The long record: conquest, dhimma and the accountability gap

Every other empire in history is discussed. The Crusades are taught in school as a byword for religious violence, and they lasted under two centuries. The Inquisition, the conquistadors, the Atlantic slave trade, the British Raj, the Belgian Congo: all of them are argued about constantly, in classrooms, in films and in national apologies. One imperial history is not discussed, and raising it is treated as evidence of a defect in the person raising it rather than a question to be answered.

This page applies the same standard to that history as to every other. Not a harsher one. The same one.

The claim on the other side is usually the phrase “the religion of peace,” offered as though it settled a question about the past. It does not describe the past. What follows is what the record says, and none of it is obscure, contested at the level of whether it happened, or sourced to anyone hostile.

The century of conquest

Within roughly a hundred years of Muhammad’s death in 632, armies under the banner of the new faith held territory from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the Indus. That is not the spread of an idea. It is the fastest imperial expansion in recorded history, and it was accomplished the way empires are.

The Sassanid Persian Empire, four centuries old, was destroyed entirely by 651. Zoroastrianism, the state religion of Iran for a thousand years, survives today as a community of roughly twenty thousand people inside Iran.
The Byzantine Empire lost Syria, Palestine and Egypt between 636 and 642, more than half its territory and its richest provinces, in six years.
Christian North Africa, the church of Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine, one of the oldest and most intellectually productive branches of Christianity, was extinguished. Not reduced. Extinguished.
Spain was invaded in 711 and held in part for 781 years.
Sindh was taken in the same year, opening the campaigns into the Indian subcontinent that ran for the next thousand years.
Constantinople fell in 1453, and the Ottoman advance was stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683.

The Crusades, for scale, began in 1095: four and a half centuries after the conquest of Jerusalem, Syria, Egypt and North Africa, and as a response to it. That ordering is reversed in almost every popular account, which presents the Crusades as the opening act of Christian-Muslim conflict rather than a late and largely unsuccessful counter-attack.

The dhimma: the legal position of everyone else

Conquered Christians, Jews, and later Zoroastrians and Hindus were not generally expelled or forcibly converted. They were placed in a defined legal category, dhimmi, protected persons, and the terms are written down.

They paid the jizya, a poll tax levied on non-Muslims and not on Muslims. Under the terms associated with the Pact of Umar they could not build new houses of worship or repair old ones without permission, could not ride horses or bear arms, could not testify against a Muslim in court, faced restrictions on dress and on the public practice of their religion, and could not marry Muslim women though the reverse was permitted. Conversion out of Islam was a capital offence, and remains one in law in several countries today.

The defence offered for this, at its strongest: for long stretches it was more tolerant than contemporaneous Christian Europe, which expelled its Jews entirely from England in 1290, France repeatedly, and Spain in 1492. Jewish life under Muslim rule in Baghdad, Cairo, Córdoba and Salonica produced Maimonides, Judah Halevi and centuries of scholarship, and Jews fleeing Spain in 1492 were received by the Ottoman sultan. That is all true and it is why “golden age” is not simply propaganda.

It is also not the claim being defended. A hierarchy administered mildly is still a hierarchy, and the mildness varied entirely with the ruler: the Almohads forcibly converted or killed the Jews of North Africa and Spain in the twelfth century and drove Maimonides himself into exile; Cairo’s synagogues were destroyed under al-Hakim; the Jews of Fez were massacred in 1033 and again in 1465; Yemen’s Jews lived under the Orphans’ Decree, which took Jewish orphans to be raised Muslim, into the twentieth century. “Better than the Inquisition, some of the time” is a real historical finding. It is not equality, and equality is what the phrase “religion of peace” is used to imply.

Thirteen centuries of slave trading

The Atlantic slave trade ran for roughly 350 years and is, correctly, a permanent feature of Western moral self-examination. The Islamic slave trades ran for thirteen centuries, from the seventh into the twentieth, and are absent from almost every curriculum that covers the other one.

Across the trans-Saharan, Red Sea and Indian Ocean routes, scholarly estimates converge on something in the range of six to ten million people for the trans-Saharan trade alone, with Ralph Austen’s syntheses in that band and totals across all the eastern routes running higher.
Male slaves taken across the Sahara were frequently castrated to produce eunuchs, at mortality rates contemporaries put in the majority. This is a large part of why there is no equivalent of the African diaspora of the Americas along these routes: the population did not reproduce because it was prevented from doing so.
The Barbary corsairs of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Salé raided European coasts and shipping for three centuries, taking captives as far north as Iceland and Ireland. Robert C. Davis of Ohio State estimated between one and one and a quarter million Europeans enslaved between 1500 and 1800, an estimate other historians consider high, and the lower ranges are still in the hundreds of thousands.
Abolition came late and largely under external pressure. Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Dubai in the same decade, and Mauritania in 1981, where it was not made a criminal offence until 2007 and persists in practice.

