[Raymond Ibrahim, PJ Media] Although August 15, 2021, will forever live in infamy as the date the Taliban reconquered Afghanistan, for over 13 centuries that date was famous for another event — Constantinople’s defeat of the caliphate, August 15, 718. While these two events separated by exactly 1,303 years are vastly different in nature — not least that in 718 Islam lost, while in 2021 it won — they both confirm one irresistible point that the confident West should take to heart: the tenacity of Islamic jihad — this relentless snake of war that always bides its time, even if by remaining coiled for many centuries, before striking.
Consider the first event. In 718, the Eastern Roman Empire ("Byzantium") repulsed, in dramatic fashion, the Arabs. It was such a spectacular victory, and Muslim losses were so bad, that, for many centuries, the caliphates never dared make another attempt against the walls of Constantinople.
Put differently, for many centuries after the year 718, anyone living in Constantinople would have thought — and would have apparently been justified for thinking — that the Islamic threat, whatever it was elsewhere, was well behind them.
And yet, in the early 1400s — 700 years after the people of Constantinople had thought they’d seen the last of jihad — it was back again besieging them, with the city finally falling to Islam on May 29, 1453.
More significantly, those who besieged and conquered Constantinople in 1453 had little to do with those who besieged it in the eighth century. The latter were Arabs, under the Umayyad caliphate centered in Damascus. Those who actually conquered Constantinople were Turks, whose capital was Adrianople (now Edirne).
On the surface, there is no connection or continuity between those who in the eighth century tried to conquer, and those who in the fifteenth century did conquer, Constantinople — except, of course, for one thing: both were Muslims, and both articulated their hostility for and need to conquer Constantinople in distinctly jihadist terms: like every other infidel, the Christian kingdom had two choices before it: submit to Islam — which it rejected — or fight. |