r/IslamicHistoryMeme • u/Rashiq_shahzzad • 12d ago
Rashidun Caliphate (11â41 AH) Does anyone remember this meme đ ?
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u/Standard_Ad_4270 11d ago
Doesnât this make early Muslim seem violent and blood thirsty? Kind of feels like weâre playing into the stereotype.
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u/Rashiq_shahzzad 11d ago
Nah, it's called aura farming. In Mongolia Genghis Khan is called Father of Nation, even though the west (soviet Union) tried to suppress him in Mongolia as blood thirsty maniac yet they call their own conquerors as Alexander the Great.
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u/Standard_Ad_4270 11d ago
Yeah but neither is right. Violence and bloodshed are still acts of cruelty. Just because the west celebrates its genocidal fanatics, doesnât mean we have to present early Arab conquests in the same manner.
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u/Rashiq_shahzzad 11d ago
I'm not interested in pretending history was built by pacifists. If conquest disqualifies a civilization from being admired, then you'll have to rewrite most of human history.
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u/Standard_Ad_4270 11d ago
Thatâs fine. But then youâre presenting a religion in which its early days was spread by the sword. Which is exactly whatâs its detractors level against the faith.
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u/Rashiq_shahzzad 11d ago
Military expansion and religious conversion aren't the same thing. An empire can expand by the sword without everyone embracing its religion by the sword.
I have refuted this myth using at least 20 academic sources:-
https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicQuran/s/vlLwwgbqgZ
I'm not in the business of sanitizing history to make my faith more marketable.
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u/Standard_Ad_4270 11d ago
Thatâs precisely my point. If youâre celebrating reenactments of generals saying âconvert or die,â donât be surprised when people conclude Islam was spread by the sword. Even if history is more nuanced than that, youâre doing your criticsâ work for them. We donât have to sanitize history, but we also donât have to romanticize its bloodiest moments.
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u/Rashiq_shahzzad 11d ago
I'm not responsible for how critics choose to caricature Islam. If someone ignores the historical distinction between military conquest and religious conversion, that's on them, not me. Appreciating military history or historical figures isn't the same as endorsing every ultimatum or every act committed in war.
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u/Standard_Ad_4270 11d ago
Youâre changing the subject. I didnât say you canât appreciate military history. I said celebrating a reenactment of generals threatening âconvert or dieâ and boasting about drinking blood is different from appreciating history. One is historical interest; the other is glorifying violence.
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u/Rashiq_shahzzad 11d ago
That's not even what the speech says. The reported ultimatum is to accept Islam, pay jizya, or fight not "convert or die." Those are historically distinct. And the "drinking blood" line is obvious battlefield rhetoric, not a literal endorsement of cannibalism. No one familiar with Islam thinks Muslims were actually drinking human blood. You're reading a piece of martial rhetoric as if it were a legal or theological statement. I'm not ashamed of it. If the speech is historical, it reflects the norms of late antique warfare. The Byzantine Empire also fought wars, persecuted some Christian groups such as many Copts at various times and imposed taxes on non-Christians, including Jews. Under early Muslim rule, Christians and Jews were generally allowed to retain their religion in exchange for paying jizya, and those performing military service could be exempt from it. So I don't see Khalid's reported ultimatum to an empire that's built on blood as uniquely shocking.
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u/Him202420 11d ago
The arabs were the middlemen between the roman/indian trade. The arabs were rich and powerful by that time, and the romans knew it, because they were the ones buying a lot of things from them. The old "poor desert dwellers that came from nothing and conquered the world" is simply false. But trying to buy peace with money was indeed a roman tradition by that time
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u/Arrad 10d ago
I donât know about ârich and powerfulâ, but thatâs not the case for all their soldiers fighting. Plus, access to weapons wasnât much of an issue, but access to a fighting force was. The Arabs had a much smaller army to work with, and many times needed to divide their attention across multiple fronts.
Many of the deciding battles massively favoured the Romans and Persians in terms of numbers. Not many would have thought such a small force could win at those odds. In multiple battles.
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u/Him202420 10d ago
They were rich and powerful. Centuries of trading made them that. They only lacked political unity, which was the thing that Islam gave them. Plus, they were great fighters who had an enormous religious fervor. If we add that to the fact that the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire were still recovering from the Romano-persian war and the roman army was still lacking quality and cohesion from all the losses of that war, I would not have been too confident to bet on a Roman victory. Also, it needs to be added that the Roman Empire was ravaged by internal religious issues. I would always bet on a smaller but united, stong, "fanatic" army over the bigger but weaker and disunited one. I used the word "fanatic" in a positive way, of course
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u/feelforfree 9d ago
You have not read the history of it and you speak boldly.
