This week marks the anniversary of
an epic event that’s no longer commonly known but which nonetheless shaped
the future of the Western world, and which may still hold inspiration for
the West today.
After the death of the Muslim prophet
Mohammed in 632, Islam spread like a bloody tide throughout the Arabian
peninsula, north to the Caspian Sea and east through Persia and beyond,
westward through Egypt and across North Africa all the way to the Atlantic
Ocean. From there it crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to make all of the
Iberian peninsula, or al-Andalus, Islamic. In a mere one hundred years,
Mohammed’s aggressive legacy was an Islamic empire larger than Rome’s had
ever been.
The
Battle of Tours
By 732 the Roman empire had devolved
into a patchwork of warring barbarian tribes. When Abd-ar-Rahman, the governor
of al-Andalus, crossed the Pyrenees with the world’s most successful fighting
force and began sweeping through the south of what would become France
toward Paris, there was no nation, no central power, no professional army
capable of stopping them.
Except one – led by the Frankish duke
Charles, the eventual grandfather of Charlemagne. His infantrymen, as Victor
Davis Hanson puts it in a fascinating chapter of Carnage
and Culture, were “hardened veterans of nearly twenty years of
constant combat against a variety of Frankish, German, and Islamic enemies.”
Hanson writes that the Roman legions had crumbled “because of the dearth
of free citizens who were willing to fight for their own freedom and the
values of their civilization.” But Charles had such spirited warriors under
his command.
Sometime in late October (the exact
date is disputed), on the road between Poitiers and Tours (and thus it
is sometimes called the Battle of Poitiers) less than 175 miles from Paris,
Abd-ar-Rahman arrayed his cavalry against the solid block of Frankish footsoldiers,
which at 30,000 was by some estimates half the size of the Arab and Berber
army.
The opposing forces sized each other
up for a full week. And then on Saturday morning Abd-ar-Rahman ordered
the charge. But his army, which consisted mostly of cavalry and which counted
on speed, mobility, and terror to defeat dying empires and undisciplined
tribes, could not splinter the better-trained and better-armed Frankish
phalanx. At the end of the day’s carnage, both sides regrouped for the
next day’s assault.
But at dawn, Charles and his men discovered
that the Muslim army had vanished, leaving the booty stolen from ransacked
churches behind, as well as their dead (Hanson estimates 10,000) – including
Abd-ar-Rahman. It was the beginning of the end for further Muslim incursions
into Europe for hundreds of years.
Some contemporary historians downplay
the magnitude of the Muslim threat, claiming that Abd-ar-Rahman’s force
was only a raiding party. They minimize the significance of the battle’s
outcome, too; at least one
historian even claims that Europe would have been better off if Islam
had
conquered it. But Hanson notes that “most of the renowned historians of
the 18th and 19th centuries… saw Poitiers as a landmark
battle that signaled the high-water mark of Islamic advance into Europe.”
Edward
Creasey included it among his The
Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. Many believe that if Charles
– whom the Pope now dubbed Martel, “the Hammer” – had not stopped Abd-ar-Rahman
at Tours, there would have been nothing to prevent Europe from ultimately
becoming Islamic. Edward
Gibbon called Charles “the savior of Christendom” and wrote in The
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776 that
if not for Charles’ victory, “perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would
now be taught in the schools of Oxford.”
If only Gibbon could see Oxford now.
Not only is the interpretation of the Koran taught there, but Islam
thrives in Oxford, thanks partly to the patronage of dhimmi
Prince Charles. In his essay “Islam
in Oxford,” faux
moderate Muslim scholar Muqtadar Khan writes smugly that
Gibbon would have been surprised
to learn the lesson that military defeats do not stop the advance of civilizations
and the globalization of Islam is unimpeded by the material and military
weaknesses of the Muslim world.
Apart from his dubious assertion that Islam
has anything to do with the advance of civilization, Khan is right. Today
the Islamic invasion of Europe and the rest of the West is of the demographic,
not military, sort, as Mark
Steyn argued in his alarming (and yet entertaining) America
Alone. The continent faces an immigration crisis from a generation
of young Muslims who not only are willfully unassimilated, but who are
waging a cultural and physical aggression against their hosts, establishing
parallel communities ruled by sharia
and “no-go” zones of violence toward infidels. Germany’s Chancellor Merkel
confessed
recently that their multicultural experiment has failed, miserably;
that failure is nowhere more evident than in England, which is on the path
to civil war with its decidedly unicultural, radicalized young Muslim
population.
“Nothing
can stop the spread of Islam,” insisted Islamic apologist Reza
Aslan recently. “There are those who would try, but it simply will
not happen. Absolutely nothing can stop the spread of Islam.”
Charles Martel begged to differ in 732.
And now contemporary “Hammers” have arisen to lead the resistance against
a new wave of militant Islam, terrorism and sharia. The conflict is different
now – it’s not as simple and elemental as two armies facing off – and so
the new Martels are not necessarily soldiers. But they are warriors nonetheless
in the so-called Clash of Civilizations, culture warriors like Dutch politician
Geert
Wilders, activists Pamela
Geller and Brigitte
Gabriel, terrorism expert Steven
Emerson, authors Robert
Spencer and Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, policy analyst Frank
Gaffney, and many more, all putting themselves on the front lines against
the stealth jihad.
The tide was turned back before, and
it can be turned back again – by such “free citizens willing to fight for
their own freedom and the values of their civilization,” as Martel and
his men once were. |