Еве еден Енглез, историчар, кој како ретко кој успеал да ја види големата слика.
In the early 7th century, when Muhammad embarked on his prophetic mission, the vast majority of people in the Middle East were Christian.
Yet by 650, fewer than 20 years after Muhammad's death in 632, Arab armies had conquered most of the Middle East, and brought huge numbers of Christians under their rule.
The emergent empire grew fat on taxes levied upon those who had been conquered.
What, though, of those Christians who refused to submit to the Arabs?
The Byzantine Empire — the name by which historians call the eastern, surviving half of the Roman Empire — still held out, although it had lost Syria, Palestine and all its North African provinces.
By the 8th century, 100 years after the death of Muhammad, it was becoming clear that the Islamic Caliphate that had been established was not, after all — as Muslims had originally hoped — destined to conquer the world in one fell swoop.
Though they had swept westwards to Morocco and eastwards deep into central Asia, Arab armies had still experienced the occasional rebuff.
Their most formidable foes, as they had been from the very beginning, were the Byzantines, whose capital, the great city of Constantinople, ranked as the bulwark of Christendom.
Unsurprisingly, then, during the 8th century, Muslims began to conceive of the world as divided between the House of Islam and a Christian 'House of War', sinister in its disbelief, obdurate in its defiance of the message of the Holy Koran. Sayings became attributed to Muhammad which cast warfare in the cause of the Muslim God as a duty of the Faithful, such as: 'I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but Allah.' '
Slaughtering Christians was cast not merely as an option for dutiful Muslims, but as a positive obligation. One veteran of warfare against the Byzantines gave a blistering retort to a battle-shy friend who had boasted of his peaceable pilgrimages to Mecca and Medina.
'Your worship is mere play. For you the fragrance of spices, but for us the fragrance of dust, and dirt, and blood flowing down our necks — which is altogether more pleasant.'
Al-Andalus, as this western Caliphate was known — modern Andalucia — was as brilliant as any region in the House of Islam: rich with crops, studded with great cities, and adorned with the arts of peace such as science and philosophy.
Even its Christian enemies hailed it as 'the ornament of the world'. Certainly, the strife-torn and poverty-stricken kingdoms of Christendom had nothing to compare. Their backwardness, to the Muslims of al-Andalus, appeared the natural order of things.
In 997, in demonstration of this, a Muslim army sacked Santiago de Compostela, Spain's holiest Christian shrine.
Bells from the despoiled cathedral were suspended from the Great Mosque of Cordoba in the south, to serve the faithful as lamps, and prisoners of war set to labouring on a great extension to the mosque.
Others were publicly decapitated, and their severed heads paraded through the market place, before being hung from the main gates of the citadel.
А сега поважното
Today, according to a poll, some two-thirds of Muslims worldwide want to see the restoration of a Caliphate. It is not empires per se they are opposed to — just non-Islamic empires.
That Constantinople has been a Muslim city for almost 600 years, that the Crusades are done and dusted, and that Europe no longer defines itself as Christendom, barely intrudes on the consciousness of many jihadis.
They inhabit a mental landscape in which the Middle Ages never went away. The menace of this way of thinking is brutally evident — a world in which young people murdered at a rock concert can be cursed as 'Crusaders' is a world on the verge of going mad.
It is not just non-Muslims who are threatened by this imperialist nostalgia. 'Either you are with the Crusade,' ISIS has warned European Muslims, 'or you are with Islam.'
Its ambition is to terrorise the West into turning against its own Muslim citizens, and render it impossible for them to live here as equals: 'For then Muslims in the Crusader countries will find themselves driven to abandon their homes, and will go to live in the Caliphate.'
Е сега ако Калифатот биде создаден, знаеме кој прв ќе го јаде. Голема штета е што Балканот денес е шитхол и задња рупа на свирало у светов инаку ѓубрево немаше толку сила да си зема. И што е најлошо, Балканот (Византија) кој беше бастион на сите вредности кои се тотална спротивност на се во кое варварсково ѓубре верува денес стана логистичка поддршка на тие што сакаат да креираат калифат. За да се смени тоа, Балканот треба да биде свесен дека е една целина која продуцирала некакви вредности кои имаат некакво значење за светската цивилизација, а не мали раскарани земјчки кои си гледаат за себе и му се смеат на комшијата на муката, исполнети со шака јад кои само наведнуваат глава и прават тоа што ќе им кажат. Се дур Балканот не се свести дека боледува од рак во облик на терористички земји инсталирани на негова територија ко Туркие, Шчиприа, Косова Репубљик и пола Мачедониа, тоа значи дека на Балканот му е сеедно што у брзо време ќе се сретне со својата смрт.
