The Verdict of History: Islam, Christendom, and the Moral Record of Civilisation
By Naseer Ahmed, New Age Islam
30 October 2025
I. Introduction
For centuries, polemicists have painted Islam as a faith spread by the sword and sustained by conquest. Raymond Ibrahim’s recent revival of that myth — now echoed by those eager to prove themselves “reasonable” before Western approval — is only the latest retelling of an old falsehood.
But the verdict of history has already been delivered — and not by Muslim apologists, but by Western, Jewish, and Christian historians of unimpeachable reputation. The record shows that Islam, far from being a project of coercion, produced the most enduring experiment in pluralism known to premodern civilisation.
II The Historical Verdict on the “Clash of Civilisations”
1. Marshall G. S. Hodgson (The Venture of Islam, 3 vols., 1974)
Hodgson, one of the most respected historians of Islamic civilization at the University of Chicago, explicitly rejects the “clash of civilizations” thesis. He portrays Islam as a world civilization whose moral and intellectual achievements far exceeded contemporary Christendom.
“The Islamic world, by the thirteenth century, had developed a cosmopolitan civilization which set the standard of urbanity, refinement, and learning for all the Old World.”
— The Venture of Islam, Vol. 2, p. 62
He adds that Europe’s later rise was indebted to the Islamic world:
“The scientific and philosophical renaissance of the Latin West was made possible by the transmission of knowledge from the Islamic world… Islam was the first civilization to become truly international in scope.”
— Vol. 1, pp. 174–175
In short, Hodgson’s verdict is clear: Islamic civilization was pluralistic, law-bound, and cosmopolitan when Europe was still feudal, sectarian, and provincial.
2. Gustave E. von Grunebaum (Medieval Islam, 1946)
Von Grunebaum, a foundational Orientalist scholar (University of California), provides detailed evidence of Islam’s social and intellectual pluralism:
“The Islamic city was not a theocracy but a community of believers and protected minorities under the sovereignty of divine law.”
— Medieval Islam, p. 39
He stresses that non-Muslims were “integrated as indispensable participants in urban and intellectual life”, contributing to administration, medicine, philosophy, and trade.
“Islamic society, unlike medieval Christendom, did not confine knowledge within the walls of a single faith.”
— ibid., p. 135
For von Grunebaum, this inclusivity was not accidental but intrinsic to the Quranic ideal of adl (justice) and ilm (knowledge).
3. Thomas W. Arnold (The Preaching of Islam, 1896, rev. ed. 1913)
Arnold’s classic study directly refutes the missionary and colonial myth that Islam spread by force:
“The duty of the Muslim rulers was not to impose their faith upon the vanquished, but to secure the political supremacy of Islam… The people of the Book were left free to follow their own religious laws and customs.”
— The Preaching of Islam, p. 80
He notes that even in times of conquest, Islam’s record was comparatively humane:
“Nowhere, save in Spain, was there any organized attempt to exterminate a subject race or to force upon it the faith of its conquerors.”
— ibid., p. 125
Arnold’s research shows that conversion to Islam was largely voluntary, driven by admiration for its justice and simplicity.
4. Bernard Lewis (The Jews of Islam, 1984)
Before his late-career neoconservative phase, Bernard Lewis himself conceded that Islam’s treatment of minorities was historically exceptional:
“Persecution, that is to say, violent and active repression, was rare and atypical. They [the Jews] were not subject to any major territorial or occupational restrictions such as were the common lot of Jews in premodern Europe.”
— The Jews of Islam, p. 62
He further admitted:
“When inequality and injustice appeared, they were despite Islam and not as part of it.”
— ibid., p. 63
Even Lewis, later accused of fueling Islamophobia, recognized that Islamic civilization was far more humane and legally regulated than its Christian counterpart.
5. Primary European Testimony: Crusader Chroniclers
Even hostile Christian sources record the contrast between Muslim magnanimity and Christian brutality.
