Raymond Ibrahim examines the theological "two swords" doctrine justifying medieval Christian warfare against Islam, contrasting defensive Crusades with Islam's doctrinal mandate for global conquest. He details historical aggression from the 732 AD halt of Muslim expansion to Barbary pirates enslaving over 1.2 million Europeans and the U.S. spending 16% of its budget appeasing Muslim powers. Debunking myths about Templars and modernizing Saladin's image, Ibrahim argues that Western materialism creates a vacuum filled by Islam's strong morale, asserting that civilizations lacking faith cannot stop this inherently expansionist force. [Automatically generated summary]
And people always say, they still complain and say, oh, Muslims are invading Europe.
And it's like, no, they're not invading, they're being invited.
Completely different.
You have the power.
So, on the one hand, Christians were weak historically, but they had heart and something to fight for.
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Raymond Ibrahim.
You know, the constant struggles between Islamic countries and countries that have their basis in Christianity is obviously in the news again.
It's a vexed question because in America we have a great tradition of religious tolerance, but at the same time we want to defend ourselves from ideas that undermine our freedom.
Raymond Ibrahim is a scholar of Islam.
He's a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute and a best selling historian who's written such books as Sword and Scimitar and now a book called The Two Swords of Christ.
Raymond, thank you so much for.
Coming on, a lot of swords in those titles.
And I guess I want to begin with asking well, let me begin by asking, what are the two swords of Christ's?
Yeah.
So that book, what it's about is the military orders and their wars against Islam in the Holy Land, but they went beyond the Holy Land as well.
And the reason I called it the two swords kind of came to me as an epiphany almost, because on the one hand, the one verse, That the military orders and their ecclesiastical supporters often cited is the one in Luke where Jesus says to his disciples, He who has no sword, sell your garments and buy one.
And then they say, Look, Lord, here are two swords.
And then he says, That is enough.
That verse, of course, today is sort of kind of just symbolized into meaninglessness.
But at the time in the medieval era, and especially in the context of the military orders, it was habitually understood.
As that Jesus was saying, you have two swords, one against spiritual evil, spiritual sword, which I think modern day Christians comprehend, but also a physical sword against physical evil, which is the kind of missing from today's theology, I would argue.
So that justified, and that's why they didn't have much difficulty fighting back, fighting very aggressively.
And these military orders, of course, were on the one hand very pious, they were monks, okay, and they, if you know, How it is to live like a monk in the medieval era.
You know, it's very austere stuff.
But on the other hand, they were also the most ferocious warriors on the field against Islam.
So they were a strange hybrid, certainly from our perspective.
But the other, there's another play on the word, the two swords of Christ.
That's the theological dimension.
The other is I ended up really right.
There's really two main military orders, which is the knights of the temple, the Templars, and the knights of the hospital, the hospitallers.
So that's why, even on the cover, you have two swords, and one sword represents.
One military order.
But again, like I said, the theology behind it is also very interesting.
So you're right.
The reason I was joking about there being a lot of swords in the title is just been a lot of struggle between these two religious cultures.
And I guess I'd like to talk at the beginning about whether you think that that is inherent in the nature of these religions, that they must struggle, that there must be a real sword, not just a spiritual sword, or are some of us doing something wrong, I guess?
We can look at it two ways.
We can look at it from doctrine, okay?
And obviously, the struggle, if we're talking about Christianity and Islam, it's A one way struggle.
In other words, if Christianity is fighting, it's habitually in a defensive posture, not necessarily an offensive.
It's Islam that is offensive.
Okay, so the doctrine itself, we can go over any number of verses, but the long story short, and there's a quote I actually would often get from the Encyclopedia of Islam, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam, which goes away, the original one, but no one had any misunderstanding what jihad meant in the West.
Jihad meant that Islam had a mandate, Muslims had a mandate.
To conquer the world, which was seen as an altruistic endeavor on their end because they're spreading the light of Islam.
