The Crusades: The Spread of Islam

Oh man, oh man, oh man, oh man.  Honestly oh my fucking God.  Allah in all his glory give us a hand on this one.  If either side of this debate has anything to say about the following couple of posts, there will be blood.

I mean, we're going to be talking about the religions of Abraham & Freddy Mercury here & that's going to angry up the blood.

And we're going to be honest about it too & that's going to get the blood to boil.  Because, well, let's face it.  Honest history, when dealing with Religion, all religions is totally Un-PC in the way that the conservatives like & the liberals hate...& at the same time, it's honest in a brutal sort of way that the liberals like & the conservatives hate.

And that's just the political side.  We haven't even come to the religious side where anything remotely insulting or dark said about any religion, particularly the religion you are following leads to a tumult that is generally followed by bombs & beheadings, stonings & crucifixions.

So to avoid this, we are going to put all the mockery & humor aside, like we always do, & approach this topic with deadly seriousness.

No, I'm joking, we're going to do the same shit we always do.  Only this time, it might actually get us killed by a crazy-wackjob fundamentalist....of the Muslim variety.  The fundamentalists of the Christian variety will kill us if we make it to the next post.

For starters there's a misconception that we have to clear up:

Bull Shit!  Serious Bull Shit!  DING!  DING!  DING! Bull shit detector is on overload here.

Islam doesn't mean peace.  Islam means submit.

Because you know how word, or at least Etymology obsessed we are here, the word Islam literally means "submission to the will of God."

It comes from the root word aslama which means, "resigned, retired, surrendered, & submitted."

So, where does this whole peaceful thing come from?

Well, Islam, as a word also comes from  either a conjunctive with the root salima which means "safety" or salam which does, in fact, mean "peace."

Despite all of that, Islam does NOT mean peace.  It means submit.  Still, Islam is a peaceful religion.

Bull Shit!

Out of all the Abraham religions there is only one that is peaceful in it's creed & you would NOT know that by looking at MOST of it's flag waving, gun-totting, Peace-Bashing, wife beating, concealed carrying, pro-war, queer-stoning, anti-homless , anti-Christ, card-carrying NRA followers.

That rant being said, I bet you can't guess which is the only religion of Abraham that condemns violence.

That's right, it's hard to tell isn't it.  One of the religions was peaceful, but historically, all the religions of Abraham kill in the name of G_d.

Islam was no different.

Alright, you see that map that reads "The Spread of Islam 622-750 CE"  it's the spread of Islam.  That's how you can map it out on the globe.

There are words in that spread that sort of stand out.  Little phrases & what not. 

• Conquest of Mecca
• Battle of Hunayn  
• Battle of Tabouk

He, Muhammad, sort of spread Islam by the sword.

No, not that Muhammad.  All he spread was entertainment...& sort of Civil Rights.

Yeah, that's the Muhammad we are talking about.

He sort of got his followers together, armed them, & then went to war in Saudi Arabia, which, after his death, was sort of completely conquered by the people that followed him.

And then the Rashidun Caliphate spread things through Persia, which we all know from earlier posts was Zoroastrian.

What we don't know, what we haven't covered yet is the fact that the Zoroastrians are the reason that Islam, Judaism, & Christianity, are all monotheistic religions.

You see there were certain scribes responsible for the writing of the Torah over the years.  Together, they spell JED.  They were J.  E.  & D. & before things with the Jews were really solidified the Assyrians came storming in & the burned down the 1st Temple almost right after Solomon built it.

They looked like this:

And we really don't know all that much about them.  They aren't as famous as a lot of the ancient peoples.  Mainly, we know who they were because Yossarian was an Assyrian.

Three person joke that was.

Look close, you see that symbol above king Jehu?  If you are familiar with Zoroastrianism you've seen that shit before.

Anyways, when the Assyrians came rolling in, a scribe broke into the temple & pilfered what we know of the Torah to date.  That's sort of where we get the Book of Deuteronomy from.

Before the Assyrians came rolling through the Holy Land, the Abrahamic God had a wife.

That's right, like millions of Americans, God had a divorce.

The Jews won't admit to it, but it's right there in the Archeological record.  Her name was Aisha. 

She was a fertility goddess.  That is her from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which you are familiar with if you know the Noah story.  She is also mentioned in the Old Testament, the Torah, in the Book of Exodus.

She was even mentioned by Moses, who was around just a little bit after Akhenaten who was a Pharaoh that tried to convert the Egyptians to monotheism. 

And he worshiped the sun god Amun...but the Egyptians hated him & his new religion & now scholars wonder if Moses wasn't a follower.

Anywho....

After Yossarian's people came storming through the Persian people did the exact same thing & this time they took the Jews into exile...& then totally converted to Zoroastrianism which was the world's first monotheistic religion & totally condemned slavery.

So they let the Jews go.

And when the Jews got back, they had a complete Torah & only one God.

And then, Alex came storming through, messed things up, made the men hairy, & about a thousand years later the Muslims did the same thing.

But they couldn't kill the followers of Zoroastrianism outright, not like they could the pagans that refused to convert, so instead they just taxed the hell out of them & oppressed the shit out of them until they converted by choice.

And then they went into North Africa, where they took over the Berbers & used them as foot soldiers to takeover as much of the old Roman Empire as they could, which is why Italians, & particularly Sicilians have olive skin, dark hair, & brown eyes.

LOTS of raping.

Things were going good, until they went into France and got stopped by Charles Martel in the
Bataille de Poitiers & were forced back to Spain, who acted like Ireland & never really stopped rebelling until they kicked the last of the Muslim rulers out.

You read that right, the French stopped them.  They used to be pretty very extremely kick ass.

 And then they started a massive slave trade through Africa, & a smaller one of preferred sex slaves brought from the Vikings which is where we get that nasty word used in Lethal Weapon 2 which we've already learned about in an earlier post.

At the time we are talking about, Istanbul was still Constantinople, & controlled by the Byzantines, who were actually the Romans, or what was left of them, & still very upset about the fact that their empire was conquered, bit by bit, by barbarians & Muslims.

Eventually all the barbarians became Christian & not pagan & the Byzantines formed a sort of shaky alliance with them.  You see, their land was now in Muslim hands, & that land was their holy land, which they were NOT allowed to enter, so they hatched a plan to reconquer it & launched the Crusades.

That is sorta kinda where our story starts, &, for good or bad,  when our story stops, the Islamic Empires were in a bit of trouble due to infighting.


I'll Leave you with this: