something. You can force people maybe in the short term but you can't force people to change something as important as their religion for the long term. The conversions in the first 200 years of power in Islam were voluntary conversions. You cannot over-emphasize enough that Islam with a great deal of logic presented itself to the Christian population that it conquered as the logical successor and culmination of Christianity. Christians were not persecuted. They had to pay a small tax called the jizya. But they were not persecuted.
By contrast, when Christianity gained power in the Roman Empire, the Christians conducted the largest political persecution and religious persecution campaign in the history of the world, an absolutely horrific event. On top of that, due to contradictions in the Bible, the Christians themselves spent a huge amount of time persecuting each other over questions about the Trinity and so on.
ISLAM CAME TO THE NEAR EAST AS A FORCE OF LIBERATION
So when Islam arrived in a countries such as Egypt, such as modern Syria, such as Libya, Islam arrived as a force of religious liberation. The endless suppression of minorities by Christianity was ended and people came to see Islam as a breath of fresh air . At the same time Islam built civilization in places such as Baghdad, here were the wonders of the ancient medieval world. Here there was the study of Aristotle, there was the study of the Greek classics and so on. This was a civilized nation and commanded the respect of the world.
PERSECUTIONS IN INDIA
Now beyond the first 200 years Islam would go on to expand further. To be specific, Islam and Islamic governments would start to invade India in the 11th century. This is a subject of very great controversy today as to what those invasions consisted of and we certainly aren't going to resolve it to the satisfaction of this side or that side. According to the Hindus, this was a Holocaust of as many as 100 million Hindus. There is no question about it that this was a very brutal campaign of conquest. We're not going to sugarcoat the situation and say that it was humane and the it was all misrepresented. But how brutal was it? We don't know.
What we do know, in terms of Islam, is that unlike in central Asia, unlike in Persia, unlike in the conquest of the Byzantine Empire sections in the West that it seized, the Muslims came into contact with a competing religion Hinduism and either because of the heavy-handed tactics of of the conquerors and or the intellectual power of Hinduism, Islam did not triumph in terms of converting the majority of the people in India. In India, no one really knows what happened to Buddhism in India but our theory is that Islam superseded Buddhism, but we do know that today's Buddhism is virtually nonexistent and our theory on that is that Islam superseded Buddhism in India as it superseded Buddhism in central Asia. However, you can't sugarcoat the fact that Islam of did not succeed in converting the majority of the people of India. Now towards the end of the 17th century things began to go wrong for Islam in India. The last major Mughal (that was the name of their dynasty) Emperor was a very intolerant person and this intolerance led to great levels of unrest as he expanded terror in his Empire. This set the seeds for disaster because Islam's rule in India was based on a certain level of tolerance. Once that was replaced with intolerance the whole thing collapsed.
THE DISASTER OF THE MONGOL CONQUESTS FOR ISLAM
Now will just take a further tour around the world and other areas of Islam and other events of the Mongol conquests were originally seen as a huge disaster for Islam particularly since they led to the destruction of Baghdad and one of the most horrific disasters in world history. (By the way, the conquest of Baghdad was conducted by a Christian general serving the Mongols that's an interesting fact.) However, the power of Islam was again on display where the Mongols eventually converted to Islam and the scope of Islam actually expanded. The Ilkhanate empire, which took over Iran and related areas, converted to Islam. The Golden Horde in the areas of southern Russia and the Crimea converted to Islam, so the actual result of the of Mongol conquest was actually an expansion of Islam not a decline. It's a very interesting fact. Now in the 14th and 15th century, the Ottoman Empire began to expand and expanded into Europe and was very successful. The Europeans didn't do a very good job of defending themselves. At that time somebody emerged was probably the biggest disaster in the history of Islamic called Tamerlane, who set up a very powerful empire which attacked the Mughal Empire in India and committed a whole series of devastating atrocities. He attacked the Golden Horde committed a whole series of devastating atrocities and at a time when the Ottoman armies were making tremendous progress (It very well may have made its way to the Atlantic coast) Tamerlane attacked the Ottoman Empire, forcing the Ottoman Empire troops to withdraw and he defeated the Ottoman Empire at the battle of Ankara. All these things were big disaster for Islam and would long-term weaken Islam in power as Europe began to rise in power.