And this conquest does not necessitate conversion because, as we know, you can convert, and that's a good thing to do, of course, if you want to be part of the winning team.
But if you're a Jew or Christian, a person of the book, you can pay tribute and live as a second class citizen.
But the main point is that Sharia, Islamic law, Islamic Hegemony must be in place.
That's the concept of jihad in the doctrine.
And we can talk about verses and so forth.
But the second explanation, which I find much more compelling, is not the doctrinal argument, even though it's there.
The doctrinal argument is there.
But the problem is a lot of people will rightfully argue and say, well, look at the Bible.
The Old Testament's full of violence.
So what's your point?
But a lot of Christians and Jews are not doing that sort of thing.
So my take has always been okay, fine, let's hark the scriptures.
And let's see what happened historically.
And lo and behold, if you study the real history of Islam and the West, it is one of unmitigated jihad and conquest.
Most people are unaware that in the seventh century, when Islam essentially burst out of Arabia, just from the year that Muhammad died, 632 to 732, which is the Battle of Tours in the middle of France, Muslims conquered literally almost three quarters of what was once the Christian world.
Most people are unaware that when you talk about Christendom before Islam, the majority of it is in what we now call the Middle East and North Africa, MENA, Muslim world.
So Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, that land, the PA territories, all of Turkey, Asia Minor, all of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Spain.
Okay, all those were Christian and they all got conquered.
Spain, of course, is still Christian until they got into the middle of France.
And then later, you had another several iterations of jihad would burst out.
And one of the most fierce was the Ottoman Turks.
And they again invaded and they conquered the Balkans and Constantinople.
And in 1683, now we're talking a millennium after Muhammad's time, they're surrounding Vienna and on the verge of conquering it.
And then there were the mass slave raids that left virtually no part of Europe, including Iceland, untouched.
North African Barbary pirates would go as far as North Iceland.
They had an island base off Britain called Lundy, and they would terrorize and go ransacking and get slaves.
In about a one century era, in the 16th century, there were 1.2 million European white Christian slaves being sold in North Africa.
That's just from Barbary.
The Ottomans and then the Tatars, the Crimean Khanates and the Golden Horde, which were Muslims, they enslaved multiples and multiples of millions as well.
And just to cap it off, America's very first war as a nation is with Muslims thinking again on that same rationale.
And it's so very telling because all you have to do, so, what I'm referring to, of course, is the Barbary War, first one.
Which flares out around 1800.
But in the years before that, the same Muslim pirates were ransacking American vessels, kidnapping and enslaving soldiers.
And long story short, at one point, the U.S. was spending 16% of its federal budget to appease them.
So they stopped doing that.
And then they finally, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with one of the ambassadors from Barbary.
And it's remarkable because we have preserved his letter to Congress and what he says.
And he basically says we took the time to explain to them we have no beef.
Against anyone, whatever religion, why don't we work together?
Why don't we engage in trade?
And then he writes back what the ambassador told Jefferson Adams, which was basically it is our religion, it is our prophet, it is our Quran, all of these call you the infidel.
It is our right to kill you, attack you, plunder you, and any of us who die go to heaven.
So that's straight out of ISIS.
So what I've just given you this is a quick encapsulation from the time of Muhammad to America.
So we're talking 1,200 years now.
And this is what I said let's park the doctrine, the books, the Quran, and let's see what actually happened.
And what happened, of course, is just one long, nonstop jihad, different iterations and vicissitudes, of course.
And like I said, three quarters of the Christian world, the older, richer, more sophisticated, more theologically advanced region, which no one connects with Christianity, like Egypt and Syria and Asia Minor, Turkey, were all swallowed up.
So when you ask about the question, is this struggle intrinsic?
I would say yes from the Islamic side.
Okay, we've seen the doctrine, but the history has been the way it is.
The only reason it ever stopped was because it was physically stopped by the West.
