Ashrof’s Missed Battlefront: When Rhetoric Replaces History
By Naseer Ahmed, New Age Islam
29 October 2025
Abstract
V. A. Mohamad Ashrof’s recent article, A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Raymond Ibrahim Thesis Of Religious War (New Age Islam, 28 Oct 2025), expends considerable effort in dismantling Ibrahim’s “clash of civilisations” narrative—but never actually does so. His analysis remains confined to rhetorical abstractions and scriptural cross-quotations while sidestepping the historical record that could decisively confirm or refute Ibrahim’s claims.
By failing to engage history on its own terms, Ashrof inadvertently leaves Ibrahim’s central assertion—that relations between Christendom and Islam were shaped largely by religious antagonism—unchallenged. This essay restores the argument to its proper terrain: historical evidence and moral comparison.
On Parody, Piety, and the Abdication of Reason
Ashrof’s response to Raymond Ibrahim’s polemic is a study in misplaced strategy. He declares that “by employing scriptural principles from both the Quran and the Bible, this work challenges Ibrahim’s underlying assumptions, binaries, and ethical inconsistencies.”
This is not a challenge but capitulation. Ibrahim’s attack is framed as history—Muslim conquests, slavery, violence—and to meet that with verses from scripture is to parody both faiths. Facts must first be refuted by facts, not by parallel pieties. The Quran may explain the moral restraint that history confirms, but it cannot by itself serve as historical evidence.
In effect, Ashrof surrenders the field before the battle begins. By appealing to shared ethics instead of confronting falsified history, he shifts the argument from truth to sentiment. His plea for interfaith harmony—commendable in isolation—becomes, in this context, an abdication of reason. It says, in substance, let us not dispute whether the accusation is true; let us agree that both sides mean well or are equally guilty. Such moral equivalence may sound conciliatory, but it leaves Islam undefended and history uncorrected.
I. Ibrahim’s Amnesia—and Ashrof’s Echo
Raymond Ibrahim’s critique of Islamic expansionism rests on selective amnesia. He mistakes the military encounters of the Caliphate for the moral essence of Islam itself. Ashrof, in shadowboxing with Ibrahim’s rhetoric rather than his record, compounds the same error.
Both overlook a central truth: the early Islamic conquests were not imperial projects of domination but defensive and restorative campaigns—intended to secure trade, protect a nascent moral order, and ensure freedom of belief against two collapsing empires, Byzantium and Persia, whose centuries of despotism had reduced entire nations to servitude.
The early Caliphate’s wars were not fought to subjugate, but to end subjugation.
II. Moral Restraint in an Age of Empire
Nowhere is this clearer than in what the early Caliphate did not do. Having defeated both Rome and Persia, the Muslims did not lunge eastward toward India, the richest land within reach. Their campaigns halted at Sindh, and even that annexation was pragmatic, prompted by piracy, trade obstruction, and aggression against Muslim merchants.
Once the threat ceased, so did the campaign. This restraint was not political fatigue—it was moral principle. The Caliphate fought where aggression existed, established justice where tyranny reigned, and built peace where cooperation was possible. Its armies expanded the reach of order, not the geography of oppression.
III. The Conquest of Sindh: Securing Trade, Not Empire
The Umayyad campaign in Sindh (711 CE), led by Muhammad bin Qasim, was no expansionist adventure. It was a response to repeated attacks on Arab merchant ships and the capture of Muslim women and children by pirates allegedly aided by Raja Dahir. Diplomatic protests were ignored, and the Caliphate intervened only after appeals for redress failed.
The result was a limited incorporation of Sindh—opening secure trade routes and facilitating centuries of cultural exchange between Arabia and the Indian subcontinent. Far from conquest for conquest’s sake, it was an assertion of maritime law and commercial justice.
(Sources: “The Indosphere,” SlideShare; “History of Islam”)
IV. The Conquest of Spain: A Response, Not an Invasion
Likewise, the Muslim entry into Iberia in 711 CE was not an ideological war on Christianity but a response to internal Christian appeals. Count Julian of Ceuta, a Visigothic noble, invited the Muslim governor of North Africa, Musa ibn Nusayr, to intervene against the usurper King Roderic, who had allegedly violated Julian’s daughter and seized the Visigothic throne.
Musa sent Tariq ibn Ziyad with a modest expeditionary force that, aided by disaffected Visigothic factions, rapidly succeeded. When Muslim armies reached regions that resisted, they halted; when invited, they administered. This was not empire-building by creed, but a stabilising intervention welcomed by those oppressed under Roderic’s rule.
(Sources: Wikipedia, “Conquest of Iberia”)
V. The Ethical Code of Conquest
Unlike Byzantium or Christendom, the Caliphate’s wars were bound by a moral ceiling. No forced conversions. No destruction of worship. No killing of non-combatants. Peace was preferred to victory, and treaties took precedence over subjugation.
The Qur’an itself codified asylum for enemies—
“And if any one of the polytheists seeks your protection, then grant him protection so that he may hear the word of Allah. Then escort him to a place where he is secure” (9:6).
This ethic, revolutionary for its time, defined the Caliphate’s conduct and gave its victories a moral legitimacy unseen in contemporary empires.
