The Stream

On October 21, 1094, a tiny force of Christian knights destroyed a massive Muslim horde in Spain, where the jihad and the Reconquista had been raging for years. For Christians, the leader of these knights had validated the biblical verse that “one man will chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight” (Deuteronomy 32:30).

Background: Around 1085, the Almoravids, a North African group committed to jihadist teaching that was led by the Emir Yusuf bin Tashfin, began pouring into Spain to aid their Islamic counterparts, the Moors, who had suffered several significant defeats by the Christians in recent years.

In 1086, the Muslims and Christians clashed at Sagrajas. The Christians were annihilated; their king barely managed to escape with a dagger embedded in his thigh. Afterward, in a typical gesture of Islamic supremacy, Yusuf had some 2,400 Christians decapitated and then assembled their heads into a pyramid, atop which the muezzin called the faithful to prayers.

Retaking Valencia

Following the disaster at Sagrajas, one by one, Moorish kingdoms that had been liberated from Islam during the Reconquista — even a few Christian strongholds — fell back under Muslim control.

But when the Muslims overran Valencia in 1093, its lord, Roderick (or Rodrigo) Díaz of Vivar — better known to posterity as “the Cid” — returned and laid siege to the city for nearly nineteen months, finally reconquering it.

As a result, the pride and prestige of the glorious jihadist victor of Sagrajas, who had subsequently unified virtually all of Muslim Spain under his authority, was shaken to his core: “He has forcibly invaded my territory and he attributes all his success to Jesus Christ!” blurted Yusuf, who, on hearing of the fall of Valencia, “was powerfully moved to anger and bitterness.”

The emir was, accordingly, “determined to recover the city at all costs,” writes the contemporary Muslim, Ibn Bassam, before adding that “the news of the fall of Valencia filled every Moor in Spain with grief and humiliation.”

A showdown was inevitable: “Islam and the Occident were now each represented by an outstanding personality,” writes historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal: “Yusuf the Saharan and the Castilian Cid stood face-to-face in the struggle between the two civilizations.”

Epic Battle

The emir responded by sending the supreme Almoravid general of Spain — his nephew, Muhammad — “with an infinite number of barbarians and Moabites [Almoravids] and Ishmaelites [Moors] drawn from all over Hispania to besiege Valencia and to bring Roderick to him captive and in chains,” wrote one contemporary (using, as every Christian did back then, biblical names to refer to Christians’ enemies).

Reportedly consisting of some 50,000 fighters, the Almoravids dwarfed the Cid’s Valencian garrison of 4,000 men. By late 1094, “the infidel hordes” had arrived and “pitched their tents and encamped” at Cuarte, three miles from Valencia.

The final showdown between the Cid and his Muslim adversaries had come and is recorded in both song and chronicle. According to the Historia Roderici,

This Moabite army lay about Valencia for 10 days and as many nights, and remained inactive. Every day indeed they used to go around the city, shrieking and shouting with a motley clamor of voices and filling the air with their bellowing [references to the takbir, i.e., spasmodic cries of “Allahu Akbar”]. They often used to fire arrows… But Roderick … comforted and strengthened his men in a manly fashion, and constantly prayed devoutly to the Lord Jesus Christ that he would send divine aid to his people.

The sources emphasize the ominous beat of the African drums, the thundering roll of which seemed to rend the earth asunder. It filled the hearts of all — especially those unacquainted with its booming sounds, such as Roderick’s wife and daughters, who were holed up with him in Valencia — with dread and consternation.

October Surprise!

With every day that the Cid remained on the defense, the Muslims became more emboldened and encroached closer to his city’s walls. Before long they had surrounded Valencia’s gates in very tight formations — precisely what the Cid was waiting for.

And so, on October 21, 1094 , when “the enemy were as usual going around outside the city yelling and shouting and scrimmaging, confident in the belief that they would capture it,” Roderick Díaz, “trusting with his whole mind in God and his mercy, courageously made a sortie from the city,” whereupon “a major encounter ensued.”

Thus, at the height of Muslim confidence, heavily armored knights astride even heavier steeds of war burst out of one of the gates, taking the jihadists by complete surprise.

Before they could effectively retaliate, another Christian sortie burst out from another gate. Though unclear which, the Cid led one of these two forces which now crisscrossed each other in a medieval-style blitzkrieg, causing mass confusion and carnage among the densely packed Muslims. After a “multitude” of Almoravids “fell to the sword,” the panicked Africans “turned their backs in flight,” the Historia concludes, many of them falling and drowning in the Jucar river.

