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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.
In Iran, child marriage isn’t merely a whispered rural custom; it’s a practice that can breathe because the law gives it room. A Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty report tells the story of “Leila,” married at ten to a fifteen-year-old boy—an arrangement delivered to her in the night, a ring placed on her finger like a stamp. She describes the aftermath not as romance or “tradition,” but as fear, pain, and a body treated as if it were already spoken for.
The scandal here is not that bad people exist; it’s that systems can normalize the bad. The report states that marriage is legal for girls at 13 with parental consent, and that younger girls can be married with a judge’s permission (and that the legal age cited for boys is 15). It also cites 37,000 underage marriages registered in the last Iranian year ending in March (as of 2016), while noting that unregistered unions mean the true number is likely higher.
A society’s moral temperature shows up in what it excuses, and what it calls “inevitable.” The piece reports that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child urged Iran to raise the marriage age and expressed concern that the legal framework permits sexual intercourse with girls as young as nine lunar years, alongside gaps in criminalization of other sexual abuse against very young children. This isn’t “culture” in the harmless sense; it’s power arranged into a rite, with a child paying the cost.
Bibliography 📚
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Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Radio Farda), “Childhood’s End: Forced Into Marriage At Age 10 In Iran” (Nov. 17, 2016).
This week’s “book I want to read (but haven’t yet)” is Raymond Ibrahim’s Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. The book is pitched as a long, battle-driven military history: landmark encounters, vivid narration, and a claim that these wars illuminate modern hostilities. It’s explicitly framed as “Islam vs. the West” as a historical through-line, and it advertises heavy use of primary sources (notably Arabic and Greek) to tell that story. (Barnes & Noble)
The thesis, as Ibrahim presents it in descriptions and interviews, is that the conflict is not merely politics or economics—it’s substantially religious and civilizational in motive and self-understanding across centuries. In short: jihad (as an animating concept) and sacred duty are treated as durable drivers; key episodes are used to argue continuity rather than accident. Even the “origin story” in some blurbs is framed in explicitly religious terms (conversion demand → refusal → centuries-long jihad on Christendom), which signals the interpretive lens: ideas and theology matter, and they matter a lot. (Better World Books)
Why I’m flagging it for the DWR Sunday Religious Disservice: it’s a strong claim, not a neutral survey—and it’s the kind of claim you should read with a second book open beside it. Supportive reviews praise it as a bracing corrective to “sanitized” histories; skeptical academic commentary warns that it can function as an intervention that frames Islam first and foremost through antagonism and “civilizational conflict,” which can flatten variation across time, place, and Muslim societies. So the honest pitch is: this is Ibrahim’s argument; it may sharpen your sight—or narrow it—depending on what you pair it with. (catholicworldreport.com)
Endnotes
- Publisher/retailer description (scope + primary sources framing): (Barnes & Noble)
- “Origin story” / jihad framing in overview copy: (Better World Books)
- Interview-style framing of “landmark battles” thesis: (Middle East Forum)
- Critical scholarly pushback (civilizational conflict lens): (Reddit)
The West keeps making a category error. It treats Islam as “a religion” in the narrow civic sense modern liberal societies usually mean: private belief, voluntary worship, and a clean separation between pulpit and state.
Islam can be lived that way. Many Muslims do live that way. But Islam, as a tradition, also carries a developed legal–political vocabulary: a picture of how authority, law, community, and public order ought to be arranged. That does not make Muslims suspect. It makes Western assumptions incomplete. A liberal society can only defend what it can name.
A faith that has historically included law
In the classical Islamic tradition, sharia is not only “spiritual guidance.” It is commonly described as governing interpersonal conduct and regulating ritual practice, and in some countries it is applied as governing law or in specific legal domains. (Judiciaries Worldwide) That matters because the modern West is built on a particular settlement: religious freedom inside a civic order that does not belong to any religion.
The relationship between religion and governance in Islamic history also does not map neatly onto the European story of Church versus state. Even critics of the simplistic slogan that Islam “fuses religion and politics” concede a real point beneath it: Muslim thinkers draw distinctions between din (religion) and dawla (state), but the domains and their interrelations do not mirror the European pattern. (MERIP)
So when Western elites insist, “Islam is just a religion,” they are not being tolerant. They are being imprecise. And imprecision is how liberal societies lose arguments before they begin.
The distinction that matters: Islam and Islamism
Precision starts by separating two things that get blurred, sometimes by ignorance, sometimes by strategy:
- Islam: a religion with immense internal diversity, spiritual, legal, philosophical, cultural.
