The Islamic Conquest of Judea

The Islamic conquest of Judea, how did it go?

Here is Andrew Bostom:

Relying upon the definitive study of this period, Moshe Gil's 1992 A History of Palestine 634-1099, and other corroborating scholarly sources, the following is a summary of the devastating and decidedly "non-liberating" consequences of these jihad campaigns, characterized by massacre, pillage, enslavement and deportation of the indigenous Palestinian Jewish, Christian and Samaritan populations.

The entire Gaza region up to Caesarea was sacked and devastated in the campaign of 634 C.E., which included the slaughter of 4000 Jewish, Christian and Samaritan peasants. Villages in the Negev were also pillaged, and towns such as Jerusalem, Gaza, Jaffa, Caesarea, Nablus, and Beth Shean were isolated. In his sermon on the Day of the Epiphany 636, Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, bewailed the destruction of the churches and monasteries, the sacked towns and villages, and the fields laid waste by the invaders. Thousands of people perished in 639, victims of the famine and plague wrought by this wanton destruction. The Muslim historian Baladhuri, maintained that 30,000 Samaritans and 20,000 Jews lived in Caesarea alone just prior to the Arab Muslim conquest; afterwards, all evidence of them disappears. Archaeological data confirm the lasting devastation wrought by these initial jihad conquests, particularly the widespread destruction of synagogues and churches from the Byzantine era, whose remnants are still being unearthed. The total number of towns was reduced from 58 to 17 in the red sand hills and swamps of the western coastal plain (namely, the Sharon). Massive soil erosion from the western slopes of the Judaean mountains also occurred due to agricultural uprooting during this period. Finally, the papyri of Nessana were completely discontinued after the year 700, reflecting how the Negev also experienced destruction of its agriculture, and the desertion of its villages.

When Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab visited Jerusalem during 638, mainly to end some of the wanton destruction wrought by his jihadist forces, he immediately built an unostentatious mosque on the Temple Mount — hardly an act of "reinstating Jewishness and Judaism" to Jerusalem! Moreover, Umar's treaty of submission for the Christians included abiding their prohibition on Jewish settlement in Jerusalem. Three years later, in 641, Umar did allow very limited Jewish re-settlement of Jerusalem, but for politico-religious reasons, advantageous to the Muslim rulers: to spur economic activity and weaken Christian claims of exclusivity to the city. By the end of the 7th century, the triumphal Dome of the Rock was constructed on the Temple Mount under the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik and his sons, giving Jerusalem a Muslim, not a Jewish "aura of sanctity," transforming it, "into a center of attraction to visitors from all over the Muslim world."

The jihad conquest of Palestine created an Islamic state under Sharia jurisdiction for the surviving Jews, Christians and Samaritans, with all its accompanying religious and socio-political discriminations. There was nothing "liberating" about the jihad waged against the vanquished "dhimmi," per Qur'an 9:29:

"Fight against those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth [i.e., Islam] from those who were given the Scripture - fight until they give the jizyah1 willingly while they are humbled."

This verse, and its interpretation by seminal Muslim Qur'anic commentators and jurists, was the key rationale for Sharia-based restrictions on non-Muslims' religious practices, as well as their pauperizing taxation, disarmament and inequality in penal law.

Although interrupted, in part, for nearly two centuries by the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291 C.E.), the oppressive imposition of Islamic law in Palestine persisted for over a thousand years, in total, through the mid- to late 19th century under Ottoman rule.

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