Wars and Islam

[Dark Primus]

A simple question.
How many wars has Islamic countries or the Arab World fought and won in the last thousand years?

[Joe]

The Ottoman Empire (Turkish, Islamic) kicked ass across the Balkans, Eurasia, and the Middle East during its rise.

[Darth Wong]

Europe was beaten like a rented mule until they discovered the "New World". Islam fell because after its successes, it grew fat, complacent, and isolationist and stopped paying attention to developments in the world outside. This is not an unusual trait of dominant empires; the Chinese did the same thing.

[Colonel Olrik]

Europe was beaten like a rented mule until they discovered the "New World". Islam fell because after its successes, it grew fat, complacent, and isolationist and stopped paying attention to developments in the world outside. This is not an unusual trait of dominant empires; the Chinese did the same thing.

It started earlier than that. By the time the Portuguese started conquering Africa, effectively beggining the period of world colonization by Europe, the muslims were all but gone from they old possessions in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Western Europe. Granada, their last stronghold in Spain, fell right before the beggining of America "colonization", by command of The Most Catholic Monarchs

At that time, we actually used to kick their spanish asses. And Rule the World*. Sigh.


*Buahahahha. And no U.N to bother us. Let's go and conquer the World, my hearties!

[Sea Skimmer]

A whole fucking lot.

[HemlockGrey]

I would peg the loss of Greece as the death knell for the Ottomans.

[Wicked Pilot]

When all the women are forced to cover up in public, is there really anything worth fighting for? I mean, when you get back home all you have to great you are hairy men and camels.

[Nathan F]

When all the women are forced to cover up in public, is there really anything worth fighting for? I mean, when you get back home all you have to great you are hairy men and camels.

They go for that sort of thing, possibly?

[StarshipTitanic]

A simple question.
How many wars has Islamic countries or the Arab World fought and won in the last thousand years?

Not really, unless you specify who they were fighting against. Themselves? Others? And I find it simpler to seperate them (Islamic world) into three groups: Turks, Arabs, and Persians.

[StarshipTitanic]

EDIT: I guess you could add Tartars/Mongols in there, too.

[StarshipTitanic]

I would peg the loss of Greece as the death knell for the Ottomans.

Erm, Russia was kicking the unholy crap out of the Ottomans all along the Black Sea and it took England, France, and the Italian kingdoms of Naples and Sardinia to stop them from reaching their price: Constantinople and the Straits.

Maybe my posts can be merged?

Tomorrow I might come up with some significant "Islamic" victories spanning all four of my groupings.

[Master of Ossus]

Europe was beaten like a rented mule until they discovered the "New World". Islam fell because after its successes, it grew fat, complacent, and isolationist and stopped paying attention to developments in the world outside. This is not an unusual trait of dominant empires; the Chinese did the same thing.

To be fair, the Moors lost Spain the same year that Colombus sailed to the New World (as in, lost their final holdings in Spain), but for the most part you are correct. In Eastern and Southern Europe, particularly, the Ottomans dominated the battlefield for several centuries.

[StarshipTitanic]

Here's one, because I feel like one: The Dardenelles campaign in WW1, made famious by the deployment of ANZAC troops by Britain. The idea was to take control of the Sea of Marmara and eject the Ottomans from Constantinople so the Russians would have access to the Mediterranean Sea. I can't remember how long the campaign lasted but the fighting was too hard for the Allies and they were forced to retreat. And for a bit of trivia, the Titanic's sister ship, the Brittanic was sunk by a mine while acting as a hospital ship.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

It started earlier than that. By the time the Portuguese started conquering Africa, effectively beggining the period of world colonization by Europe, the muslims were all but gone from they old possessions in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Western Europe. Granada, their last stronghold in Spain, fell right before the beggining of America "colonization", by command of The Most Catholic Monarchs

At that time, we actually used to kick their spanish asses. And Rule the World*. Sigh.


*Buahahahha. And no U.N to bother us. Let's go and conquer the World, my hearties!

Not quite. There's an interesting pattern to Muslim history.

