Muslims are apparently taking over parts of the United Kingdom.

According to an August 22 report, “Mobs of armed Muslims, many waving Palestinian flags, took over swathes of Birmingham, England’s second city, on Monday, and pursued journalists from the areas under their control ‘for miles.’” One reporter on the ground, Fraser Knight, said he was “chased out of an area of east Birmingham by groups of Asian men”:

The security guard with me decided immediately it wasn’t safe for us — it was clear we weren’t welcome — but there wasn’t a safe place for us to go for miles,” he continued, adding that cars followed them and that “at one point a group of around six men ran after us down a road with what looked like a weapon. We were forced to run…. In the 40 minutes we were there, we saw perhaps two or three police cars driving past. There were no officers on the streets that we walked. There were no vans on standby nearby that I could see. It felt like it was them against us — and there were a lot more of them.

Knight wasn’t the only journalist to be driven out by Birmingham’s new masters:

[A] broadcast by Comcast’s Sky News in the city was terminated after a mob of masked Muslims shouting “Free Palestine!” and making gun signs descended on them. In a later incident, a Sky News crew filmed a Muslim with a knife stabbing the wheels of their van.

These apparent Muslim takeovers come in response to regular Brits having had enough of migrants murdering their children — the latest murderer being the son of two African migrants (who may or may not be Muslim) — and rising up in protest. Authorities, meanwhile, have responded with double standards. The report continues,

The scenes in Birmingham only strengthen the accusations of a two-tier system for the “far right” and ethnic minorities, however. Almost everywhere they have gone, anti-mass migration protestors have been confronted aggressively by police in full riot gear. On the other hand, Muslim counter-demonstrators have been met by police liaison officers politely requesting that they deposit any weapons they are carrying unlawfully at nearby mosques.

How did Muslims, who first entered the UK as poor, impoverished asylum seekers, reach such a point of dominance? Certainly mass migration and supportive, lenient governmental policies have helped. But there’s another element at work here, and it goes under the Arabic term ribat.

What is Ribat?

Soon after the jihad broke out of Arabia in the seventh century, ribats formed wherever and whenever jihad was forcibly stopped by non-Muslims. There, on the frontier, the jihadists created a permanent base to continue waging war on the infidel.

These strongholds were referred to as ribat, from an Arabic word (رباط) etymologically rooted to the idea of a “tight fastening” or “joining,” and used in the Koran: “O you who have believed, persevere and endure and remain fastened [رابطوا verb form of ribat] and fear Allah that you may be successful [3:200].” 

In other words, for Muslims to be “successful,” they must form tightly fastened strongholds along the borders of non-Muslim habitations, where they “persevere and endure” in their jihad to conquer and seize the lands of infidels.

Interestingly, the word ribat lives on, though few recognize it. Rabat, the capital of Morocco, is so named because it was originally a ribat, from which devastating Barbary/pirate raids on Spain and the Christian Mediterranean were launched for centuries. Similarly, the Almoravids — the name of an important eleventh-century North African jihadist group — is simply a transliteration of the Arabic al-murabitun, “they who fight along the ribat.” In 1086 these “Almoravids” invaded Spain and crushed the Castilians at the battle of Sagrajas. Afterward they erected a mountain consisting of 2,400 Christian heads to triumphant cries of “Allahu Akbar.”

The Pain in Spain

Speaking of Spain, which, in the context of contemporary Britain, offers a useful paradigm of how Muslim and Christian neighbors traditionally interacted for centuries, another important ribat formed along that nation’s Duero River, separating the Christian north from the Islamic south. For centuries, it too became “a territory where one fights for the faith and a permanent place of the ribat,” wrote historian Joseph O’Callaghan. After explaining how the Muslims intentionally devastated the Duero region of Spain, later naming it “the Great Desert,” French historian Louis Bertrand wrote the following:

To keep the [northern] Christians in their place it did not suffice to surround them with a zone of famine and destruction. It was necessary also to go and sow terror and massacre among them…. If one bears in mind that this brigandage was almost continual, and that this fury of destruction and extermination was regarded as a work of piety — it was a holy war against infidels — it is not surprising that whole regions of Spain should have been made irremediably sterile. This was one of the capital causes of the deforestation from which the Peninsula still suffers. With what savage satisfaction and in what pious accents do the Arab annalists tell us of those at least bi-annual raids [across the ribat]. A typical phrase for praising the devotion of a Caliph is this: “he penetrated into Christian territory, where he wrought devastation, devoted himself to pillage, and took prisoners.” … At the same time as they were devastated, whole regions were depopulated. …. The prolonged presence of the Musulmans, therefore, was a calamity for this unhappy country of Spain. By their system of continual raids they kept her for centuries in a condition of brigandage and devastation.

This historic expostulation on the nature and role of the ribat is important to understanding Islam’s position in the West. Because Muhammad’s creed is fundamentally tribal — going so far as to demand that all Muslims hate all non-Muslims — once in a Western locale, Muslims do not assimilate but rather form ghettoes and “no-go” zones, where “radicalization” and jihadist activities thrive. 

In other words, they form ribats — bastions of Islamization and jihadist sentiment, from which they launch terror attacks on the infidels across the way — or, increasingly, just as in the historic Spain examples, on the infidels across the street. Just take a look at the UK, Sweden, Germany, France, and other Western nations which are littered with ribats and suffering accordingly.

Welcome, Invaders

The only difference between past and present ribats is that, historically, they formed wherever non-Muslims forcibly stopped them. Conversely, today’s ribats are not located along the borders of Muslim and non-Muslim regions, but rather right smack in the middle of European nations and cities such as Birmingham. Moreover, those entering and turning these Western regions into Islamic enclaves did not do so by force but rather because they were welcomed in with open arms.

And till this very moment, those who welcomed them in — that is, the ruling class of Western Europe — are doing everything in their power to continue providing cover for Muslims, including through their two-tiered system of “justice.”

In short, the reason ribats are a problem in the West in general, and Britain in particular, is entirely due to Western actions. Muslims are simply doing what Muslims have always done.

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.