VI. Where Ashrof Lost the Battle
Ashrof’s “interreligious discourse analysis” misfires because it meets a historical argument with synthetic interreligious modern hermeneutics of reconciliation, which amounts to surrendering rather than meeting the challenge on its own terms of historical fact. Ibrahim’s thesis is not theological—it is civilizational. The only adequate response is historical: how each civilisation treated the conquered, the dissenting, and the weak.
And on that field, the verdict of history is clear—and it does not favour Christendom.
VII. The Peace of Islam vs. The Persecution of Christendom
From Damascus to Cordoba, from Baghdad to Cairo, Jews and Christians lived as protected communities (Ahl al-Kitab) under Muslim rule. They maintained their worship, practiced their faiths, and rose to prominence in administration, medicine, and philosophy.
In Christian Europe, meanwhile, Jews were burned, expelled, or confined to ghettos. When Muslim Spain fell in 1492, both Muslims and Jews were massacred, forcibly converted, or exiled.
If Ibrahim charges that Islam waged war on Christendom, history returns the accusation tenfold: it was Christendom that waged wars of extermination against Islam, and against its own.
When Jerusalem fell to Crusader forces in 1099, its streets ran red with blood; when Salahuddin recaptured it in 1187, Christian and Jewish pilgrims continued their worship in peace.
VIII. Conquest vs. Coexistence
Ashrof misses the starkest contrast: the Islamic model of coexistence. Muslim conquerors never eradicated native populations, never built racial hierarchies, and never exported genocide.
By contrast, the Christian “Age of Discovery” unleashed centuries of slavery, depopulation, and racial subjugation—from the Americas to Africa and Australia. The same Europe that decried “Saracen conquest” sanctified colonial genocide as a divine duty.
If the yardstick is human suffering, Christendom was the aggressor, Islam the restraint.
IX. The Unspoken Continuity of the Crusades
Ibrahim’s attempt to trace moral continuity between the Crusades and later European expansionism is ironically half-correct—for the wrong reasons. The Crusading spirit did survive, but as a theology of conquest sanctified by Christian exceptionalism.
It re-emerged in the Reconquista, the Inquisition, and the global imperialism of Spain and Portugal. Ashrof could have eviscerated Ibrahim’s argument by exposing this lineage of aggression. Instead, he retreats into pious platitudes. Where Ibrahim falsifies history, Ashrof empties it.
X. No Record of Genocide in Muslim Expansion
Across the vast arc from Spain to Sindh, history records no instance of systematic extermination or racial slavery by Muslims. Conversion was gradual and largely voluntary. Local autonomy survived.
The Ottomans, far from destroying “three-quarters of Christendom,” preserved churches, languages, and communities for centuries. It is this inclusivity—not coercion—that explains Islam’s endurance long after its empires crumbled.
People remained Muslim not because they were forced to, but because they wished to.
XI. Moral Contrast in Captivity and Conquest
The difference between the two civilisations is most vivid in their treatment of captives.
Christendom’s wars culminated in enslavement, torture, and forced conversion—from the Crusades to the Spanish Reconquista. The Qur’an, by contrast, transformed servitude into a moral burden:
“And what will explain to thee the steep path? It is to free a slave.” (90:12–13)
It outlawed enslavement for faith and elevated manumission to expiation for sin (24:33). Under Islamic governance, slaves could own property, marry freely, and rise to power—some even becoming rulers and generals.
In Christian Europe, slavery remained racialised, hereditary, and divinely rationalised. The difference was not quantitative but civilizational: Islam’s moral revolution redefined power itself.
XII. The Verdict
There is a gulf between rhetoric that borrows the vocabulary of piety and scholarship that confronts the moral demands of history. Mr. Ashrof’s article, with its familiar lamentations about “religious war,” belongs to the former. It substitutes slogan for substance and sermon for scholarship.
By refusing to meet Ibrahim’s thesis on its natural battlefield—history—Ashrof leaves the impression that Ibrahim’s caricature of Islam stands unrefuted.
The real refutation lies open in the chronicles of history:
- in the convivencia of Andalusia,
- in the tolerant administration of Jerusalem under Caliph Umar,
- in the pluralism of the Ottoman millet system,
- and in the moral restraint that defined the early Caliphate.
If Ibrahim sees only blood in Islam’s past, it is because Ashrof forgot to show him the light.
Epilogue: The Modern Echo of a Medieval Blindness
The tragedy of today’s discourse is that both Islamophobes and apologetic scholars inherit the same medieval habit of selective vision. One sees only Islam’s swords and forgets its schools; the other clings to scripture and forgets its civilisation. Between these distortions, history is left unconsulted, and truth unspoken.
Raymond Ibrahim’s hostility and Ashrof’s hesitancy are mirror images of the same failure—to engage Islam not as theology or threat, but as a lived moral project whose history testifies to its restraint, its pluralism, and its enduring moral realism.
Until scholarship restores that balance, rhetoric will keep masquerading as reason—and history will remain the battlefield no one dares to enter.
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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.
URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-terrorism-jihad/battlefront-rhetoric-replaces-history/d/137433
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