Wall Street Journal praises book about Islam’s glorious past, whitewashes its brutality and inhumanity

JIHAD WATCH ^ | FEB 18, 2020 2:00 PM | ROBERT SPENCER

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Wall Street Journal praises book about Islam’s glorious past, whitewashes its brutality and inhumanity FEB 18, 2020 2:00 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER

In this enthusiastic, adulatory review of Justin Marozzi’s book Islamic Empires, Tunku Varadarajan, executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and thus someone who should know better if our academic environment were not so corrupt and compromised, retails present-day academic fictions about Islamic history that outrage the historical record, and that no one who was remotely honest and even glancingly familiar with that record could repeat with a straight face.

“His previous books include biographies of Herodotus and Tamerlane, the 14th-century Turco-Mongol conqueror whom Mr. Marozzi lauds as ‘one of history’s greatest self-made men.'”

That he may have been, but Tamerlane was much more as well, yet Tunku Varadarajan and apparently Justin Marozzi don’t see fit to inform us of that fact. In The History of Jihad we learn, among much more about Tamerlane, that Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, a fifteenth-century Persian who wrote a biography of Tamerlane, observed that “the Qur’an says the highest dignity man can attain is that of making war in person against the enemies of his religion. Muhammad advises the same thing, according to the tradition of the Muslim doctors: wherefore the great Temur always strove to exterminate the infidels, as much to acquire that glory, as to signalise himself by the greatness of his conquests.” One of history’s greatest self-made men indeed.

“‘One of the defining features of Abbasid Baghdad,’ he writes of the city in its ninth-century heyday, ‘was its cosmopolitanism. Arabs lived alongside Persians, Indians, Turks, Armenians and Kurds in a capital of Jews, Christians and Muslims.’ Tolerance was ‘less something to boast about than a generally accepted way of life.'”

From The History of Jihad: “In the late 770s, the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi traveled to Aleppo, where twelve thousand Christians greeted him with great honor. Al-Mahdi, however, was not disposed to respond in kind, and told them: ‘You have two options. Either die or convert to our religion.’ Most of the Christians chose to die rather than embrace Islam. In and around Baghdad, he noticed that the Assyrian Christians had built new churches since the Muslim conquest, in violation of dhimmi laws; he ordered them destroyed; five thousand Christians in Syria were given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Many stayed true to their ancestral faith and chose death.”

There’s your tolerance.

S0 why does ahistorical twaddle and fantasy such as Islamic Empires get published and praised to the skies in the Wall Street Journal? Because it tells people what they want to hear.

“‘Islamic Empires’ Review: Revisiting a Glorious Past,” by Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2020 (thanks to David):

…A history graduate from the University of Cambridge, Mr. Marozzi is an accomplished and ambitious writer: His previous books include biographies of Herodotus and Tamerlane, the 14th-century Turco-Mongol conqueror whom Mr. Marozzi lauds as “one of history’s greatest self-made men.” He has also written an elegant history of Baghdad. His latest work is “Islamic Empires,” a sweeping, vibrant and often irrepressible account of the cities most emblematic of Islam since that religion was promulgated by the Prophet Muhammed in the early seventh century…..

In making this last comparative point, Mr. Marozzi directs us to the most striking feature of most of the cities in his book: their onetime ethnic and religious diversity. “One of the defining features of Abbasid Baghdad,” he writes of the city in its ninth-century heyday, “was its cosmopolitanism. Arabs lived alongside Persians, Indians, Turks, Armenians and Kurds in a capital of Jews, Christians and Muslims.” Tolerance was “less something to boast about than a generally accepted way of life.” Elsewhere he writes that the Samarkand of Tamerlane—a man feared in the West as the scourge and wrath of God (to use the poet Marlowe’s famous phrase)—was “one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, though this owed as much to the forced movement of people and prisoners as it did to the magnetic attraction of the place.”

Even Kabul, which struggles daily to keep the Taliban at bay, was in the 16th century a polyglot place that beguiled a young Babur. When in 1504 he captured the city as a 21-year-old warrior from Fergana (in modern Uzbekistan), he was “fascinated by the human population . . . of which he had made himself master.” He found himself ruling over “many tribes, including Turks, Mughals, Arabs, Persians, and Sarts, who spoke up to twelve languages.”

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