- Raymond of Aguilers, chronicler of the First Crusade, admitted that Crusaders massacred “every Muslim man, woman, and child” in Jerusalem (1099). Contemporary Muslim sources — notably Ibn al-Athir — record that Saladin (1187) spared the Christian population when he retook the city.
- Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, an eyewitness to Saladin’s conquest, wrote:
“Not a drop of blood was shed in revenge; not a single Christian was slain in retaliation for the blood of Muslims.”
— Al-Fath al-Qussi fi-l-Fath al-Qudsi
- The Frankish chronicler William of Tyre acknowledged the Muslims’ comparative civility:
“The Saracens showed greater mercy to our people than our people showed to theirs.”
— Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, Book 20
Thus, even the adversaries of Islam recorded its restraint in war and its refusal to desecrate holy places — a sharp contrast to Christian conduct during the Crusades.
6. Urban and Intellectual Flourishing: Baghdad, Córdoba, Cairo
- Baghdad (8th–13th centuries): The Abbasid capital hosted Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), where Muslims, Jews, and Christians jointly translated and expanded upon Greek science and philosophy.
- Córdoba (10th century): With public libraries, street lighting, and universities, it had “more books than all of Christian Europe combined” (John William Draper, A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, 1862).
- Cairo (Fatimid era): Al-Azhar University (est. 972 CE) welcomed scholars of all backgrounds; its curriculum integrated philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and law centuries before European universities followed suit.
At that same time, Paris was a swamp — literally and metaphorically — still a semi-rural settlement where even basic sanitation and education were absent.
III. The Jewish and Christian Experience under Islam
Few testimonies are more decisive than those of Jews and Christians themselves, who lived under both Christian and Muslim rule.
- Avi Shlaim, the Iraqi-Jewish historian, recalls his childhood in Baghdad with nostalgia:
“Jews lived in peace and harmony with their Muslim neighbours. We felt fully part of Iraqi society.”
His life was upended not by Muslims, but by Zionism and Western manipulation that fractured centuries of coexistence.
- Uri Avnery, a Jewish writer, stated in 2006:
“Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted them and tried many times ‘by the sword’ to get them to abandon their faith.”
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, reflecting on his own Christian ancestors under Muslim rule, noted in Skin in the Game:
“The Islamic rulers weren't particularly interested in converting non-Muslims… In fact, my ancestors saw clear advantages in not being Muslim — mostly in the avoidance of military conscription.”
For Taleb, this was not subjugation but a stable, pragmatic coexistence.
These testimonies converge: under Islam, minorities retained dignity, property, and faith. Under Christendom, they were burned, expelled, or forcibly converted.
IV. The Christian Record
The Christian record, by contrast, is a chronicle of violent exclusivism.
From the Albigensian Crusade to the Spanish Inquisition, from the Thirty Years’ War to colonial genocides, the Christian West routinely annihilated those it deemed “infidels” — whether Muslims, Jews, or even fellow Christians.
Even when Western nations secularised, the impulse to dominate persisted through empire. Colonisation exported Europe’s internal violence to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, wrapped in the language of civilisation and progress.
V. The Empire’s Footprint: Colonisation, Race, and Slavery
1. Settler Colonialism and the Subhuman Other
Unlike the Islamic empires, the Christian West’s expansion was driven by a theology of racial superiority and a civilisational mandate to subjugate.
The Spanish conquest of the Americas, the British colonisation of Australia, and the North American frontier expansion systematically exterminated or displaced indigenous populations. Native peoples were treated as subhuman obstacles to be cleared, not as communities to be integrated.
By contrast, the Muslim conquests did not entail ethnic cleansing.
Indigenous populations in Persia, Egypt, Syria, and North Africa were neither exterminated nor enslaved. They remained in their lands, governed by their own laws, and gradually assimilated into a shared civic culture. The Muslim conqueror ruled; he did not replace.
2. Slavery: A Tale of Two Civilisations
Both civilisations practised slavery — but in utterly different moral worlds.