ISLAM IN INDONESIA
Now the other big area of Islam that we want to discuss is the world's largest Muslim population today and that is the population of Indonesia. When talking about the history of Indonesia, you must understand that it might come as a shock to people but this was not the time of Gallup polls and people running around with iPads collecting data. So we don't know a lot about that. Our study of this is very fragmented in terms of the mists of the past. But with the history of Indonesia there's an influence of Hinduism, there is an influence of Buddhism. When did Hinduism and Buddhism get to Indonesia? Who knows. The theory is the second and third centuries A.D. but who knows. Interestingly, both Islam and Christianity arrived in Indonesia at about the same time however Christianity—even though having the power of an imperial government behind it with the Dutch colonizers—didn't really go anywhere. It went to 10% of the population and Islam ended up taking almost 90% of the Indonesian population and it did so by means of a campaign of tolerance, of intellectual debate and so on. Again we're not stating that everybody was a little angel here, but we're trying to make some basic points that this is what was successful in building a successful Muslim state.
PROBLEMS AFTER WORLD WAR I
Now looking at Islam today what lessons can we draw from Islamic history? It seems really very clear that when Islam presents itself as a force of tolerance and an intellectual force, it succeeds. So we have to ask a very basic question today: Why is Islam today in the sorry state that it's in? This is debated throughout the Islamic world but there's no question that Islam is not in good shape today. The planet is also not in very good shape. Christianity is the dominant religion today. Part of the problem is the attacks of Anglo-American imperialism culminating in the really diabolical, despicable Lawrence of Arabia in World War I who tricked the Arabs and misled the Arabs into believing that if they bled and died to fight the Turks they would get a homeland. This was a lie from the get-go. The end results of World War I were probably the low point of Islam in world history. The Western powers forced Turkey to give up the caliphate. That was destroyed and then contrary to the promises of the Western powers, they seized control of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan. And then to make sure they really ticked off the local populations, they established a home for European Jews fleeing all the religious lunacy in Europe into Palestine. The latter point was a great tragedy because Islam has had a long history of tolerance for Judaism and of serving as a refuge for the vehemently anti-and murderous anti-semitic campaigns that have been such a feature of European history. For instance, Ferdinand and Isabella, the financiers of Columbus, conducted one of the most murderous campaigns against the Jews in world history prior to the Holocaust and forced out hundreds of thousands of Jews from Spain. They largely went to the Muslim world where they were accepted. So the combination of the betrayal of Lawrence of Arabia and the establishment without any consultation of a home for Jewish people in Arab territory, unfortunately, led to a huge amount of hostility towards the Jewish people, which has continued to this day. This has also created problems with the Arabs relationship with the West.
ISLAM AFTER WORLD WAR II
Now after World War II, the chains of colonialism began to be broken because the Western powers had bled themselves white and England basically self-destructed as an empire. However, colonialism all too often was replaced by neocolonialism, and that wasn't a terribly positive situation. The Arabs were able to play off the Cold War of the West vs the Soviet Union and gain some advantage from that. In the Arab world there was a struggle for leadership between shall we say secular nationalism represented by Nasser and religious Islam represented by Saudi Arabia. They even came to blows in a struggle for the control of Yemen, which is where a good part of the Egyptian troops were in 1967. The 1967 war was just a cataclysmic disaster for secular nationalism in the Arab world from which it really never recovered and it moved the center of gravity of the Arab world from Egypt to Saudi Arabia.
