Dr Paul Allen

On August 20, 636, the most consequential battle in world history took place: the Battle of Yarmuk. Not only did it decide whether the Arabian creed would thrive or die, it became a source of inspiration and instruction for jihadists throughout the centuries — right down to the Islamic State, or “ISIS.” Yet very few in the West are even aware of this battle, much less its influence on modern jihad. The story begins with the Prophet of Islam. In 632, Muhammad died, having united the Arabs under Islam. Afterwards, some tribes refused to pay taxes, or zakat, to the caliph Abu Bakr. Branding them apostates, the caliph launched the Ridda (“apostasy”) Wars, in which tens of thousands were beheaded, crucified, or burned alive. By 633, these wars ended, and in 634, Abu Bakr died. It fell to the second caliph, Omar bin al-Khattab (r. 634–44), to direct the united Arabs against “the infidel.” Thousands of Arabs quickly flooded into Christian Syria, slaughtering and plundering in the name of jiha...

On August 15, 718, Constantinople hurled back the greatest assault the forces of Islam had ever mustered — and in so doing, preserved Western civilization. The irony of this date runs deep: The Muslims’ siege of that great city had begun on the same date a year earlier. And deeper still is the bitter fate that Constantinople — once the shield of Christendom — went on to suffer. The story is worth retelling in full. For All the Marbles After several failed sieges of Constantinople, in 715 the Umayyad Caliphate decided that enough was enough. This time it would vomit forth everything it had in a single, all-consuming effort to bring down the ancient Christian capital. Caliph Suleiman summoned his younger brother Maslama, commanding him to lead Islam’s combined might to Constantinople and “stay there until you conquer it or I recall you.” The young emir accepted the task as a sacred honour; he vowed, “I [will] enter this city knowing that it is the capital of Christianity and its glory; m...

On July 16, 1212, atop the windswept plains of Las Navas de Tolosa, Christendom and Islam clashed in one of the most consequential battles of the Middle Ages. This event shattered an empire, galvanized a continent, and still echoes in the political currents of modern Spain and among Islamist terrorists who vow vengeance for it. It had been 500 years since the armies of Muhammad first crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and began their conquest of Iberia in 711. In their wake, most of the peninsula fell under the crescent. Yet a single ember of resistance smouldered in the northern mountains of Asturia—small, defiant, unyielding. From this remnan,t the Reconquista was born: the slow-burning, centuries-long Christian effort to reclaim the land for the cross. A Gathering Storm By the dawn of the thirteenth century, that ember had grown into a flame. Northern Christian kingdoms had pushed their borders south, reclaiming nearly half of Spain. Alarmed, the Muslim world responded with a thund...

  July 4 marked the anniversary of the Battle of Hattin, one of the most catastrophic defeats of Christians by the forces of Islam in history.  This battle led directly to the fall of Crusader-held Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. A far lesser-known but equally horrific event took place after that: the ritual beheading of the warrior-monks of Christendom. Unlike the average captured Crusader, these knights were denied the opportunity for ransom. In fact, Saladin went so far as to “ransom” 300 Templars and Hospitallers from their Muslim captors for 50 dinars apiece, simply to ensure he could personally witness their slaughter if they rejected his “magnanimous” offer: Any knight willing to utter the words of the Islamic profession of faith would be spared and welcomed into the ummah as a brother. He then sent them to a makeshift desert prison to contemplate their fate. An Offer They Could Refuse That night, amid the howls and jeers of their captors, the brethren of the Temple and H...

While the world’s attention remains locked on nuclear threats, anti-Israel rhetoric, and escalating Middle East tensions, a quiet revolution is transforming Iran, not through politics or protests but through a surge of faith that defies everything the Islamic Republic stands for. Beneath the iron grip of clerical rule and state repression, more than 2,000 Iranians are converting to Christianity every single day, embracing a faith that is banned, criminalized, and punishable by prison or worse. This spiritual explosion, invisible to international headlines but deeply real on the ground, is rewriting the very identity of a nation once seen as an unshakable stronghold of radical Islam. What’s happening is not a fleeting trend but a sustained transformation with roots going back nearly a decade. As early as 2016, Iran was recognized as the country with the fastest-growing Evangelical movement in the world. Today, mission groups and researchers estimate that well over two million Iranians h...

One of the most egregious examples of fake history: Georgetown University Professor John Esposito’s claim that Five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed before political events and an imperial-papal power play led to centuries-long series of so-called holy wars that pitted Christendom against Islam and left an enduring legacy of misunderstanding and distrust. [ Islam: The Straight Path , p. 64] Esposito is saying that, from the very start, Muslims and Christians had always lived in “peaceful coexistence,” until those vile European Christians decided to ruin it all with the First Crusade. Those “five centuries of peaceful coexistence” featured Islam violently conquering three-quarters of the Christian world, with all the usual massacres, mass enslavements, and the systematic destruction of churches — 30,000 of them in 1009 alone.  Perhaps hundreds of thousands of Christians were slaughtered or enslaved by Muslims in the decades before Pope Urban II finally responded to cries fo...

What is — and isn’t — wrong with Islam? That is the question before us. Since late 2001, when Islam became front-page news, almost everything about it has been criticized: It’s been presented as hostile to progress, anti-democratic, theocratic, patriarchal, misogynistic, and draconian in its punishments. Is that what’s wrong with Islam? I’m here to argue no — none of those are the reasons why non-Muslims should be wary of Islam. Why? Because  they are all things that Muslims do to and amongst each other. They do not involve non-Muslims. What do I care if Muslims agree among themselves to chop off the hands of thieves, whip adulterers, or strictly segregate the sexes? Focusing on the many issues that we might find offensive but which do  not  affect non-Muslims creates confusion concerning those truly problematic aspects of Islam that  do  affect the so-called infidel. The Three Dark Pillars of Islam Once we take a step back and distinguish between the (many) doc...

Islam has been called a Christian heresy for centuries — first by the Church father  St. John of Damascus , an Arab Christian who lived during the Muslim conquests. Other notable Christian thinkers since —  Martin Luther ,  Hillaire Belloc , and  C.S. Lewis  among them —have agreed. Why? Because Islam’s founder, Muhammad, and the compilers of its holy book, the Quran, clearly cribbed from the Bible — both the  Old  and  New Testaments , as well as the  apocryphal “gospels ” that didn’t make the canonical cut.  In fact, a great  many biblical figures and events turn up in the Muslim holy book ,  as well as in  hadiths  — extra-Quranic sayings attributed to Muhammad. These figures include Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jonah, John the Baptist, Mary, and Jesus—but in the Quran, they’re all given a quite different spin.  Raymond Ibrahim deconstructed the Islamic Mary recently; a s for her Son, Muhammad’s  `Isa  litt...