In the Christian West, slavery was racial, hereditary, and dehumanising. The transatlantic slave trade uprooted tens of millions of Africans and reduced them to chattel — human property without rights, whose children were born slaves.
In the Islamic world, slavery was non-racial and legally constrained. Slaves could own property, marry free women, rise to high office, and in many cases govern empires (as in the Mamluks of Egypt). The Prophet of Islam explicitly taught that freeing slaves was an act of piety and that a slave was a “brother under your care.” No equivalent moral discourse emerged in Christendom until abolition became economically convenient.
Thus, even in its moral lapses, Islamic civilisation retained a conscience. The West industrialised its cruelty.
VI. The Most Recent Record of Civilisation
In the twentieth century, the West turned its violence inward.
The Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered by Christian Europe, was not a deviation from its past — it was its culmination.
And today, in the twenty-first century, the State of Israel, claiming the legacy of those victims, enacts a genocide against Palestinians with the full complicity of the Christian West. The bombs fall on Gaza while Western leaders proclaim “shared values.”
There is no comparable atrocity by Muslims in either scale or ideology.
Whatever internecine conflicts exist in the Muslim world, they have never reached the industrial, theological, and ideological magnitude of Western exterminations.
VII. The Verdict
The historical and contemporary record speaks with one voice:
- Islam, despite human failings, produced a civilisation marked by restraint, pluralism, and moral realism.
- Christendom, despite later secularisation, produced the most totalising systems of violence in human history — from crusades and inquisitions to colonialism and genocide.
- Unlike Western empires, Muslims never wiped out indigenous populations, never built their wealth on racial slavery, and never treated human beings as subhuman raw material for empire.
To acknowledge this is not triumphalism. It is fidelity to truth.
Those who equate Islam with Christendom are not defending morality; they are pleading for Western approval — hoping to be counted among the “good Muslims” who confess the Empire’s sins as their own.
Summary Verdict
|
Criterion |
Islamic Civilisation (8th–13th C.) |
Christian Europe (same period) |
|
Treatment of Minorities |
Legally protected (dhimmi status), integrated in trade, medicine, and scholarship |
Expulsion, persecution, pogroms, Inquisition |
|
Intellectual Culture |
Translation movement, science, philosophy, medicine |
Theological scholasticism, suppression of science |
|
Urban Development |
Cosmopolitan centres (Baghdad, Córdoba, Cairo) |
Small, walled towns; literacy rare |
|
Rule of Law |
Codified under Sharia, checks on rulers |
Arbitrary feudal monarchies |
|
Warfare Ethics |
Prohibitions on killing noncombatants |
Crusades, religious extermination |
The contrast was not a “clash of civilisations,” but a contrast of civilisations — one law-bound, urbane, and plural; the other brutal, insular, and absolutist.
VIII. Conclusion
Civilisation, measured by the moral quality of its power, shows Islam in the best light.
The Muslim empires, with all their flaws, governed vast populations of differing faiths without erasing their identities. The Western empires, with all their science and progress, erased entire peoples.
The verdict of history, both ancient and modern, is unambiguous. The civilisation that restrained itself was Islamic; the one that did not was Christian historically, and now Judeo-Christian.
Islam, whatever its internal failings, was and is a lived moral project — a civilisation that tempered power with law, faith with reason, and victory with restraint.
Christendom and now Political Zionism, in contrast, sanctified domination as divine mission and carried its theology of conquest into secular modernity.
To deny this record is not scholarship. It is propaganda.
And those who, in the name of dialogue or moderation, blur this distinction are not defending Islam — they are merely performing loyalty before the Empire.
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A frequent contributor to NewAgeIslam.com, Naseer Ahmed is an independent researcher and Quran-centric thinker whose work bridges faith, reason, and contemporary knowledge systems. Through a method rooted in intra-Quranic analysis and scientific coherence, the author has offered ground-breaking interpretations that challenge traditional dogma while staying firmly within the Quran’s framework.
His work represents a bold, reasoned, and deeply reverent attempt to revive the Quran’s message in a language the modern world can test and trust.
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism