Before the idea that “white people are committed to being villains” became fashionably mainstream, it was the domain of academics, particularly those dealing with history.

This only made sense. If conclusions (“evil whitey”) are based on premises (history), then the past must be rewritten in a way that validates present narratives — namely, that Europeans have always been and therefore continue to be a scourge on mankind.

In many ways, the Crusades — which revisionist history claims featured European Christians invading and terrorizing peaceful Muslims — are perhaps the quintessential, certainly original, paradigm.

Rewriting the Past to Fit Present Narratives

The only way to demonize the Crusades, however, was to completely rewrite the past. True history makes clear that the Crusades were byproducts of centuries’ worth of (and ongoing) Muslim atrocities against Christians, including the wholesale slaughter and rape of thousands of Christians (including European pilgrims) and the destruction of thousands of churches (including Christendom’s most sacred, the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem). Victimized Christians were retaliating.

Today, however, the inconvenient facts that gave rise to the Crusades — unprovoked Islamic atrocities against Christians — are routinely suppressed. Rather, the Crusaders (those crazy white crackers who simply hated brown Muslims) were motivated by anything and everything except defending Christians and Christendom.

Thus, for Georgetown professor John Esposito, who writes in Seven Myths of the Crusades (Hackett, 2015),

five centuries of peaceful coexistence [between Islam and Europe] elapsed before political events and an imperial-papal power play led to [a] centuries-long series of so-called holy wars that pitted Christendom against Islam and left an enduring legacy of misunderstanding and distrust.

In fact, the “five centuries of peaceful coexistence” that Esposito casually mentions is precisely when a nascent Islam savagely conquered three-quarters of the Christian world — with countless Christian corpses and torched churches in its wake.

That said, the penchant to demonize premodern Europeans anytime they move against Muslims — regardless of what the latter might have done to provoke it — has metastasized beyond that blame-all (the Crusades). Here, we will examine one of these little known but very telling episodes, including how the academics have recast it and why it matters today.

The Martyrs of Cordoba

While traveling to Muslim-ruled Cordoba in 850 AD, Perfectus, a well-educated monk, was stopped by Muslims he knew and apparently trusted. They asked him what Christians thought about Christ and Muhammad.

He told them his answer would likely upset them. They assured him to be at ease and speak freely, promising that they would not share his response with others.

After citing Jesus’s warnings against false prophets, Perfectus said that is how Christians saw Muhammad: as a false prophet. The group said their goodbyes and went their way.

Days later, however, when the same Muslims saw Perfectus in a crowded marketplace, they loudly cried out that he had cursed Muhammad. He was arrested and thrown in a dungeon.

Ordered to recant and convert to Islam or face death, Perfectus defiantly reaffirmed Christ’s divinity and Muhamad’s imposture, resulting in his public beheading. (Death for whoever “blasphemes” against Muhammad at the hands of either Muslim judges or Muslim mobs continues to this day in many Muslim countries and is fueled by many hadiths, including “If anyone insults [Muhammad], then any Muslim who hears him must kill him immediately, without any need to refer to the imam or the sultan.”

Months later, another Christian, Isaac, a 24-year-old who had abandoned a lucrative position and withdrawn into a monastery, returned to Cordoba and, knowing full well the consequences, declared Muhammad a false prophet. Isaac was beheaded and his corpse hung upside down from Cordoba’s gates.

Something had clicked; more Christians followed suit.

Some were dhimmis, others muladi — that is, from formerly Christian families that had (often nominally) converted to Islam to avoid sporadic persecution or improve their social status, while internalizing their Christian faith. Reveling in the unburdening of their souls, while knowing full well the consequence of doing so, they all now publicly confessed the divinity of Christ and its corollary, the fraudulence of Muhammad.

Paul of Alvarus (800-861), a contemporary, described them as tormented souls “who were holding the Christian faith only in secret” but finally “brought out into the open what they had concealed.”

In the end, some 50 Christians were imprisoned, tortured, commanded to recant their blasphemies and convert or return to Islam — often with flattering words and enticing rewards. They all refused and were finally executed, often sadistically. One nun was hurled into a cauldron of molten lead; one elderly monk was whipped to death; a young solider was impaled; and two sisters accused of apostatizing to Christianity were arrested, offered numerous inducements to return to Islam, and refused. They were publicly beheaded.

Blaming the Victims (for Their Own Beheadings)

If those people were anything but Christian, they would be celebrated today for their defiance in the face of tyranny. And if their executors were anything but Muslim, they would be condemned for their barbarism. Yet as historian Dario Fernandez-Morera explains,

Although most scholars today do not dispute the primary-source evidence of the Umayyads’ brutal killing of these Christians, they point out the ‘extremism’ of the martyrs, not of the presumably tolerant Umayyad rulers who ordered their slaughter. They have called these executed Christians ‘fanatics,’ ‘troublemakers,’ and ‘self-immolaters.’ As that last term suggests, scholars have argued, in essence, that the Catholics ‘asked for it’ by openly doing things [that is, speaking their conscience] clearly punishable by Islam. Thus the Martyrs of Cordoba episode has been turned into a scholarly version of ‘blaming the victim.’

One need look no further for evidence of this than to John V. Tolan, a member of Academia Europaea. In his book, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination, he quotes Eulogius — a Christian renowned for his humility and charity who was also martyred in Cordoba — as once saying, “I will not repeat the sacrilege which that impure dog [Muhammad] dared proffer about the Blessed Virgin [Mary]… He claimed that in the next world he would deflower her.”

Such “blasphemous” speech does not sit well with Tolan, who explains:

This outrageous claim [that Muhammad will “deflower” Mary], it seems, is Eulogius’s invention; I know of no other Christian polemicist who makes this accusation against Muhammad. Eulogius fabricates lies designed to shock his Christian reader. This way, even those elements of Islam that resemble Christianity (such as reverence of Jesus and his virgin mother) are deformed and blackened, so as to prevent the Christian from admiring anything about the Muslim other. The goal is to inspire hatred for the “oppressors” …. Eulogius sets out to show that the Muslim is not a friend but a potential rapist of Christ’s virgins.

As recently shown, however, it is Muhammad himself who declared that “Allah will wed me in paradise to Mary, Daughter of Imran” (whom Islam identifies as Jesus’ mother). Thus it was the prophet himself — not any “Christian polemicist” — who “fabricates lies designed to shock,” namely that Christ’s mother will be his eternal concubine.

But, as with the Crusades, such inconvenient incidentals fall by the wayside — so that even Christian martyrs are now demonized in order to exonerate the “offended” Muslims who slaughtered them. At any rate, if even clear victims of Muslim oppression are being portrayed as the aggressors, not for raising a hand or even a finger, but a tongue “against” Muslims,surely it goes without saying that when armed Christians march onto long-held Muslim territories, as they did during the Crusades, they are the evil ones, no further explanation or context necessary.

To be fair, there is another reason why the martyrs are so roundly condemned. Throughout the whole of Islamic history, Western academics claim to have found a few decades in Muslim-ruled Cordoba that support the narrative without requiring too much distortion. Unfortunately, however, the Martyrs of Cordoba episode — which is something out of a ghastly Islamic State video — occurred at the height of this so-called “Andalusian golden age,” and is thus yet another wrench in the narrative to be ruthlessly suppressed.

 

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.