Have Muslims ever been conquerors or imperialists?

Question

Can anyone pull from accurate world history whether Muslims ever acted as conquerors or imperialists?

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"the suicide bombers, the Ayatollahs, ... the 9-11 terrorists to name a few." - connie777lee

Exactly how are those you listed "Imperialists"?

Imperialism: The policy of extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations.

Conqueror: To gain or secure control of, defeat, and/or subdue by force, especially by force of arms.

Answer 1

Most certainly... consider some of the following:

Ottoman Empire:
"In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottoman Empire was among the world's most powerful political entities... On several occasions, the Ottoman army invaded central Europe, laying siege to Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683 in an attempt to conquer the Habsburg domain, and was finally repulsed only by great coalitions of European powers at sea and on land...

Ottomans: Adoption of Islam:
Before adopting Islam—a process that was greatly facilitated by the Abbasid victory at the 751 CE Battle of Talas, which ensured Abbasid influence in Central Asia—the Turkic peoples practised a variety of shamanism. After this battle, many of the various Turkic tribes—including the Oghuz Turks, who were the ancestors of both the Seljuks and the Ottomans—gradually converted to Islam, and brought the religion with them to Anatolia beginning in the 11th century CE...

Ottomans: Diversity
...One of the successes of the Ottoman Empire was the unity that it brought about among its highly varied population. While the main reason was the military might and heavyhandedness in newly invaded territories, one other indirect source of this unity was allowed for by the laws of Islam, which stated that Muslims, Christians, and Jews—who constituted the vast majority of the Ottoman population—were all related in that they were "People of the Book" (Arabic: اهل الكتاب; ahl al-Kitâb).

Ottomans: Slavery
Ottomans were coming from a nomadic nation, in which slavery was very distant to the social structure. Also, from the Islamic perspective, the Kuran specifically states "everyone is same", although the practice showed differences based on cultures, which Islam and Slavery covers these perspectives, specifically Ottoman application on their domain was not approved. However, the ottomans policies were based on millet perspective which each millet had the right to govern their own domain. Trafficking in slaves is expressly forbidden by the Ottoman application of sharia, or Islamic law. For example, by the terms of the sharia, any slaves who were taken could not be kept in the status of slaves if they converted to Islam. It was, in fact, considered an insult to term an Ottoman man as a slave-master, and there were incidents in which Ottomans responded unsympathetically to any who even mentioned the idea of slavery to them.
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Other views on "Muslim Imperialism":

"No single definition prevails, but here is a good one: Jihadism engages in or supports the use of force to expand the rule of Islamic law. In other words, it is violent Islamic imperialism. It stands, as one scholar put it 90 years ago, for "the extension by force of arms of the authority of the Muslim state."
-Jonathan Rauch (www.reason.com)


Excerpts from Islamic Imperialism: A History, by Efraim Karsh:

"The birth of Islam," writes Karsh, "was inextricably linked with the creation of a world empire, and its universalism was inherently imperialist." Karsh cites, for example, the Prophet's farewell address to his followers: "I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but Allah.' " Muhammad, Karsh writes, spent his last decade fighting to unify Arabia under his reign; within a decade of his death, Islamic conquest had already built an Arab-Muslim empire, "one of the most remarkable examples of empire-building in world history."

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Muslim Invasion of India (18th & 19th Century):

"The Muslim chieftains were inviting other Islamic imperialists from across the border to come and rescue the earlier Islamic imperialists out of the morass...

...On the eve of the Islamic invasion, India was witnessing a number of Hindu princes fighting among themselves for supremacy;

The Islamic invaders took advantage of this situation, defeated the Hindu princes one by one, and established their own empires one after another;

Every Islamic empire was worn out by renewed Hindu resistance, and veered on the verge of collapse;

A new Islamic invader intervened every time, and preserved the continuity of Islamic imperialism till British imperialism appeared on the scene;

Sometimes a weakened Islamic empire invited some Hindu power to come to its help in its contest with a new Islamic invader. "

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"Alongside the story of Empire, which rises up repeatedly in history, there is also a story of resistance to Empire. The story of resistance emerges from the vision of economic justice known as the Jubilee. The Jubilee is central to the Torah, the Prophets, and the ministry of both Jesus and Paul."
-The Prophets Versus Empire by Richard Lang


Empires rise and fall. The world has changed for better and for worse as a result of past empires. As people become more educated (and hopefully enlightened), the concept of our world run by a single government raises huge red flags. Let's learn from our past and seek a new direction.