So I know several people who, when they hear this interview, are going to say, but what about the Crusades?
So, what about the Crusades?
I mean, the people leave Europe and they go to the Middle East to take back Jerusalem.
Was that not an act of aggression?
No, that was actually part of just war theory.
Because, based on what I just was saying, they knew the crusaders and the church that that land, the Holy Land, was originally Christian.
And moreover, they knew of what was happening, all the attacks and the violence.
And in the years and decades before the First Crusade, this is when I was referring to the Turks.
I mentioned the Ottomans, but before the Ottomans, you had the Seljuk Turks.
And they're the ones who precipitated the First Crusade because what they were doing is really horrific.
According to contemporary eyewitness sources, They were massacring tens of thousands of Christians in Asia Minor, primarily Armenians, Georgians, Greeks in Western Anatolia.
And at the same time, there were always pilgrims from Europe going to the Holy Land ever since Constantine the Great built the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and all these other sites.
They had always been going there, even during the height of the Islamic conquest.
And depending on who was the ruler at the time, all you had to do was pay money and maybe you could visit, but sometimes you'd get attacked.
During this time, right before the crusade, the Turks were just running havoc and the stuff they were doing.
People would travel thousands of miles, and when they get to the gates, they demand money from them, take it, and then they'd hit them, whip them, and kick them out.
There's a very notable story where a German pilgrimage went there.
This happened in 1064.
And eyewitness says they killed everyone, and there was this beautiful nun, and they gang raped her to death.
And then there's other stories about when they would go into churches and completely defile them.
Disembowel the priests and decapitate them, pull the entrails of the young boys and whip them around.
And that's so, if you really study the text and you look at why Pope Urban called for the First Crusade in 1095.
That's why it was, because of what was happening.
So, in that context, it was seen as just war.
This is the Holy Land.
This was Christian before the Muslims conquered it in 637, Jerusalem.
And now they're doing what they're doing to the holy sites and to pilgrims and to Christians in general.
And so, they would often cite another verse that they would cite is where Jesus says the two greatest commandments are to love God and to love your fellow man.
And that was understood.
Loving God in that sense was, you know, a lot of modern Christians don't understand this anymore.
But holy land, sacred sites were important.
Okay, so God was being dishonored in this construct by what the Muslims were doing.
So loving God was to go on pilgrimage and liberate the holy land.
But loving your fellow man, your neighbor, as that verse says, was also in the same context because you're going to help and liberate the indigenous Christians and the pilgrims who were being abused.
So, yeah, nobody had any problem with it in that context.
The problem is it's not presented in that context.
And so I'll just leave you with a quick quote from a professor, John Esposito.
Maybe you've heard of him from Georgetown University.
He was very popular back in the day when I went to Georgetown University.
And he was the editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam, the later version of the watered up version.
He has a line in one of his books that says, and I've paraphrased it so much that I've actually, it's verbatim now.
He says, five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed between Christians and Muslims until an imperial papal.
Power play, it's in the liberation, led to a series of so called holy wars that have left a legacy of enduring mistrust and grievances from Muslims.
So, despite what I just told you, which is Muslims conquered violently three quarters of the Christian world, okay, and all the atrocities, in 1009, okay, this is again a few decades before the first crusade, one caliph, a Fatimid caliph in Egypt, according to Muslim sources, al Makrizi, destroyed 30,000 churches and synagogues as well in greater Syria.
In the Middle East, basically, and Egypt, which on the one hand underscores how Christian that region was, as I was saying, and on the other hand, underscores the persecution that was going on.
So, all of that, you know, that's what was happening.
Templars and Heresy Accusations00:02:41
And this professor is telling us that before the first crusade, it was all peace.
Okay.
And when you see it that way, and that's how it's presented, of course, the crusaders look like the bad guys because they're colonialists, they're racists, they're xenophobes, they're Islamophobes.
You know, they're going to a land that they have no business in and they're engaging in violence.
