In this enthusiastic, adulatory review of Justin Marozzi’s book Islamic Empires, Tunku Varadarajan, executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and thus someone who should know better if our academic environment were not so corrupt and compromised, retails present-day academic fictions about Islamic history that outrage the historical record, and that no one who was remotely honest and even glancingly familiar with that record could repeat with a straight face.
“His previous books include biographies of Herodotus and Tamerlane, the 14th-century Turco-Mongol conqueror whom Mr. Marozzi lauds as ‘one of history’s greatest self-made men.'”
That he may have been, but Tamerlane was much more as well, yet Tunku Varadarajan and apparently Justin Marozzi don’t see fit to inform us of that fact. In The History of Jihad we learn, among much more about Tamerlane, that Sharaf ad-Din Ali Yazdi, a fifteenth-century Persian who wrote a biography of Tamerlane, observed that “the Qur’an says the highest dignity man can attain is that of making war in person against the enemies of his religion. Muhammad advises the same thing, according to the tradition of the Muslim doctors: wherefore the great Temur always strove to exterminate the infidels, as much to acquire that glory, as to signalise himself by the greatness of his conquests.” One of history’s greatest self-made men indeed.
“‘One of the defining features of Abbasid Baghdad,’ he writes of the city in its ninth-century heyday, ‘was its cosmopolitanism. Arabs lived alongside Persians, Indians, Turks, Armenians and Kurds in a capital of Jews, Christians and Muslims.’ Tolerance was ‘less something to boast about than a generally accepted way of life.'”
From The History of Jihad: “In the late 770s, the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi traveled to Aleppo, where twelve thousand Christians greeted him with great honor. Al-Mahdi, however, was not disposed to respond in kind, and told them: ‘You have two options. Either die or convert to our religion.’ Most of the Christians chose to die rather than embrace Islam. In and around Baghdad, he noticed that the Assyrian Christians had built new churches since the Muslim conquest, in violation of dhimmi laws; he ordered them destroyed; five thousand Christians in Syria were given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Many stayed true to their ancestral faith and chose death.”
There’s your tolerance.
S0 why does ahistorical twaddle and fantasy such as Islamic Empires get published and praised to the skies in the Wall Street Journal? Because it tells people what they want to hear.
“‘Islamic Empires’ Review: Revisiting a Glorious Past,” by Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal, January 31, 2020 (thanks to David):
…A history graduate from the University of Cambridge, Mr. Marozzi is an accomplished and ambitious writer: His previous books include biographies of Herodotus and Tamerlane, the 14th-century Turco-Mongol conqueror whom Mr. Marozzi lauds as “one of history’s greatest self-made men.” He has also written an elegant history of Baghdad. His latest work is “Islamic Empires,” a sweeping, vibrant and often irrepressible account of the cities most emblematic of Islam since that religion was promulgated by the Prophet Muhammed in the early seventh century…..
In making this last comparative point, Mr. Marozzi directs us to the most striking feature of most of the cities in his book: their onetime ethnic and religious diversity. “One of the defining features of Abbasid Baghdad,” he writes of the city in its ninth-century heyday, “was its cosmopolitanism. Arabs lived alongside Persians, Indians, Turks, Armenians and Kurds in a capital of Jews, Christians and Muslims.” Tolerance was “less something to boast about than a generally accepted way of life.” Elsewhere he writes that the Samarkand of Tamerlane—a man feared in the West as the scourge and wrath of God (to use the poet Marlowe’s famous phrase)—was “one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, though this owed as much to the forced movement of people and prisoners as it did to the magnetic attraction of the place.”