SAUDI ARABIA EMERGES AS A WEALTHY PETROL POWER
The 1973, the Middle East war was another giant earthquake in the history of the middle east. It cemented Saudi Arabia's leadership of the Muslim world. The Saudi Arabia oil embargo and the huge rise in the price of oil and the nationalization of Western oil concessions throughout the Islamic world led to a huge rise in Muslim petrol power. It is not an accident that real wages in the United States peaked in 1973. The cheap oil empire of the postwar period collapsed.
Inside America, the 1973 war would have tremendous consequences. America's enormously powerful Jewish lobby would start to see the alliance of the Arabs and the Soviet Union as an existential threat to the survival of Jews equal to the Nazi threat in the 1940s. For a while in 1973 it looked like Israel was about to be wiped out. This would cause key parts of the American Jewish community to switch to the right and support a huge increase in American military power and this would culminate in the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of the United States.
THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION OF 1979
As time went on, the power of Saudi Arabia would grow, but another event occurred which is probably one of the biggest disasters in the history of Islam, which is the Iranian Revolution of 1979. A bigoted lunatic called Ayatollah Khomeini set up an oppressive, backward totalitarian state and claimed it was Islam. His appeal to the whole Islam world was limited because this was based on the Shiite version of Islam, which is the minority version of modern Islam, but it set the stage for a whole new wave of intolerance and persecution. Saudi Arabia, particularly after the incredibly bizarre siege of Mecca, shifted to a more oppressive position.
ISLAM IN MODERN TIMES
Now 9/11 further damaged the position of Islam in terms of the West, and in our time we had a further series of disasters that really haven't helped Islam.
The emergence of Mohammed bin Salman as the dictator of Saudi Arabia has led to some positive things in terms of controlling the religious nut cases, but in terms of the issue of the image of Saudi Arabia in the world and to a certain extent home among certain people, has been nothing short of a total disaster. The murder of Mr. Khashoggi in terms of the people slaughtered by MBS is rather small, but public relations wise it was a mega event to have murdered a dissident in the Saudi embassy in Turkey and have the murder recorded and played back to the world by Turkey's secret police and so on and so forth as well as MBS's decision to embrace Mr. Donald Trump has really not been helpful for Saudi Arabia's image in the world and the image of Islam. So that's just a fact. It doesn't mean we condemn everybody in Saudi Arabia, or we condemn everything that MBS did, but overall this has not been a plus.
WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF THE MUSLIM WORLD?
So where does Islam go from here? I think we just need to come to terms with some basic facts. When Islam presented itself as a tolerant force, when Islam has presented itself as a force of intellectual Enlightenment, it succeeded. There is no way the two dominant forces in Islam today, the government in Tehran and the government in Saudi Arabia, there's no way to put a pretty face on these. These are very intolerant countries and it is very difficult to see these countries as being a a center of gravity for global Islam and expanding as it did in the thousand years of Muslim religious preeminence. Islam has virtually no support in the West. It has virtually no support. Buddhism and Hinduism (or at least what Western intellectuals think is Buddhism and Hinduism) has a certain amount of intellectual credibility in the West. Islam does not and it is not respected in the West.
We feel Islam as a religion should be respected. It is a great religion, but Islam today needs to get back to basics like it did in its golden age. The basics of respecting tolerance and being a force for intellectual enlightenment. It needs to get back to its basics as a force for social justice. A major issue in the muslim world today is the treatment of women. That is a big problem if Islam wants to make further progress in the world. As we look into the future, the crisis in the world is deepening, the environment is going further downhill, the war in Ukraine is plunging things into a further level of chaos. America internally is a study in disaster. So American imperialism is clearly not in good shape. So the moral message of Islam has great value and ultimately the major religions need to come together on common values. This discussion of Islam is to try to present how Islam could play a positive role in future lectures we can discuss issues such as the environment and other issues where the world needs to come together but this is a historical lecture which we hope will add to people's understanding and we urge you to come to our website to see documentation that we have presented.