Global Intifada

        Robert Spencer has recently posted an article on Jihad Watch entitled “The Nakba, May 29, 1453” with a witty little picture that says “Free Constantinople: 500 Years of Occupation is Enough.” His underlying argument is that the Arab use of the term “Nakba” [Translation: Catastrophe] to describe the founding of Israel should be applied to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and if the Palestinians claim a right of return to Israel, then theoretically speaking, the Christian inhabitants of Constantinople and Anatolia should demand and receive a right of return.

Spencer describes the conquest of Constantinople essentially as one where everyone (women, children, and old people included) were killed or taken as slaves, religious centers were converted into mosques, religious icons were destroyed, and the Hagia Sophia, one of the greatest emblems of the splendor of Christianity, was sacrilegiously turned into a mosque.

Spencer brings up the conquest in order to justify his theory that there is an inherent imperialist impulse within Islam, insinuating of course, that

Muslims today share such an imperialistic impulse and are secretly a fifth column who are biding their time until the moment presents itself to take control of the “West” and the world as a whole. This also creates the implicit argument that it is the responsibility of the “West”, which knows the “truth” of Islam’s imperial ventures because they’ve experienced it in the past, to stop them. Such a theory would be great for a comic book story line, but is deplorable coming from someone who portrays himself as a serious academic and “scholar.”

This post is divided into several parts. The first part will critically analyze the conquest of Constantinople from a variety of sources (all of them non-Muslim in order to eliminate the possibility of arguing that the sources are “biased” Muslims attempting to white-wash the negative aspects of their history) in order to show that the true cause of the demise of Constantinople was probably not the Ottoman Empire, but the Latin “West.” The second part will critically analyze why Palestinians have a right to return and why the Byzantines do not. The third part will discuss the general theory of Islamic imperialism by giving historic and contemporary examples of the spread of Islam. The fourth part will discuss how Spencer’s arguments reveal his underlying Islamophobia.

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