If you really understand the context, it's the exact opposite.
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So we're talking to Raymond Ibrahim, a historian, his book, The Two Swords of Christ.
You said it centers on the Templars, the Knights Templar, and the Hospitallers.
There's so many legends.
About the Templars, especially after they were disbanded violently and with great accusations of demonism and homosexuality.
How much of this is true?
What is the truth about the Templars?
Having done a really deep dive in the primary sources and especially in the secondary sources, what real historians who specialize in Templar studies, all of them emphatically agree that everything that we've heard is completely made up, has absolutely no connection to anything in reality.
Saladin's Noble Warriors00:13:54
What they were accused of by the French king, Louis IV, may be wrong, but even then, people and partisans of the king were saying, no, this is about money.
Okay, so that king already was well known for targeting anyone who had money, taking it and kicking it.
He did exactly that to the Jews in France.
He appropriated all their money and kicked them out.
He accused one of the popes right before the one that was during the.
The destruction of the Templars, of also witchcraft and sodomy, and the same sort of thing.
These were kind of like the stock and trade accusations that you would accuse someone to show them to be heretics.
But again, if you look at a deep dive and even just common sense, the whole thing doesn't make any sense.
I go to great length, I have several chapters really answering these questions.
But long and short of it, and again, from better historians than me who are truly specialized, is that these legends, they're all made up in all these groups and these esoteric cults that try to claim some lineage.
You know, there's historians have pinpointed exactly when it starts, and it's usually three, four, or 500 years after they were destroyed.
And when someone says, Oh, yeah, you know, we've still been alive and we're doing this, and so all of that has generally been discounted.
When you look at what's happening now and the Iran war and just the general hostilities between portions of the Middle East and Israel, but also through Israel America, do you just think this is inevitable?
I mean, is this what we're going to be living with?
Basically, forever, or is it?
Yeah, that's, you know, that's of course the question on everyone's mind.
And all, you know, I'm just going to respond to it from a theological and again, historical point of view by giving you the long picture, which is again, that Islam is doctrinally at odds with everyone.
It can't live in peace.
You may recall Samuel Huntington in his major book wrote, you know, the borders of Islam are bloody, okay, because they can't live in peace with their neighbors.
Well, there's a reason for that.
And it goes back to the creed and the doctrine that I explained, which is Islam is inherently expansionist.
That's just the name of the game.
And it's also supremacist.
It's not out to coexist.
Look around what's happening in Europe.
You have all these Muslims that go there.
They're not there to assimilate, they're not there to get along.
They're there just recently in London.
They had this mass prayer demonstration, basically claiming public space and making a point.
That's the religion.
It's always been like that.
There's no surprise.
So, on the one hand, we can argue that no matter what one says, a place like Iran, by virtue of its religious belief, makes itself an enemy, no matter what.
And it gets even trickier and more complicated because.
You may be familiar with the term takea, which it's basically another doctrine that permits Muslims to deceive the non Muslim.
It's very intricate, and I've written a lot about it.
And all Muslims do it.
But the ones who truly it's almost second nature to are the Shias.
And the reason for that is because they're the minority sect.
So living among Sunnis for centuries, right from the beginning, they had a lot of reason to dissemble.
And so, a lot of their dissembling has become so internalized that my point is it's very hard for me, it would be very difficult to take at face value what a Shia is telling me, especially with what I know about Islam.
Okay.
And again, you know, I'm giving you, I'm not even closely following what's happening.
These are more like general principles and sort of philosophical, theological views that I'm sharing.
So, yeah, on the one hand, Islam makes itself the enemy.
On the other hand, You know, say what you want, but Islam also teaches deception, especially Shia Islam.
In fact, a lot of people, apologists, will argue with me and say, no, Muslims don't do takea, only Shias do it.
Actually, they all do it, but the takea's are the ones who truly pioneered it.