The First Caliphate is the era of the Jihad, or conquest, in which Islam swells to a massive, unified Empire - larger than the Roman Empire, and the largest Empire in world history up to that time. It collapses due to internal dissent and strain, and is followed by the Abbasid Caliphate.

The Abbasids were a tremendously advanced people, socially and technologically. They refined mathematics considerably, built awesome engineering works for the time, had rather advanced philosophical concepts that would later be picked up in Europe, etc. Of course, they suffered from internal dissension with the Shia muslims, who established the Fatimid Caliphate in Egypt.

In Spain you see an alternative development of the early (Umayyad) Caliphate over a long period of time, after its collapse in the east, which is sometimes linked with the Muslim Kingdoms in North Africa. This is steadily pushed back, but manages to last an exceedingly long time, and integrates with the local customs and populace, establishing a local tradition. The Jews are well treated here and some of the great philosophical schools of Islam came from Andalusia; it was certainly the most developed part of Europe during the Dark Ages, with a level of sophistication to make the rest look totally pathetic (short of Constantinople).

Now, the Crusades actually did have success against Islam. But there was a reason for this. At the period of the Crusades the Abbasid Caliphate had nearly ceased to exist. It did exist in name, but the Abbasids during their decline had resorted to the use of Turkish Mercenaries. Enter the Turks! They began to convert to Islam and took over all the important positions of government, the Caliph being reduced to a figurehead.

The Abbasid Caliphate was thus split up between warring Turkish Khans (some of whom would later take the title of Sultan), who only nominally owed any loyalty at all to a totally ineffectual Caliph. At one point the Turkish Sultans were very powerful - the Sultan Alp Arslan who defeated the Byzantines in 1071 at Manzikert controlled a vast empire, but that was short-lived.

The response to that defeat, of course, was the Crusades, which took advantage of this chaos. Eventually the rise of first Saladin - and his conquest of the defunct Fatimid Caliphate - followed by the Mamelukes, finished off the crusaders. The age of the military sultanate, usually ruled by a Turk or a Tartar, was here. The Sultanate of Rum, a Turkish state in Asia Minor, was crushed by the Mongol invasion in Anatolia, giving Byzantium breathing room - But from the warring factions from it gave rise to the Osmanlis, and the Ottoman Empire eventually.

Even as Islam of the Andalusian variety - in terms of governments - was defeated in Spain, three great Islamic governments rose to power in the east. The Ottomans in Asia Minor, the Safavids in Persia, and the Mughals in India. The Safavids, curiously, it was believed actually grew out of a sect of Sufis who converted to Shia from Sunni Islam - A religious order founding a dynasty, the shortest-lived and lesser of the three, but granted, impressive in scope, a unifying and native Persian dynasty, and great in its building projects and cultural renaissance for a long-suffering Iran.

The Mughals, of course, unified India under Islamic rule, courtesy of none other than Batur, a descendant of Timur the Lame. Their dynasty would be the one that eventually the British would supplant, at first as administrators and then in fact - The title of Empress of India for Queen Victoria was justified on the fact that she had replaced the last Mughal Emperor as ruler of the country, so it was titular continuity in that fashion.

As for the Ottomans, their great successes continued right up into the 16th century in Europe, when in the 1520s they crushed the kingdom of Hungary at the battle of Mohacs and conquered most of it, and then repeatedly besieged Vienna, threatening the Hapsburgs under Charles V at the height of their power. The Sultan Suleyman the Lawgiver (commonly called Suleyman the Magnificent in the west) actually provided funding to the early Protestant cause - It was a rather clever maneovre to divide Christianity while Islam continued to be reunified, and even expand into traditionally Christian areas.

It was not until the 1570s, at the battle of Lepanto, that the Ottoman Empire was checked from further expansion, and it was not until the 1680s, when after an abortive attempt to besiege Vienna once more, a combined counterattack (including one of the last great Kings of Poland and his forces) drove the Ottomans back and reconquered Hungary.

So it was not until the late 17th century that Islam was decisively put on the defensive against the West. At this same time, the Safavids were weakening and the Portugese had a base in Iran, and likewise the colonization of the Indian coast was underway - The British already had Bombay, the foundation of their colonial Empire there. The general trend had started.