Western public culture has no trouble speaking in the language of conquest, so long as the conqueror is European. We can list the crimes of empire in a catechism: invasion, extraction, settlement, forced conversion, slavery, and the slow grinding down of local institutions. We teach it. We ritualize it. We build moral identity around denouncing it.

But history did not outsource conquest to Europe.

From the 7th century onward, Muslim-ruled polities participated in a major, long-running arc of territorial expansion: the early Arab conquests across the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, and Persia; the push into Iberia; later Turkic and Ottoman expansion through Anatolia and into the Balkans; and, further east, Muslim dynasties consolidating power across parts of South Asia. This was not a tea party with trade agreements. It was war, regime change, tribute systems, and durable social hierarchies that reordered whole regions for centuries.

Even where rule was comparatively tolerant by the standards of its time, it was still rule. Non-Muslim populations were commonly governed as dhimmi, protected yes, but subordinate. They often paid special taxes, faced legal asymmetries, and lived under conversion pressures that, in some contexts, ranged from overt coercion to the long, quiet incentives of status and security. The story differs by place and century. The pattern does not disappear.

Then there is slavery, another topic where our moral accounting often becomes selective. The trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean systems ran for many centuries and involved very large numbers, though estimates vary widely. They fed household servitude, military slavery, and sex slavery. In the Mediterranean, North African corsairing and “Barbary piracy” produced European captives well into the early modern era. Some historians argue for totals in the low millions across those centuries, though the higher figures are disputed and other scholars propose substantially lower estimates. Either way, the phenomenon is real, and it is rarely integrated into the default Western “slavery story,” which typically means plantations, the Atlantic triangle, and racial chattel bondage. The Ottoman system also included practices like devshirme, the levy of Christian boys for state service, and imperial governance across religious communities was often managed by layered legal categories. Stability was purchased with inequality.

None of this is a claim that Muslim-majority societies are uniquely violent. They are not. It is a claim that they were human societies with power, ambition, and the usual imperial toolkit. Sometimes it was tempered by pragmatism. Sometimes it was sharpened by ideology. It was always shaped by the incentives of rule.

So why does so much Western academic and activist discourse treat “colonialism” as if it is a European invention, or at minimum reserve the hottest moral language for European cases?

You can see the asymmetry in ordinary cultural output. A student can finish a humanities degree with a fluent vocabulary for “settler-colonialism,” “whiteness,” and “decolonization,” and still never be asked to apply the same conceptual machinery to the Islamization of North Africa, the Turkification of Anatolia, or the Ottoman imperial management of the Balkans. The knowledge exists. The integration often does not.

A few mechanisms are doing the work:

First: the moral map is drawn around modern Western guilt. Universities and NGOs in the West operate inside a story where the primary purpose of historical consciousness is to discipline our civilization. That can be valuable. Self-critique is healthier than propaganda. But it also creates a spotlight effect. If the goal is penance, you do not look for other sinners. You look for mirrors.

Second: postcolonial theory often frames power in a one-directional way. “Colonizer” and “colonized” become fixed identities rather than recurring historical roles. Once the roles harden into moral identities, describing conquest by non-Western empires becomes conceptually awkward. It scrambles the script.

Third: fear of misuse leads to silence. Many scholars and activists worry, often reasonably, that frank discussion of Islamic conquest will be weaponized by bigots. But the answer to bad faith is not selective amnesia. When institutions pre-censor reality to prevent “the wrong people” from citing it, they teach the public a fatal lesson. The gatekeepers do not trust the truth.

Fourth: selective “harm literacy” is now a career incentive. Some topics are safe, rewarded, and legible within current moral fashion. Others are professionally risky, easily smeared, or administratively discouraged. This does not require a conspiracy. It is simply an ecosystem where the costs and benefits are asymmetrical.

The result is not denial, exactly. It is a pattern of omission. Certain conquests are treated as the central moral lesson of history. Others are treated as context, complication, or footnote, no matter how long they lasted, how many people they reordered, or how durable their legal hierarchies proved.

If “colonization” is a real category, and if it means conquest, extraction, tribute, settlement, cultural subordination, and the restructuring of life under new rulers, then it has to apply wherever the pattern appears. Otherwise it is not analysis. It is choreography. 🎭

So here is the question Western institutions should be willing to answer plainly: Why is one empire’s violence treated as the moral template, while another empire’s violence is handled like a reputational hazard, especially when the same victims, religious minorities, conquered peoples, and enslaved captives, are supposed to matter in our universalist ethics?

Because the cost of selective memory is not merely academic. It trains citizens to distrust the referees. When respectable institutions signal, through omissions and asymmetrical moral urgency, that certain truths are too dangerous to say out loud, audiences will go looking for people who will say them. Often crudely. Often with their own distortions. And the gatekeepers will have manufactured the very problem they feared.