Answer 2

The Moors, Ottomans, Saddam's Iraq, the suicide bombers, the Ayatollahs, the Taliban, the 9-11 terrorists to name a few. I don't understand why you people think the Muslims aren't imperialists. Look around.

Answer 3

When Islam began spreading from the sands of Saudi Arabia in the mid 7th century to SW Asia, Northern Africa,Asia Minor. the Balkans, Sicily and Spain it was done at the point of the sword and thousandseither enslaved or killed they weren't doing it like conquers subduing a country after some great war but to enforce a way of life that was alien to the people and countries
being overrun.
Similar to when half the map of the world was red for British imperialism instead of green for Islam.

Answer 4

I am certainly no expert, but they had an expansionist policy in the middle ages. They, ( known as the Moors) for example, occupied Spain for several hundred years. Then there was the Turkish Ottoman empire.

I cannot give you chapter and verse, but the crusades (King Richard) were all about checking Muslim expansion.

You have to remember it was a very different world then and cannot be compared to today.

Answer 5

If I remember my history , the Muslims ruled Spain for a few hundred years? So this makes them conquerors. The most beautiful buildings of Spain were build by the Moros. as a matter of fact when I was a little girl if I happen to be near where my mom and aunts and grandmas were talking one of them would silence the talk by saying, beware ,there is a moor in court!.,

Answer 6

Absolutely on both counts - Throughout history all of the major civilizations have had their moment in the sun and all have succumbed to their nadir by indulging in greed and trying to take over the world. But just as i wouldn't call the British empire a Christian Empire i wouldn't call the Ottoman empire especially in its waning stages a an Islamic empire - both had ultimately lost their own identity if their so called empires were based on their respective religions from the get go.

Answer 7

Um yes, Mohommed himself led a conquest of all of the Middle East and North Africa. His decendents took Spain and pushed into southern France as well as parts of Southeast Europe and India.

To their credit they were fairly enlightened conquerers (comparitively speaking of course), kind of like Alexander the Great. They didn't kill everyone but instead integrated them into their empire as more or less equals. They even allowed their subjects to practice their own religions, although Muslims got big tax breaks so most people converted. But up until the Crusades there were large populations of Christians and Jews living peacefully within the Muslim empire. When the Crusaders reconquered the land they couldn't tell the Christians, Jews and Muslims apart so one European king gave the order quote "Kill them all and let God sort them out."

Answer 8

The Ottomans conquered parts of Eastern Europe all the time. They went back and forth across borders throughout the middle ages. Also the Egyptians, while not highly Muslim then, Egypt in now. The Persian empire influenced the European empire and were very prosperous.

Answer 9

Good question. The Crusades (which are blamed as being the initial reason for Muslim hatred toward the West) lasted about 200 years. This was in the middle of more than 1000 years of Muslim subjugation of Asia Europe and Africa

Answer 10

Absolutely!
Americas first foreign war in 1801 was against the Moslems of the Barbary coast,
In the Marine Corp hymn the line, "to the shores of Tripoli" refers to the 300 Marines that kicked butt. Something the Europeans were afraid to do even though their ships had been sunk, goods stolen, women raped and sold as sex slaves, and male survivors held for ransom. We, the young United States, were not going to put up with that and had to do it on our own..
Sound familiar..

This is not taught in schools now as it is not a politically correct subject.

Answer 11

Why do you think Arabic Muslims live in an area that extends from Morocco to Pakistan?

Islam was spread through conquest, and conversion was at swordpoint.