For just as the worship of Huitzilopotchtli was an invention to provide a religious justification for Aztec imperialism, so Islam was an invention for the purpose of providing a religious justification for Arab imperialism. It is commonly taught that the purpose of the Arab Conquest -- Arab hordes exploding out of Arabia in the middle of the 7th century to conquer all of the Christian Middle East, Zoroastrian Persia and Central Asia, Hindu Northern India, and Christian North Africa and Spain in 100 years -- was to spread Islam. It turns out this is the opposite of what actually happened. That is, just like other nomad hordes that swarmed out of a desert and infested civilizations through history -- like Attila Huns or Genghiz Khan Mongols -- so did the Arabs. Finding themselves in sudden possession of a vast empire of vastly different peoples and all of them non-Arab, the Arabs invented a religion to justify their ruling it, and aptly named it Islam, which in Arabic means Submission. They claimed it meant submission to the Will of God, but what it really meant was submission to them
|