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...

I have been writing about the alarming Bible passages in which God commands the destruction of the older peoples of the land of Canaan, ordering what by any common sense understanding we would call genocide. Early Christians were not too troubled by such texts, because they mainly saw them as allegorical, and they saw no need to confront the moral dilemmas in their own writings, particularly in the New Testament. But here is one exception, and a significant one. It appears in a devious and quite sneaky way in the Gospel of Matthew. Am I allowed to call gospels sneaky? The genocide commands are explicit. In Deuteronomy 7, God orders that When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations ….  and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. The word for “destroy totally” is herem, Greek anathema, and...

Canaanites the descendants of Canaan, the son of Ham. Migrating from their original home, they seem to have reached the Persian Gulf, and to have stayed there for some time. They then “spread to the west, across the mountain chain of Lebanon to the very edge of the Mediterranean Sea, occupying all the land which later became Palestine, also to the north-west as far as the mountain chain of Taurus. This group was very numerous, and broken up into a great many peoples, as we can judge from the list of nations (Gen. 10), the ‘sons of Canaan.’ ” Six different tribes are mentioned in Ex. 3:8, 17; 23:23; 33:2; 34:11. In Ex. 13:5 the “Perizzites” are omitted. The “Girgashites” are mentioned in addition to the foregoing in Deut. 7:1; Josh. 3:10. The “Canaanites,” as distinguished from the Amalekites, the Anakim, and the Rephaim, were “dwellers in the lowlands” (Num. 13:29), the great plains and valleys, the richest and most important parts of Palestine. Tyre and Sidon, their famous citie...