So, when I go back and read stories about the crusades, I mean, thinking about the Song of Roland or something like that, the Western writers depict the Muslim warriors with a certain amount of nobility, a certain amount of respect.
Saladin, especially, is thought of as a great general and he has a certain nobility, whereas sometimes even the Westerners depict the Western crusaders as being particularly brutal.
Is there truth to that, or is that part of a cultural thing?
How do you feel that grows up?
Okay, so it's not in the primary sources.
Christians may well have respected Saladin in the context of a worthy foe.
You get that feeling from King Richard, who was his main foe towards the end, and you get the feeling it was reciprocated.
So there definitely was that aspect.
And the reason that Saladin, I did a very deep study about this, the reason that Saladin is so extolled in the West is because he was more magnanimous than other Muslims, but per se was not that magnanimous, definitely not by Western standards.
So I compared him with another Muslim leader.
Who actually is very similar to him.
He had the same experiences with the Crusaders and he almost expelled them the way Saladin did, as in completely.
And this is Baybars, who comes a few decades after Saladin.
And if you look at his behavior, everything he said to the Crusaders was a lie.
He'd besiege them, give them his word that they can surrender and they can go in peace.
They'd come out, he'd skin them alive and crucify them.
Okay, I mean, really, really bad stuff.
Saladin did not necessarily do that.
He was noble in that he was a fair dealing, but he also had an extremely radical side.
Speaking of the Templars and the Hospitallers, after the Battle of Hatton in 1187, July 4th, this is the pivotal battle during the Crusader era when the Crusaders are crushed by Saladin.
He enslaved the vast majority of the Crusaders, but he said every single last night of the temple and the hospital, he gave them two choices.
He kept them in prison overnight and told them to convert.
And according to the sources, none of them would convert.
So the next day, they brought him out, and all the Muslims were hollering and screaming, a little aghbad.
About 250 of these two night groups.
And behind them was a Muslim with a sword, and they all started just decapitating and cutting their heads off.
In fact, ISIS and all those choreographed execution scenes that we see in the orange jumpsuit, it's actually modeled after that particular scene.
So he definitely had a radical side to him when he gained power in Egypt around the 1170s.
The first thing he did is make sure all the churches are tarred with black, the Coptic churches, essentially.
But he's better than Baybars.
And because of that, now he's seen as this magnanimous epitome of wonderful Muslim behavior.
More to your point, I kind of waxed a little bit here, but this change comes recently.
This is not textual.
It really starts with novels by Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, which is a novel, everyone knows, and it's fictionalized.
And yeah, in this, Saladin appears good.
And then now it's become part of the movie industry, Kingdom of Heaven, of course.
He's noble, and the Christians are stupid and savage.
So all of that, I think, is not supported.
By the sources.
It's just what we say nowadays.
So, speaking, we're speaking again to Raymond Ibrahim, whose book is The Two Swords of Christ.
He has another one, Sword and Scimitar.
These are histories of the struggle between Christendom and Islam.
You're telling that story about the martyred knights who wouldn't convert.
And it kind of led into what I was going to ask you anyway.
Now, we have, it seems, a widespread cultural hostility.
Toward Christianity, which is attacked as quote unquote religion, but a weird welcoming attitude toward Islam.
Was there anything like that in the days of the Crusade?
Were there people who were saying, oh, this is terrible that you're going over to Jerusalem?
I mean, was there that kind of division?
Was this an entirely modern phenomenon?
It's an entirely modern phenomenon.
It's unprecedented.
You always had people who, you know, preferred peace.
St. Francis, for example.
During the Fifth Crusade, he traveled to Egypt and he wanted to put an end to the violence.
How?
By converting every last Muslim to Christianity.
And he met with the Sultan at the time, Camel.
But he wasn't a Pope Francis, who took his name.
He was actually militant.
He stood for his faith, he believed in it, he told them, You're following an imposter prophet, and so forth.
And this is the ironic thing where.
