The Stream

Today in history, a battle that radical Muslims venerate took place between Muslims and Christians in Spain (known back then as al-Andalus).

In 1085, Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile captured the Muslim city of Toledo, launching the Reconquista. Great was the lamentation among Muslims and the rejoicing among Christians. The Muslim emirs of al-Andalus — notorious for their disunity and dissipated lifestyles — had to act fast, for “the arrogance of the Christian dogs” had “waxed so great.”

So the emirs called on their fanatical coreligionists in North Africa, the Almorivades, a sect devoted to waging jihad and enforcing sharia. Its elderly leader was Yusuf bin Tashfin, “a wise and shrewd man,” who had “passed the greater part of his life in his native deserts; exposed to hunger and privation, he had no taste for the life of pleasure.”

Dressed in black with a veil cloaking all but the zeal in his eyes, the 76-year-old sheikh accepted the invitation and entered al-Andalus. The Moorish emirs quickly “acknowledged his sway, hoping that he would stop the victorious course of the infidel, and thus open, for the prosecution of jihad, those gates which they had hitherto kept criminally locked,” thereby “propping up the tottering edifice of Islam, and humbling the pride of the insolent Christian.”

Eradicating Two Enemies at Once

By October 1086, a vast coalition of thousands of Almorivades and Andalusians under Yusuf’s command found themselves facing King Alfonso and his knights at Sagrajas, near Badajoz. While exact numbers are unclear, the Muslims outnumbered the Christians by roughly three to one. According to a Muslim chronicler,

When the two armies were in the presence of each other, Yusuf wrote to Alfonso offering him one of the three [conditions] prescribed by the law; namely, Islam, tribute, or death.

On October 23, 1086, the Christians finally charged the front lines of the Muslim army, where Yusuf had placed the Andalusian emirs, while he and his African warriors held the rear. The battle soon “became fiercer than ever, and the furnaces of war burned with additional violence; death exercised its fury.” As expected, before long the Moorish line began to crumble and retreat before the Christians, who “repeated their attacks with increasing fury.”

Yusuf’s unperturbed reaction belied the contempt he held for his “moderate” Muslim allies: “Let the slaughter continue a little while longer,” he told a concerned general. “They no less than the Christians are our enemies.” Moreover, once the Christians had tired themselves out, added the shrewd sheikh, “we shall vanquish them without great difficulty.”

By then, Alfonso and his knights had penetrated to the rear of the Muslim encampment, but Yusuf was nowhere to be found. He had divided his forces into three: one (finally) to aid the nearly routed Andalusians, and one to engage Alfonso; the last, led personally by the wily emir, had circumvented the field of battle. “Advancing with drums rolling and banners flying,” they went straight to and put the Christian rear camp to fire and sword.

The Drums of Doom

Upon realizing he had been outflanked, Alfonso, rather than continuing to rout his foes, ordered an about-face back to his own camp. This was a mistake. The Christian knights crashed into their own fleeing men, even as “the Moslems began to thrust their swords into their backs and their spears into their flanks.”

Always in the background was “this weird drum beating, which …dumbfounded the Christians.” It was, in fact, a tactic of the Almorivades, whose units rhythmically advanced to the beat of drums. As one historian explains:

The thundering roll of the Almoravide drums, now heard for the first time on Spanish soil, shook the earth and resounded the mountains. And Yusuf, galloping along the serried ranks of the Moors, nerved them to bear the fearful sufferings inseparable from holy war, promising Paradise to the dying and the richest booty to those who survived the day.

Soon, even the most effete of Moorish kings had returned to the fray. Now “the clash between the two kings was terrific,” writes a Latin chronicler:

the earth quaked under the hoofs of their horses; the sun was obscured by the clouds of dust rising under the feet of the warriors; the steeds swam through torrents of blood. Both parties, in short, fought with equal animosity and courage.

Muslim accounts concur:

the stormy din of drums, the clash of clarion and trumpet, filled the air; the earth quaked [under the weight of the warriors], and the neighboring mountains echoed the thousand discordant sounds.