Even Kabul, which struggles daily to keep the Taliban at bay, was in the 16th century a polyglot place that beguiled a young Babur. When in 1504 he captured the city as a 21-year-old warrior from Fergana (in modern Uzbekistan), he was “fascinated by the human population . . . of which he had made himself master.” He found himself ruling over “many tribes, including Turks, Mughals, Arabs, Persians, and Sarts, who spoke up to twelve languages.”…
Peter Dale says
Too bad you don’t write another book entitled something like ‘Islam’s Deniers’ and simply line up what these useful idiots write against the facts.
gravenimage says
I’d read that book, Peter–it would probably wind up being quite a massive tome, though, given how grimly common this is these days.
eduardo odraude says
Spencer could perhaps pick the top ten most famous people who talk nonsense about Islam, and he could write a fictional dialogue between each one and Muhammad.
gravenimage says
I’d read that book, Eduardo.
mccode says
Does the name Tamerlan Tsarnaev ring a bell?
Named after Tamerlane, the 14th-century Turco-Mongol conqueror whom Mr. Marozzi lauds as “one of history’s greatest self-made men.
This is the story that needs to be told, and often. Not the white-washed version all too prevalent in the world today.
gravenimage says
+1
barbaracvm1 says
THE MYTH OF ANDALUSIAN PARADISE by Dario Fernandez-Morera explains how the the truth of Muslims conquerors exploited the math and sciences before Islam conquered Spain and the rest of Europe.
The western cultures allowed Islam to lie.
James Lincoln says
The Wall Street Journal, once a trusted news source, has shifted to the left.
Maybe not as much as the New York Times or the Washington Post, but still a noticeable shift.
Readers beware…
Spiro says
Thanks for your comment about the WSJ I was thinking I was the only one who noticed now I only buy it there is a specially interesting article on the front page even then read carefully
Wellington says
James: This serves in part why I somewhat emotionally (and unnecessarily) responded to you the other day about the link to a WSJ article you sent me. The WSJ, as with the Drudge Report, has indeed shifted to the Left. The WSJ is particularly egregiously wrong on two issues—1) immigration; and 2) Islam.
In short, the WSJ is no longer a news source that can be trusted and relied upon. Oh yes, it will still for the time being get things down more correctly than does The New York Times or Washington Post, but this is such an easy barrier to surpass and so it amounts to virtually nothing.
Ah, most everything is amiss in our age. What has happened to the WSJ serves as merely one example of this sad and destructive development in the West over the past half century or so.
Beyond sad. Tragic actually.
eduardo odraude says
Kimberly Strassel seems to be pretty good on the Trump Russia hoax.
tim gallagher says
This idiot needs to read Robert Spencer’s “The History of Jihad” as it might put him in touch with the truth about the endless evil brutality of Islam, but I guess he would ignore reality and continue to inhabit his dangerous fantasy land view of Islam. It is hard to understand how some people are able to ignore reality to such an extreme degree, another example, dealt with here at Jihad Watch just the other day, being that Christian woman writer who wrote her book in praise of Islam. There are some truly delusional people around. They inhabit a parallel universe and just can’t seem to be put in touch with reality. Hopefully, one day they will wake up to the truth.
James Lincoln says
tim gallagher says,
“There are some truly delusional people around. They inhabit a parallel universe and just can’t seem to be put in touch with reality. Hopefully, one day they will wake up to the truth.”
Very true, tim.
Most of them in the West are completely unreachable. They often live an entire lifetime in a relatively “safe” country – in a permanent delusional state.
They run into problems, however, when they get the “swell idea” about visiting an islamic Third World country – because, to them, people are “the same all over…”
tim gallagher says
Yes, James, I guess you are referring to those naïve people that have been reported on here at Jihad Watch from time to time, who have gone off to wander around in Muslim countries because they have drunk the Kool Aid and thus believe that people everywhere are basically nice and peaceful (as you say, people are “the same all over’) and end up getting murdered. But I also think, at home in our own countries, people should notice the attempted and successful Muslim terrorist attacks and rape gangs and other problems with Muslims, and study up a bit and realise that there are fundamental problems with islam and that it is basically hate-filled and violent. I know I began to notice that there was a problem with Muslims, which wasn’t there at all in, say, Buddhists and Christians in Australia, and I began to read up a bit to find out why there was this problem. People who write books full of BS about how pleasant and worthwhile Islam is (like the man in this report) really have no excuse for being so dense and, although probably most people will ignore their BS, they are a danger as they may succeed in misleading some people.
ntesdorf says
The Wall Street Journal is not even a reliable source of information about Banking and Finance, let alone anything believable about the History and Reality of Islam.
gravenimage says
Wall Street Journal praises book about Islam’s glorious past, whitewashes its brutality and inhumanity
In this enthusiastic, adulatory review of Justin Marozzi’s book Islamic Empires, Tunku Varadarajan, executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and thus someone who should know better…
………………………….
