Or: Ignorance about Mohammedanism then and now
When I stopped adding new content to my Dutch-language website islamofobie.nl *) in 2014, I turned it into a kind of archive. In that context, I also made a new division of categories.
Looking back in 2024 –and more specifically: after October 7, 2023– the ‘History‘ category is by far the most interesting.
That category contains 33 articles. Many of these are worth translating into English now and publishing here at the ODP-site.
With minor improvements and updates.
There is one serious obstacle: many of the online resources I linked to ten years ago are now dead. I’ve replaced some of these with links to hopefully more sustainable sources …
Boston Marathon bombing
April 15, 2013 a terrorist attack on participants and spectators of the Boston Marathon bombing immediately killed three people and injured more than 250.
The two terrorists were brothers and the older of the two was named after one of the worst, if not the worst, mass murderer in human history.
When I started collecting some more information about this person named after that hellhound, one of the first sources I came across was a Dutch history site. They wrote, mind you, about the mass murderer as part of highlighting UK Disability History Month … Well well.
They did pay some attention to Timur Lenks atrocities.
Not only did the article state that ‘according to scholars’ [sic] Timur led the killing of around 17 million, but also that he “…showed his brutality once again when he suppressed an uprising in Isfahan, Persia, which he conquered, where he had 70,000 inhabitants beheaded and large towers built from their skulls.“
The world population was so much smaller in his time. If he had killed the same share of the world population in the twentieth century the number of fatalities would have been bigger than of WWI and WWII combined.
Spectacular indeed, but another aspect of that old Timur Lenk and its history in a way is more interesting: the confusion that existed in Europe at the time about how to judge Timur.
Better Turkish than Papist?
Although the Ottomans had not yet conquered Constantinople at the end of the 14th century, they had already made significant advances in the Balkans.
Earlier, Timur -who called himself ‘sword of Islam‘ according to Wikipedia, had already wreaked havoc in the Sultanate of Delhi in India, in a south-eastern direction, where he, among other things, slaughtered 100,000 prisoners of war, and he had defeated the Mohammedan rulers in the south-west, the Mamluks, and plundered Aleppo and Damascus.
The Battle of Nicopolis **), in northern Bulgaria, and the exemplary Mohammedan treatment that Sultan Bazeyid treated the conquered to were still fresh in European memory when Timur defeated and imprisoned that sultan.
In Europe he was therefore seen as a (potential) ally: in the context of the simplistic approach ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend‘.
In Dutch there was this saying: Better Turkish than Papist: it expressed the disgust for the anti-protestant Pope and the Spanish rule. In this century some idiots in the Netherlands suggest that it expressed positive feelings about islam… The Dutch protestants did not try to make an alliance with the Turks to get rid of the pope.
However, an emissary was even sent from Europe to Timur Lenk to explore the possibility of fighting together against the Ottomans: so poorly informed they were about that mass murderer.
Disinformation
The Washington Post published an article a week after the terrorist attack, titled No links seen between Boston suspects and foreign terrorist groups officials say:
The information gleaned by a special team of FBI interrogators before charges were filed against Tsarnaev on Monday appears to be consistent with the direction of a broader investigation that has not uncovered any links to terrorist networks abroad, officials said.
“These are persons operating inside the United States without a nexus” to an overseas group, a U.S. intelligence official said. Instead, officials said, the evidence suggests that Tsarnaev and his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan, who was killed during a confrontation with police, were “self-radicalized.”
Take note: not long before the brothers had been back to Dagestan. Of all places.
Several media immediately brought the story that the brothers had ‘misunderstood Islam‘. The Lone Wolves narrative. Here some quotes from a website called Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. Exact same wording can be found elsewhere.
Tamerlan would throw out foreign words like “jihad” and “Inshallah” – Arabic for “God willing” – without really understanding their meaning, he said. Though Tsarni is himself Muslim, he said he does not worship at a mosque. (…)
The uncle was surprised when he learned that Tamerlan had gotten married to an American woman – a “good Christian family girl,” [!] who his nephew said was about to convert to Islam.
In February, Alexander Podobryaev, who lives a couple of houses from the Tsarnaevs, exchanged pleasantries with Tamerlan as they shoveled snow. He says the man pointed to a woman in a black Muslim headscarf and identified her as his wife.
(…) Others began noticing signs of Tamerlan’s increasing agitation.
(…) One of the brothers’ neighbors, Albrecht Ammon, said he had a bizarre encounter with Tamerlan in a pizza shop about three months ago. The older brother argued with him about U.S. foreign policy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and religion. He said Tamerlan referred to the Bible as a “cheap copy” of the Quran, and that many of this country’s wars “are based upon the Bible – how it’s an excuse to invade other countries.”
(…) About three months ago, around Martin Luther King Day, Tamerlan stood up and interrupted the imam during the sermon, said Anwar Kazmi, a board member of the Islamic Society. The imam compared the slain civil rights leads (sic) to the Prophet Muhammed, drawing objections from Tamerlan, Kazmi said.
Mosque leaders later sat down with Tamerlan and discussed his rant, said Kazmi, who said Tamerlan returned to future services and had no further outbursts.
So the terrorists supposedly didn’t know what the word jihad meant…
Tamerlan’s exchange with neighbor Ammon is called ‘bizarre’ here.
It is suggested that the mosque management may have tried to persuade the would-be terrorist to repent.
In turn, I am not suggesting that the brothers had acquired their Mohammedan ideas in this mosque, but, for example, that representation of the Bible as some cheap/poor copy of the Quran that Allah had communicated before in vain to others: that is really just one of the main themes of the teachings of Mohammed, a theme that is very widely supported among his followers.
If you only rely on the texts in the best-known media, you are as poorly informed about the Mohammedanism of this Timur in the 21st century than the European leaders were at the time about his namesake.
Self evidently here at the ODP-website this translation is in the category 49:49.
I did want to give credits to the person who made the photo but I could only find it in the search results but am not allowed to visit the site where it was published because I live in the Netherlands/not in the USA.
Notes:
*) The website islamofobie.nl was set up to support the launching of the Dutch book titled ‘Islamofobie? ‘ A questionmark is not possible in a URL. The book can still be ordered here.
**) On YouTube you can find a channel with the cosy name ‘Ottoman Total War‘. It has animations on it of Ottoman wars. It has also one on the Battle of Nicopolis. The comments are quite revealing. Especially those of people who still take joy in the great victories of the Ottoman Empire …