- Islamism (political Islam): a broad set of political ideologies that draw on Islamic symbols and traditions in pursuit of sociopolitical objectives. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
A devout Muslim can reject Islamism. A culturally Muslim person can reject Islamism. A believer can treat sharia as personal ethics while rejecting its coercive imposition in a pluralist state. Islamic sources themselves contain the frequently cited line: “Let there be no compulsion in religion.” (Quran.com)
But it is also true that in many parts of the world, substantial numbers of Muslims express support for making sharia “the official law of the land.” (Pew Research Center) That doesn’t prove anything about your Muslim neighbour in Edmonton. It does establish something narrower and important: the political question is not imaginary. It is not a fringe invention.
The engine: infallible doctrine, universal horizon
The political question is whether a movement treats its doctrine as a governing blueprint, one that must eventually become public authority. That is what makes Islamism different from ordinary piety: it is not satisfied with private devotion or voluntary community. It wants law, policy, and state power aligned to a sacred ideal.
If you want a useful analogue for how Islamism works, look at Marxism. Not in theology, mechanics. The doctrine is treated as infallible, so failure can’t belong to the doctrine; it must belong to the people, the impurities, or the enemies. That logic produces a predictable politics: dissent becomes not an alternative view but a problem to be managed, re-educated, or removed.
From there, the “universal” impulse makes sense. This is not always military conquest talk. More often it is a civilizational horizon: the expectation that Islam should be socially and politically ascendant, with public authority aligned to that vision. Classical Islamic political vocabulary has long included categories describing the realm where Islam has “ascendance,” historically paired with an external realm. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
A liberal society can coexist with any faith. It cannot coexist with a program that treats liberal pluralism as a temporary obstacle to be overcome.
What the West keeps getting wrong
Western discourse often collapses three claims into one muddy accusation:
- “Muslims are dangerous.” False, unfair, and morally corrosive.
- “Islam has a legal–political tradition.” True, and visible in texts, history, and institutions. (Judiciaries Worldwide)
- “Islamism is a modern political project that can conflict with liberal norms.” True, and increasingly relevant. (Encyclopedia Britannica)
If claims (2) and (3) are denied out of fear of sounding like (1), the result is not compassion. It is blindness. And blindness is not a strategy.
What a liberal society should do
This does not require panic. It requires clarity.
First, speak precisely. Say “Islamism” when you mean political ideology. Say “Islam” when you mean the religion broadly. Don’t use a sweeping civilizational label to do the work of a specific critique.
Second, draw the civic line cleanly: the liberal state is not negotiable. Freedom of worship is protected. Violence and harassment are punished. Attempts to import coercive religious governance into public law are rejected.
Third, stop outsourcing integration to slogans. Liberalism is not a magic solvent. It is a culture of habits, rights, obligations, and red lines that must be taught and applied evenly.
Fourth, refuse collective guilt. Defend liberal norms without treating ordinary Muslims as a fifth column. A society can oppose an illiberal political project while still welcoming neighbours who want to live in peace.
Here is the honesty sentence: if political Islam is largely marginal in Western societies, with negligible institutional influence and no meaningful appetite for parallel authority, the urgency of this argument drops. If, instead, organized efforts continue to carve out exemptions from liberal norms, to pressure institutions into censorship, or to substitute religious authority for civic law, the urgency rises.
The West doesn’t need a religious war. It needs vocabulary. It needs the courage to name ideological ambition without demonizing human beings. And it needs to remember that liberalism is not the default state of humanity. It is a fragile achievement that survives only when people are willing to defend it
References
- Federal Judicial Center, “Islamic Law and Legal Systems” (overview of sharia as governing interpersonal conduct/ritual practice; sometimes governing law). (Judiciaries Worldwide)
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Islamism” (definition as political ideologies pursuing sociopolitical objectives using Islamic symbols/traditions). (Encyclopedia Britannica)
- Pew Research Center, The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society (overview and chapter on beliefs about sharia; questionnaire language on making sharia official law). (Pew Research Center)
- MERIP, “What is Political Islam?” (discussion of din/dawla and why European categories don’t map neatly). (MERIP)
- MERIP, “Islamist Notions of Democracy” (notes the common modern formulation of “religion and state” and its relationship to secularism debates). (MERIP)
- Qur’an 2:256 (“no compulsion in religion”) and Ibn Kathir tafsir page commonly cited in discussion. (Quran.com)
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Dār al-Islām” (political-ideological category describing the realm where Islam has ascendance, traditionally paired with an external realm). (Encyclopedia Britannica)
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