The Wall Street Journal generally used to know better, as well. Most Indians used to know better than to whitewash Islam, too.
The irony is that Varadarajan has himself been accused of being an “Islamophobe” in the past, having penned an article for Forbes titled “Going Muslim” (playing on the term “Going Postal”) in the wake of the Ft. Hood Shooting–even though this description is quite apt.
rochelle2420 says
I ended my subscription to WSJ just in time! Hoover Institution? isn’t VDH affiliated with it? oh no!
will have to catch Strassel elsewhere.
jca reid says
Talk about a “Revisionist” view of history! something like 125MILLION taken into slavery. They had to take that many as males were castrated & something like 80% did not survive the process. In 19th Century Africa, the only real force that stopped it was the expansion of the British Empire that vehemently opposed slavery from the 1830’s onwards. There are the documented writings of the British Missionaries, David Livingstone et al, re. the Muslim slavery of the Africans. Mohammed himself called them “Raisinheads”. Imagine the furore if a white person had used that term! Saudi Arabia only gave up, (if it actually has), slavery in 1965 at the behest of the UN. Mauritania in the 1980’s! however, it’s making a comeback there with the Sex Slave Markets doing a ‘roaring trade’. you can see films of it on ‘youtube’, where an American documentary Crew actually participated & bought a woman. They released her having bought her. These Apologetic pr*cks are complete idiots! More important to massage their egos than state well known & common facts.
On the BBC TV (19/Feb/2020), there was a documentary about the Holocaust Denial movement. Supposedly intelligent people saying it never happened, even though they had the films & eye witness testimony of the survivors & witnesses.
E T says
Social engineering is now part of our daily lives. I rarely watch television, the other day watching a home show, I noticed all the commercials had a black and a white spouse. Maple Leaf foods spew they are the first Canadian Company to be carbon something. These commercials have nothing to do with Global Migration or climate horse pucky, so next we have a push by the so called learned scholars telling us just how wonderful Islam is.
This deplorable, who don’t got no couth, ain’t never gonna bow to Allah.
el Cid 2 says
It boggles the mind. After 9/11, after the Fort Hood massacre, after the Boston Marathon bombing, and more, – there are STILL people who refuse to see or hear the truth.
Is it too painful to face reality?
As someone has said – you may not be interested in Islam – but Islam is interested in you (and it’s interest is not benevolent).
E T says
Muslim Brotherhood hoods love their revered, scholar of Islam, Sayyid Qutb and they listened to him and still quote their most learned man. So now would be a good time, before the world is totally lost to the barbarians to read Qutb.
“The chasm between Islam and Jahiliyyah is great, and a bridge is not to be built across it so that the people of the two sides may mix with each other, but only so that the people of Jahiliyyah may come over to Islam.”
No political system or material power should put hindrances in the way of preaching Islam. it should leave every individual free to accept or reject it, and if someone wants to accept it, it should not prevent him or fight against him. if someone does this, then it is the duty of Islam to fight him until either he is killed or until he declares his submission.”
Qur’an 291
Fight and kill the unbelievers until “Religion is Allah’s
i.e. Islam rules all societies.
5:33
Crucify or amputate the hands and feet of those who make war against Allah and Mohammed.
8:12
Allah will terrorize unbelievers; Muslims should behead them.
8:39
Fight unbelievers until Islam reigns supreme.
8:60
Make war against the enemies of Allah.
47:
Behead and slaughter the unbelievers, take others captive.
3:110-112
Muslims are the best of people, Jews have earned Allah’s anger.
3:181
Jews are bound for Hell.
Do you feel the love yet?