The Most Successful Colonial Empire No One Wants to Talk About

We should acknowledge the uncomfortable truth: Islam does in fact have a colonial history, and in fact our current intellectual climate is structured to erase it. In contemporary discourse, “colonialism” is interpreted as a specifically Western phenomenon, rooted in European empire, race, and capitalism. And this is a convenient framing. When colonialism is seen as an exclusively Western ill, massive societies are absolved from moral critique. Islam in particular is almost always presented as the passive object of colonialism. But that myth falls apart as soon as Islamic history is subjected to the same standards routinely applied to European history. What becomes apparent is no aberration, but a shockingly successful system of imperial structure.

In fact, it is difficult to argue that Islamic society is not a colonial empire if we understand colonialism to be defined by conquest, hierarchy, and lasting cultural change justified by ideology. Islam did not spread primarily as a new personal religion across civilizations; it spread through governance. And governance was not a later development in Islam, bastardizing the “core” of the faith: from its inception, the religion was structured as law, state, and faith from the top down. Muhammad was not a religious leader who was later co-opted by political rulers, he was a political ruler. Governance and faith were intertwined at the root. What makes Islamic imperialism notable is not just violence, but duty.

All empires can construct justifications for their expansion after the fact, but often in classical Islam, it was described as a duty. Jihad was not just a spiritual metaphor, but a legal category. The idea of a lasting “peace” with a non-Muslim state was, for most of Islamic history, only something to be tolerated as an interlude between periods of expansion. This is crucial because it means expansion does not need to be justified in the immediate term. Historically, Islamic society alternated between periods of military expansion and periods of rest and consolidation. But the moral validity of expansion is never denied, and therefore it is always looming. Expansion can take a break without being disavowed.

The rapidity with which Islamic armies conquered the Eastern Christian world is astonishing, in retrospect. All of North Africa, which had been Christian for centuries, fell within a few generations, as did the intellectual center of Christianity, the Middle East. However, conquest is not the most significant result of Islamic empire: replacement, transformation, and disappearance are. Christian societies, along with their languages and cultures, largely vanished from most of the conquered region, though to varying degrees and over different time scales. If colonial societies are to be condemned by their fruits, then Islamic colonialism was a remarkable success. Populations were not just governed by Islamic rulers; they were assimilated. This did not take place through unceasing violence, but rather through legal inequality.

The conquered Christian and Jewish populations were brought into the system of dhimmitude, paying higher taxes (jizya), suffering legal disadvantages, and facing social limitations. Though official conversion to Islam was often frowned upon, the cumulative result of this colonial structure was that it was difficult for non-Muslim communities to thrive. Islamic colonialism against Christendom, then, is ultimately most remarkable for the degree to which it was successful. The indigenous religious populations were not just subdued and governed, they were over centuries nearly eliminated and replaced. Flare ups of violence against dhimmis in this system sparked periodic waves of conversion or exodus, and depending on the dynasty in power could reach extremes of brutality.

Slavery is perhaps the best example of a moral blind spot in our re-telling of history (Atlantic slavery in the Americas in terms of exposure in school curriculum, and in terms of righteous condemnations by contemporary Muslims.) Islamic societies also captured and sold African, White, and Asian slaves for centuries, under highly regulated conditions prescribed and justified by Islamic law. In fact, the first foreign relations disaster the United States confronted after its independence from Britain was the capture and enslavement of Americans on the high seas by Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian pirates, who justified their actions openly according to Qu’ranic law. In contemporary history classes and conversations, African-American students are not taught to blame the Arabic societies that enslaved and shipped their ancestors from the East. Though the record of atrocities may be shorter, it is no less real.

And when it comes to the Crusades, a perfectly valid complaint is that Christian violence against Muslims is disproportionately remembered, while hundreds of years of Muslim violence against Christians and others is not. This is an accurate assessment of the current climate. The Islamic world’s history of colonialism is not neglected because it is secret, but rather because it is inconvenient. We must judge all empires by an equal yardstick, or give up on the project of judgment.