Today in History: West Saved from Islam at Battle of Tours

Precisely 100 years after the death of Islam’s prophet Muhammad in 632, his Arab followers, after having conquered thousands of miles of lands from Arabia to Spain, found themselves in Gaul, modern day France, facing a hitherto little known people, the Christian Franks.

There, on October 10 or 11, in the year 732, one of history’s most decisive battles took place, demarcating the extent of Islam’s western conquests and ensuring the survival of the West.

Prior to this, the Islamic conquerors had for one century been subjugating all peoples and territories standing in their western march—including Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. In 711, the Muslims made their fateful crossing of the straits of Gibraltar, landing on European soil. Upon disembarkation, the leader of the Muslims, Tariq bin Zayid, ordered the Islamic fleet burned, explaining that “We have not come here to return. Either we conquer and establish ourselves here, or we perish.”

This famous Tariq anecdote—often reminisced by modern day jihadis—highlights the jihadi nature of the Umayyad caliphate (661-750), the superpower of its day. Indeed, as most historians have acknowledged, the Umayyad caliphate was the “Jihadi-State” par excellence. Its very existence was coterminous with its conquests. Its legitimacy as “viceroy” of Allah was based on subjugating lands in the name of Allah.

Once on European ground, the depredations continued unabated. Writes one Arab chronicler regarding the Muslim northern advance past the Pyrenees: “Full of wrath and pride” the Muslims “went through all places like a desolating storm. Prosperity made those warriors insatiable… everything gave way to their scimitars, the robbers of lives.” Even far off English anchorite, the contemporary, the venerable, Bede, wrote, “A plague of Saracens wrought wretched devastation and slaughter upon Gaul.”

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Our Saviors, the Christian Warriors

The Battle of Tours, 732 AD

The excellent points made in the following reflection are in response to a review of the anti-Christian movie, Beowulf, that appeared on the FrontPageMag blog. The original article points out that this movie is another "hackneyed and predictable" Hollywood "attempt to try to depict pagans as 'open-minded and 'free-spirited' peoples, or, quite anachronistically, as Medieval counterparts to the modern secular liberal. The idea being that pagan peoples -- unencumbered by the suffocating forces of Christianity -- were/are happy, passionate folk, able to live life to the fullest."

Hackneyed, predictable and tiresome. Thanks for the warning!


The Following is from The Brussels Journal

Another depiction ubiquitous to these types of movies is the notion that Christianity, which at one point Beowulf contemptuously calls “the weeping religion of martyrs,” is an effete faith that all “true men” – warriors such as Beowulf – eschewed. […] This in fact is a well entrenched motif, best given intellectual grounding by the many writings of Freidrich Nietzsche, who maintained that Christianity is the religion of the weak, while atheism, paganism, or even “Mohammedanism” – anything, really – is more conducive to the cultivation of manly virtues. […]

But this begs the question: If Christianity was, and is, some sort of un-masculine religion, meant to sap the "aristocratic" class of their manhood and arête – that is, manly virtue and excellence – why then did the ruling warrior class of Europe ever come to accept it in the first place? Why did the warrior emperor Constantine embrace Christianity in the 4th century? Who forced him – the persecuted church and its anchorite fathers? They had no authority; it is only due to Christianity's intrinsic appeal that it spread – to both the people as well as their warrior-leaders. Following Constantine, there have been a number of heroic leaders who chose – not through coercion or any pressing need – to embrace Christianity: such as the Carolingians, including Charles "the Hammer" Martel, who Christian civilization owes no small debt for its existence (battle of Tours 732) and his descendants, most notably Charlemagne. Had these staunch Christians not defended the borders of Christendom from both pagan and Islamic forces, there would be no Western civilization to speak of.

Nazis and Islamists

By Paul Belien

During the Second World War, the Nazis worked on plans to build the “Amerikabomber,” an airplane specially devised to fly suicide missions into Manhattan’s skyscrapers.

Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister for Armaments, recalled in his diary: “It was almost as if [Hitler] was in a delirium when he described to us how New York would go up in flames. He imagined how the skyscrapers would turn into huge blazing torches. How they would crumble while the reflection of the flames would light the skyline against the dark sky.” Hitler hated Manhattan. It was, he said, “the center of world Jewry.”

Less than 60 years later, Hitler’s plans were executed by Muslim immigrants living in Germany. At the 2003 trial of the network around Mohammed Atta (the pilot who flew into the World Trade Center), Shahid Nickels, a German convert to Islam and a friend of Atta’s, said that the Islamists had targeted Manhattan because it is “the center of world Jewry, and the world of finance and commerce controlled by it.”

The parallels between Nazism and Islamism are overwhelming. Yet the subject is a taboo. When last March the German historian Matthias Kuentzel, author of “Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11,” was to give a lecture at the University of Leeds (Britain), the university authorities cancelled the lecture after threats from Muslim students.

There is a war going on between the Jihadists and the West. We are losing the battle because, as so often in man’s history, our political leaders think that they are still fighting the previous war. Europeans who warn against the danger of Islamism are considered – and sometimes even prosecuted – as xenophobes, racists, even neo-Nazis.

The European Left, in league with the Islamists, is constantly reminding the Europeans of Hitler and the Nazis, accusing Europe’s identity, the very core of its being, of being intrinsically evil. Hence, attempts to rob Europe of its identity are seen as “good,” even when those eager to eradicate this identity leave no doubt that they will eradicate the Jews first.

Unfortunately, some American “conservatives” are also blind. Last year, Ralph Peters wrote in the New York Post that Europe’s identity is stained by “ineradicable viciousness.” He said that the Europeans are “world-champion haters,” who have “perfected genocide and ethnic cleansing.” Mr. Peters’ message is similar to that of Ayyub Axel Koehler. Last June, Mr. Koehler, a convert to Islam and the chairman of the German Council of Muslims, told German church leaders that Europe should be ashamed of the “trail of blood” that it had left throughout the world down the centuries.

To some, defending Europe’s identity is seen as a characteristic of neo-Nazism, while they fail to realize that Hitler’s real successors are the Jihadists. To many Europeans it now seems that the only way in which Europe can atone for the crimes of the holocaust is by looking on passively while others prepare a new holocaust.

And so, ironically, Hitler will get his way and win the war after all. Contrary to what is generally acknowledged, the Fuehrer did not care about Europe’s or even Germany’s identity. Those European nationalists who today take their inspiration from Charles Martel, the Germanic leader who beat the Arabs in 732 at the Battle of Tours, cannot be neo-Nazis for the simple reason that Hitler explicitly wished Martel had lost the battle.

“Had Charles Martel not been victorious,” Hitler told his inner crowd in August 1942, “then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world.” Hitler told Albert Speer that Islam is “perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament.” If the Muslims had won in Tours, the whole of Europe would have become Muslim in the 8th century and “the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of [Europe]. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire.”

Today, Germany, like the rest of Western Europe, is rapidly turning Islamic. In addition to the many Muslim immigrants, 4,000 Germans convert to Islam each year. As always the converts are among the most radical. Last September, Fritz Gelowicz and Daniel Schneider, two young German converts to Islam, were arrested as they were preparing to bomb Frankfurt International Airport. Hitler would have been proud of them. And he would have loathed the so-called “racists” who worry about their country losing its national identity.

This piece was originally published in The Washington Times on November 7, 2007 .