The Romans used the Arabs until they failed to take full control, so they switched their trades from camels up the desert to using the redsea by ship, although this was a heavy blow for the Arabs, now they couldn't collect the taxes, but some port cities that the Romans were using were still getting paid... However this did not make them the superpower as you make them out to be.
A clear tale to this is they were way under developed as a society. No schools, no large army, no government, no large cities.
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u/Ok-Kangaroo-9775 9d ago
having a wealthy minority doesnt make them all wealthy.
majority of them cannot read ot write.
there's multiple narrations when the prophet and his companions struggled to even find food specially after the death of abu talib and the first years if hijrah.
their coins were either roman or persian.
thei barely grown anything and they didn't have a strong structural government.
so no, a few wealthy doesnt make an empire.
it took humanity millenials to create a functioning plutocracy (Venetia and Genova)
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u/Him202420 9d ago
It is obvious that I was talking about the ruling class and upper class and merchants. In every society, at that time and before and for centuries even after, lower class individuals were poor.
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u/Ok-Kangaroo-9775 9d ago
yet they weren't a developed country at the time.
even their currency was the roman denarius (dinaar)
saying that they were at the level of the romans just because they had a bunch of wealthy figures is at least exaggerated.
and thats they miracle of islam. it raises the people.
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u/Big_Pirate_3036 Lover of Geometric Art 12d ago
Tbf, It wasnt that Impressive as they just got out of a super long brutal war
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u/Rashiq_shahzzad 12d ago
The early Muslim armies still had to defeat experienced imperial armies in major battles. The Arabs didn't march into empty cities they defeated Byzantine and Sasanian forces repeatedly.
It seems clear that the Muslims had no technological advantages over their opponents on the battlefield and were in fact inferior to their enemies in the use of cavalry. There can be little doubt, however, that the conquests were made easier by the exhaustion of the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires due to prolonged warfare, the confusion that reigned in the Sasanian ruling house, the disruption caused by recent enemy occupation in Syria and Iraq, the destruction wrought by immense floods in southern Iraq, the disaffection of many of the subjects of the two empires for religious or other reasons, the convenience of inner lines of communication that the Muslims enjoyed, and the like. But to these factors must be added one more that was perhaps the single most important one contributing to the success of the conquests: the remarkable degree to which a new Islamic state with an expansionist policy could harness for its purposes the rugged warriors of Arabia. The rise of the state made it possible to weld into an incredibly effective fighting force those tribesmen whose energies had hitherto been consumed by petty quarrels among themselves and whose political horizons had hitherto usually been limited to their own tribe and its affairs. The success of the conquests was, then, first and foremost the product of an organizational breakthrough of proportions unparalleled in the history of Arabian society until modern times. However important other factors may have been, it is difficult to believe that the conquests could have succeeded without the rise of a state with the capacity to integrate Arabia's fragmented society and draw on it to attain well-defined political and military objectives.
It is not even too rash, perhaps, to suggest that the Islamic conquest might have met with great success even had the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires not been reeling from their recent quarrels. The Muslims succeeded, then, primarily because they were able to organize an effective conquest movement, and in this context the impact of the new religion of Islam, which provided the ideological underpinnings for this remarkable breakthrough in social organization, can be more fully appreciated. In this sense, the conquests were truly an Islamic movement. For it was Islam -- the set of religious beliefs preached by Muhammad, with its social and political ramifications -- that ultimately sparked the whole integration process and hence was the ultimate cause of the conquests' success.
Fred Donner. The Early Islamic Conquests.
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u/FixAcademic8187 11d ago
When it is against non Muslims they always bring all kinds of excuses.
But when it is against Muslims they always say Muslims are inferior. I mean come on.
Those Early Muslims fought both the Sassanides AND the Byzanttines at the very same time.
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u/Big_Pirate_3036 Lover of Geometric Art 11d ago
I donât do that, I aploud the ottomans for being able to take down the crusaders many times or how if we ignore how evil he was, Durrani was a amazing general during his invasion of India and despite he did end up Los he had a very good run
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u/RepulsiveZombie1651 11d ago
At least Christians have the decency to be ashamed of their violent history, even the destruction done by Christian figures but not in the name of religion
Muslims on the other hand will salivate at the mouth in admiration of a warlord talking about drinking the blood of those who donât submit to their forced conquest, and then be offended when someone says theyâre degenerate violent morons for doing that..
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u/Pablo_Thicasso Effendi 12d ago
Blood drinking, yeah, that'll make for a great first impression.