The subcontinent

The campaigns into India began in 711 and continued in waves for a thousand years. Mahmud of Ghazni sacked the temple at Somnath in 1026, one of seventeen expeditions. Timur took Delhi in 1398 and left a massacre behind him that his own chroniclers boasted of. The Delhi Sultanate and later the Mughals under Aurangzeb destroyed temples as policy and reimposed the jizya on a Hindu majority.

Will Durant called the Islamic conquest of India “probably the bloodiest story in history.” That is a historian’s judgment in a sentence, not a count, and the specific figures that circulate, most often K. S. Lal’s estimate of eighty million dead, are rejected by most demographic historians and are not carried by any dataset. What the archaeology and the chronicles both carry is enough without it: a millennium of conquest, systematic destruction of temples, and a permanent religious partition of the subcontinent that produced, in 1947, the largest forced population exchange of the twentieth century.

The twentieth century

The Armenian genocide, 1915 to 1923: between one and one and a half million Armenians murdered by the Ottoman state, alongside the Assyrian and Greek genocides in the same years. The Committee of Union and Progress that ran it was a nationalist movement more than a religious one, and the Ottoman Sheikh ul-Islam had still proclaimed jihad in November 1914, and the deportation machinery still ran on the legal category the empire had kept for the non-Muslim since the seventh century.
The Farhud, Baghdad, June 1941: a pogrom that murdered roughly 180 Jews and ended two and a half thousand years of Jewish Babylonia within a decade.
Roughly 850,000 Jews were driven out of Arab and Muslim countries between 1948 and the 1970s, property confiscated and citizenship stripped. Iraq’s Jewish community went from over 130,000 to almost none. Egypt’s, Libya’s, Yemen’s and Algeria’s likewise.
Christians in Turkey fell from around a fifth of the population in 1914 to well under one per cent today. Copts remain in Egypt under recurrent attack, including the Palm Sunday church bombings of 2017.
Yazidis, 2014: Islamic State killed several thousand at Sinjar and enslaved thousands of women and girls, publishing theological justifications for the sexual enslavement of the captured.
Bahá’ís in Iran and Ahmadis in Pakistan remain criminalised populations, in living memory and in current law.

The accountability gap is the actual subject

The point of assembling this is not that Muslims are uniquely violent. It is that every other empire’s record is public property and this one is not, and that the asymmetry is maintained by a move rather than an argument: the person who raises the record is told that raising it is bigotry, and the record itself never gets addressed.

Three things that costs.

It abandons the victims. Armenians, Assyrians, Yazidis, Copts, Bahá’ís, Mizrahi Jews and Hindus are the only victim populations in the world expected to be quiet about what happened to them in order to protect the reputation of the people it happened to them at the hands of. No other group is asked for this.

It hands the subject to actual bigots. When the mainstream refuses to discuss a documented history, the only people discussing it are the ones with the worst possible motives, and their version, unopposed, is the one that spreads. A subject that cannot be discussed honestly will be discussed dishonestly.

It makes the present unreadable. Seventy per cent of the world’s terrorism deaths in 2025 came from four jihadist organisations, and the people they kill are overwhelmingly Muslims. That is not explicable inside a framework where the entire history is off-limits and the entire present is a reaction to Israel.

Say it the way you say the Crusades

An empire is judged by what it did and a person is judged by what they did. Those are different sentences, this page is the first one, and everybody already understands the difference in every other case. No one thinks a schoolchild in Madrid is answerable for the conquistadors. The distinction is only ever demanded in one direction, and it is demanded not to protect Muslims living now but to protect a history from being read out loud.

So read it out loud. Christianity survived the Crusades being taught to every eleven-year-old in the West. Spain survived the Inquisition. Britain survived the Raj, and Belgium survived the Congo, and the United States teaches the Atlantic slave trade in primary school. Not one of those countries collapsed, and not one of those histories is off the syllabus because someone might take it badly.

Thirteen centuries of slave raiding, an empire built at sword-point from the Atlantic to the Indus, a legal caste system for everyone conquered, and the extinction of the church of Augustine, are not more sensitive than any of that. They are less examined, which is a different thing entirely, and the difference is not accidental. It is the product of a single move, repeated for forty years: the person who raises the record gets discussed instead of the record.

Nothing on this page is harsher than what the West says about itself every single day. It is simply said about someone else, once, and that is the entire offence.