Epic Upset

The battle of Cuarte was a shattering blow to the hitherto undefeated Almoravids: though outnumbered 12 to one, the Spanish knights had defeated and driven off 50,000 jihadists, giving life to the ancient words of Moses as recorded in Deuteronomy. Christians all throughout Western Europe wildly celebrated.

Historian James Fitzhenry summarizes the Cid’s strategy:

The maneuver Rodrigo used that day has come to be known as “la tornada,” or, the tornado. Once the Christian knights had charged through the enemy lines in one direction, they turned and passed through again in a different direction. Whole units were disrupted, broken apart and irreversibly separated. The Africans were packed so tightly together, and their shouts and screams and the clash of steel so loud, that few commands could be heard over the din of battle. Besides, the attack was so swift that there was no tactic that could be successfully employed to neutralize it.

After the battle, and now “sated with slaughter,” the twelfth-century Poem of the Cid resumes the narrative: “

the Cid returned to his wife and daughters, his helmet gone, the hood of his coat of mail thrown back and the linen under-cap pushed over his brow. His sword was dripping with blood, which had run up the blade to the hilt and along his arm up to the elbow.

With the other arm he hurled a mutilated drum at their feet, crying, “Thus are Moors vanquished!” In terror and awe, they fell to the ground before him, vowing: “We are thy servants!”

Raymond Ibrahim is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum. Portions of this article were excerpted from his book, Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam.

Coptic Solidarity

A Coptic Christian man was recently murdered, hacked to pieces, and dumped into a canal in the Amiriya district of Cairo.

On September 29, Mina Musa, 21, left his family home in Minya for a new job in Cairo. He was responding to an advertisement on social media to assist an elderly person in Cairo, for a generous salary, along with broader networking opportunities in the field of physical therapy.

His family lost contact with him after he left Minya, only to receive a call from people—the ones behind the fake job advertisement—saying they had kidnapped and were holding Mina for 150,000 Egyptian pounds in ransom—a very sizable sum for poorer Egyptians. His family immediately contacted the authorities (Mina had taken this distant job precisely to help not exacerbate his impoverished family’s condition).

The authorities managed to track the young man down to a Cairo apartment, where his kidnappers were holding him. On breaking into the apartment, they found parts of Mina’s body—his torso with one arm, no head, legs, or other arm, which had already been hacked off and thrown into the nearby Ismaila Canal. Three men were arrested; they confessed to their crime. Last reported, divers were searching for Mina’s head in the canal.

At this point, there is no clear indication that the heinous crime was, strictly speaking, “religiously” motivated.

Yet, two points for consideration:

The very concept of jizya makes clear that the only way for “infidels” to exist under Islamic rule is for them to pay an extra annual “tax”—tribute to the Islamic state. For some rulers, the Copts were to be squeezed of every ounce of wealth they possessed. Thus, an eighth century caliph, Suleiman Abdul Malik, once urged the governor of Egypt to “milk the camel [Egypt’s Christians] until it gives no more milk, and until it milks blood.”

Although the jizya was abolished due to pressure from colonial powers in the nineteenth century, the idea is still very much alive. As Anjem Choudary, a Pakistani cleric and welfare recipient in England, once boasted:

We take the jizya, which is our haq [Arabic for “right”], anyway. The normal situation, by the way, is to take money from the kafir [infidel], isn’t it? So this is the normal situation. They give us the money — you work, give us the money, Allahu Akbar! We take the money.

In short, radicalized Muslims believe it is their “right” to shake down any infidel they come across—including through abducting and holding them for ransom, as in the case of Mina.

Second, not only do Muslim criminals hold Christians and other infidels in contempt—thereby relieving their “conscience” when engaged in such coldblooded slaughter—but they know that the broader society, including the authorities, if not sharing in the same hostility for infidels, will at the very least express a certain indifference, and possibly look the other way. This, for example, is precisely why Muslim men in Egypt regularly target Coptic Christian women: they know the authorities will not bother—certainly not to the level they would if a Muslim woman were preyed on—allowing wrongdoers a level of impunity.

So, what may have happened is this: from all the applicants, the criminals specifically chose Mina Musa because his name cries out "Coptic Christian." Not only had they been raised in a nation where preaching hate for Copts is common, thereby rationalizing and justifying the heinous crime, but they hoped that the authorities would not bother too much over Mina’s disappearance. In general, they may have been right, but in this case, the authorities did indeed behave professionally—which is not the general rule.

In short, prevailing, pervasive fundamentalist Islamic teachings/education that permeate Egyptian society likely played a role in this latest atrocity. At the very least, they create an environment where Christians and other non-Muslims are ideal targets for criminals.