Islam did not begin as a persecuted faith spreading through martyrdom and persuasion. It began as a political and military movement led by a prophet who wielded the sword and sanctified conquest.
If you have not yet read Part One please do so here and then come back.
What happened when the teachings of Islam on Holy War, jizya, and submission left Arabia? The picture that history clearly paints is that the doctrines left Arabia and immediately began an all-out assault on the Christian world.
In fact, within a single century, Islamic armies shattered half of historic Christendom. Ancient Christian lands fell. Churches were replaced. Populations were subjugated. Entire civilizations were burned, pillaged, raped, and transformed.
This was not an accident of history. It was the logical outcome of a religious system built for expansion. If all must submit, and to force them to do so is holy, why would you not?
In fact, if you were promised eternal rewards for your death in such a holy war, wouldn't that drive you to take up arms and invade the Christians who do not submit to Allah and his holy prophet?
Clearly, the early Muslims thought this was the proper course of action, and they took it.
What follows is not polemic. It is history And it explains far more about our present moment than most are willing to admit.
The rise of Islam did not unfold slowly. It did not wait generations to find its footing. It did not remain confined to Arabia while its theology matured.
Instead, within one hundred years of Muhammad's death in 632, Islamic armies had conquered territories stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the borders of India. In that single century, much of historic Christendom was lost forever. For reference, all of these conquered lands were Christian strongholds for hundreds of years prior to the initial Islamic conquests.
This map shows the expansion of the Islamic Caliphates in the 7th and 8th Centuries CE: 1. Dark Shade: Expansion under the Prophet Muhammad, 622-632 CE. 2. Medium Shade: Expansion under the Rashidun Caliphate, 632-661 CE. 3. Light Shade: Expansion during the Umayyad Caliphate, 661-750 CE. Map sourced from worldhistory.org archives.
This was not a migration. It was not trade. It was not a cultural exchange. It was a bloody, vicious conquest.
And the speed of it should still shock us.
In the early seventh century, the Christian world was vulnerable. The Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire had exhausted themselves in decades of war. Cities were weakened. Borders were thinly defended. Populations were weary.
Into this moment stepped a new force animated by a unified religious and military vision.
Islam did not view war as a tragic necessity. It viewed it as divine command. As historian Hugh Kennedy notes, early Islamic expansion was "extraordinarily rapid" and driven by a religious ideology that fused belief and rule into a single mission.
The objective was clear. Bring lands under Islamic law. Establish Muslim rule. Subordinate unbelievers.
The first targets were Christians.
Syria fell within a few years. Damascus was taken in 634 AD. Jerusalem fell in 638 AD. The Christian holy city was not merely occupied but permanently transformed. The Dome of the Rock was built atop the Temple Mount as a declaration of Islamic supremacy.
Egypt followed. Alexandria, one of the great centers of Christian learning, fell in 641 AD. And, with it, Islam burned the greatest collection of history and art ever collected to the ground, forever devastating our knowledge of the ancient world. It then moved to North Africa soon after. By 711 AD Islamic forces crossed into Spain and within a few years controlled most of the Iberian Peninsula.
To grasp the magnitude of this loss, consider this map of early Islamic expansion.
This was not the fringe of Christendom. These were its heartlands.
Before Islamic conquest, North Africa was Christian. Egypt was Christian. Syria was Christian. These regions produced church fathers, councils, theologians, and missionaries. Today they are overwhelmingly Muslim.
That transformation did not occur through peaceful conversion.
Historian Raymond Ibrahim documents extensively that early Islamic sources openly describe conquest as jihad and frame victory as proof of divine favor. Cities that resisted were sacked.
Populations were killed or enslaved. Those that submitted were spared annihilation but placed under Islamic law.
Non-Muslims were allowed to live as dhimmis. This status required payment of the jizya tax and acceptance of permanent inferiority. Remember that Quran 9:29 explicitly links fighting to this arrangement.
Submission did not mean equality. It meant survival.
As historian Bat Ye'or explains, dhimmitude was not tolerance as the modern West understands it but a system of institutionalized subjugation that ensured Islamic dominance.
One of the most important questions is why Christian resistance collapsed so quickly.
Victor Davis Hanson argues that civilizations fight according to their cultural assumptions. When those assumptions fracture, so does resistance. In the seventh century, Christendom was divided, exhausted, and politically fragmented.
Islam was not.
Islamic armies fought with unity of belief, clarity of purpose, and a theology that sanctified victory. Defeat was not merely military failure. It was a religious failure. Victory validated truth.
This dynamic explains the speed of conquest better than numbers alone.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy is not that these lands were conquered but that their Christian history was erased.
Churches became mosques. Christian languages disappeared. Entire populations converted over generations under pressure, taxation, and legal inequality.
Today, when Western Christians hear the phrase Middle East, they rarely think of Christianity. That amnesia is itself a consequence of jihad.
The world we inherited is the result of what was lost.
Modern commentators often treat Islamic expansion as ancient history. Irrelevant. Finished. It also teaches that the later Crusades were an initial aggression, rather than the response to a violent enslavement and destruction of half the Christian world.
But ideas that produce outcomes do not vanish when the calendar changes.
The same theology that animated the first jihad has never been repudiated. It has only adapted.
Understanding how half of Christendom fell in a single century is essential to understanding how Islam advances today. Through law, demographics, intimidation, and institutional capture rather than cavalry and swords.
But the objective has not changed, it is submission.