At just the right moment, Yusuf unleashed his elite black guard — 4,000 bellowing Africans, armed with light blades, spears, and hippo-hide covered shields — toward Alfonso and the bulk of his most stalwart knights holding their ground. He ordered them “to dismount and join the fight, which they did with awful execution, hamstringing the horses, spearing their riders when on the ground, and throwing confusion into the enemy’s ranks,” to quote from an Arab source:

In the middle of the conflict Alfonso attacked, sword in hand, a black slave who had spent all his javelins, and aimed at his head; but the black avoided the blow, and, creeping under Alfonso’s horse, seized the animal by the bridle; then, taking out a khanjar [J-shaped dagger] which he wore at his girdle, he wounded the Christian king in the thigh, the instrument piercing both armour and flesh, and pinning Alfonso to his horse’s saddle. The rout then became general, the gales of victory blew, and Allah sent down his spirit to the Moslems, rendering the true religion triumphant.

Exhausted, bloodied, and now impaled, Alfonso and his few remaining men — just 500, almost all seriously wounded — retreated, even as the relentless Muslims gave chase deep into the night and slaughtered some more. In the words of the historian al-Maqqari, Alfonso “fled from the field of battle like the timid hare before chasing dogs, and reached Toledo, beaten, dejected in spirits, and wounded.”

Historically Grotesque

To mark the Islamic bona fides of this triumph, a grisly scene soon unfolded on the field of battle. In keeping with the modus operandi of more than four centuries of Muslim heroes and caliphs, stretching back to Muhammad’s treatment of the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza in AD 627, “Yusuf caused the heads of all the Christian slain [to the number of 2,400] to be cut off and gathered together in massive piles.”

And from the tops of those gruesome minarets the muezzins called to morning prayers the victorious soldiers, now worked into a frenzy by the sight of this bestial treading underfoot of human remains, ‘In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful.’

The emir later had the by-then-rotten heads hauled off in carts to the kingdoms of al-Andalus as material proof of victory — and a reminder of the fate of all who resist Islam.

Yusuf bin Tashfin is still revered among Muslims, particularly those of the jihadist bent, for his pious exploits at this battle. Indeed, with the exception of perhaps the battle of Yarmuk, few if any other jihads of Islamic history are as extolled in Muslim historiography as Sagrajas, though it is known by a different name in Arabic: the battle of al-Zallaqa, meaning “slimy” — an apparent reference to the slippery conditions caused by the copious amount of blood shed on the battlefield, as echoed by a chronicler:

For many years after the field of battle was so covered with carcasses of the slain, that it was impossible to walk through it without treading on the withering bones of some infidel.

In the end, “this memorable battle and defeat of the Christian forces … inspired new life into the body of [Andalusian Islam],” and set the stage for the next 150 years, which saw the fiercest fighting between Christian and Muslim forces in Spain. But that is another story.

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 and are documented in his book, Sword and Scimitar.

The Stream

Another Columbus Day — or as it is increasingly known, “Indigenous Peoples Day” — has come and gone, with more and more institutions ignoring it or worse, repeating the hackneyed allegation that the Italian explorer committed a “genocide” against the natives.

One need look no further than to the current star of the “left,” Kamala Harris, for all the usual woke grandstanding and bromides against the Italian explorer. Not only is she on record affirming that she wants to officially cancel Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous People Day, but in 2021, as vice president, she condemned America’s “shameful past” in the context of Columbus:

Since 1934, every October, the United States has recognized the voyage of the European explorers who first landed on the shores of the Americas. But that is not the whole story. That has never been the whole story. Those explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for Tribal nations — perpetrating violence, stealing land and spreading disease. We must not shy away from this shameful past, and we must shed light on it and do everything we can to address the impact of the past on Native communities today.

Earlier this week, a Trump campaign spokesperson slammed Harris for this position:

Kamala Harris is your stereotypical leftist. Not only does she want to raise taxes and defund the police — she also wants to cancel American traditions like Columbus Day. President Trump will make sure Christopher Columbus’ great legacy is honored and protect this holiday from radical leftists who want to erase our nation’s history like Kamala Harris.

Columbus’s “great legacy,” along with words like “radical” and “erasing history,” are a reminder of something else — something almost always forgotten in the debate about the explorer: why he sailed west in the first place. The answer isn’t “for spices,” as we were taught in school, but to circumnavigate and fight “radical” Muslims, in what is now an “erased history.”