Historically, if you look at the Islamic world, it was understood that that was the behemoth and Europe was the weak power.
Okay, that was, and Muslims, it was the destiny that they had the manifest destiny westward and they would conquer Europe eventually.
That was widely believed as a matter of time.
And especially in the context of the Ottoman Empire, which was just a massive monster machine versus all these small European nations.
So it was believed that that would be the end of it, but they fought tooth and nail.
Okay.
And the book that I wrote between Sword and Scimitar and Two Swords of Christ, it's titled Defenders of the West.
And that really looks at the pain and the passion of these fighters, of what they went through just to try to preserve their way of life, okay, their civilization, their culture, their religion, their lands.
And they were, again, they were usually the outnumbered ones, but they fought tooth and nail.
Many of them died.
Okay.
It was a great sacrifice.
So then you fast forward to today, and the West is.
Immensely more powerful than the Islamic world militarily, economically, technologically, every which way you can imagine.
Islam is gone, it's weak.
Muslims go cap in hand to Europe as migrants.
And yet, lo and behold, okay, Islam is terrorizing Europe again.
Yeah.
Okay.
And so, my point is on the one hand, and people always say, they still complain and say, oh, Muslims are invading Europe.
And it's like, no, they're not invading.
They're being invited.
Completely different.
You have the power.
Western powers, authorities, policymakers, they have the power.
And for whatever reason, they're bringing in masses of Muslims.
They're appeasing them.
They're shutting down the native population.
And you go to jail if you say something, the wrong thing.
Denmark, I was there recently.
You know, they're the only nation in Europe that essentially has a blasphemy code.
You can't burn the Quran because, you know, Muslims will riot and so forth.
So, on the one hand, Christians were weak historically, but they had heart and something to fight for.
And they did.
Today, Westerners are powerful, but they don't have heart and apparently have nothing to fight for.
And so we're seeing what we're seeing.
Well, that was going to be my last question.
You know, when 9 11 happened, I remember.
The shock among American intellectuals and elites that anybody would do such a thing for religion.
It was hard for them to.
I remember on PBS people saying, well, it's not about religion, it's about jobs.
I thought that's not what they're saying.
It's about religion.
It's a very.
And people even talk about.
I heard Steven Pinker say this the other day that, oh, under religion, there were all these deaths and wars and all this stuff, which is nonsense looking at the 20th century when it was irreligious creeds that.
Caused most of the deaths, many more deaths than I think any religion has ever caused.
Can Islam be stopped by, or at least held at bay, by a civilization that has no faith, in your opinion?
Well, that's the question.
See, the short answer is no, because people need something more than just material comfort.
Okay, they need, and that's what's happening now, inasmuch as Islam is inherently inferior.
To, well, I would say Christian civilization, the West in general, if you've jettisoned all of that and you have nothing and you're essentially a materialist, even the inferior culture will fill the vacuum because something has to fill the vacuum.
It can't just be we're all materialists and consumerists and hedonists.
That leads to death and decline, which is what's happening to the West.
But when you have another people who are, like I said, physically weak, But they have the morale because they have something they believe in.
Well, yeah, that will fill in the vacuum.
And I believe that's what we're seeing.
And it's not just, you know, I mean, it's literally physical because they go to Europe and they also outbreed them.
So they're filling the vacuum literally and figuratively.
And that's because there is a vacuum.
Filling the Cultural Vacuum00:00:33
Raymond Ibrahim, the book is The Two Swords of Christ.
He's also written the bestseller Sword and Scimitar.
Raymond, it's really nice to meet you.
Excellent conversation.
I appreciate it.
I hope you'll come back another time.
Thank you very much, Andrew.
I'm more than happy anytime.
Really interesting historical perspective.
And the book is very gracefully written, obviously steeped in research.
Raymond Ibrahim, The Two Swords of Christ.
Come to the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.
Why?
Because I will be there and I would love to see you as well.