A Lifetime of Jihad

When he was born, the then-more than 800-year-old war against Islam — or rather, defense against jihad — was at an all-time high. In 1453, when Columbus was two years old, the Turks finally sacked Constantinople, an atrocity-laden event that rocked Christendom to its core.

Over the following years, Muslims continued making inroads deep into the Balkans, leaving much death and destruction in their wake, with millions of Slavs enslaved. (Yes, the two words — Slavs and slaves — are etymologically connected for this very reason.)

In 1480, when he was 29, the Turks even managed to invade Columbus’s native Italy. In the city of Otranto, they ritually beheaded 800 Italians — and sawed the local archbishop in half — for refusing to recant Christianity and embrace Islam.

It was in this context that Spain’s monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella — themselves avowed Crusaders, especially the queen, who concluded the centuries-long Reconquista of Spain by liberating Granada from Islam in 1492 — took Columbus into their service.

They funded his ambitious voyage in an effort to launch, in the words of historian Louis Bertrand, “a final and definite Crusade against Islam by way of the Indies” (which culminated in the incidental founding of the New World).

The True Story

Many Europeans were convinced that if only they could reach the peoples east of Islam — who, if not Christian, were at least “not as yet infected by the Muhammadan plague,” to quote Pope Nicholas V (d.1455) — together they could crush Islam between them. The plan was centuries old and connected to the legend of Prester John, a supposedly great Christian monarch reigning in the East who would one day march westward and avenge Christendom by destroying Islam.

All this comes out in Columbus’s own letters: in one he refers to Ferdinand and Isabella as “enemies of the wretched sect of Muhammad” who are “resolve[d] to send me to the regions of the Indies, to see [how the people thereof can help in the war effort].” In another written to the monarchs after he reached the New World, Columbus offers to raise an army “for the war and conquest of Jerusalem.” (That his voyages centered on liberating Jerusalem from Islam is further evident in the title of one 2011 book, Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem.)

Nor were Spain and Columbus the first to implement this strategy. Once Portugal was cleared of Islam in 1249, its military orders launched into Muslim Africa. “The great and overriding motivation behind [Prince] Henry the Navigator’s [b. 1394] explosive energy and expansive intellect,” writes historian George Grant, “was the simple desire to take the cross — to carry the crusading sword over to Africa and thus to open a new chapter in Christendom’s holy war against Islam.” He launched all those discovery voyages because “he sought to know if there were in those parts any Christian princes” who “would aid him against the enemies of the faith,” wrote a contemporary.

Actually Not Racists

Does all this make Columbus, and by extension Ferdinand and Isabella — not to mention the whole of Christendom — “Islamophobes,” as those few modern critics who bother mentioning the true motivation of Columbus’s voyage allege? For example, in an LA Timesop-ed, Yale historian Alan Mikhail wrote:

A primary force behind Columbus’ Atlantic crossings was a fear and hatred of Islam…. This shaped how white Europeans engaged with the “New World” and its native peoples for centuries, and how today’s Americans understand the world.… Columbus was born into Europe’s anti-Islamic mind-set in 1451…

While much of this is true, Mikhail does not bother explaining why there was such a “fear and hatred of Islam,” or why Europe had an “anti-Islamic mind-set” in the first place. Rather, “white Europeans” were just unenlightened bigots (“racists” in contemporary, if infinitely overdone, parlance).

But therein lay the irony: Yes, Columbus and Europeans were “Islamophobes” — but not in the way that word is used today. While the Greek word phobos has always meant “fear,” its usage today implies “irrational fear.”

However, considering that for nearly a thousand years before Columbus, Islam had repeatedly attacked Christendom to the point of swallowing up three-quarters of its original territory, including for centuries Spain; that Islam’s latest iteration, in the guise of the Ottoman Turks, was during Columbus’s era devastating the Balkans and Mediterranean, slaughtering and enslaving any European who dared travel east through their domains; and that, even centuries after Columbus, Islam was still terrorizing the West — marching onto Vienna with 200,000 jihadists in 1683 and provoking America into its first war as a nation — the very suggestion that Western fears of Islam were, or are, “irrational” is itself the height of irrationalism.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.