The Colonialism, Imperialism, and Oppression of Islam
By Bobby Darvish
While modern academia often paints Western colonialism as the primary force of global oppression, it conveniently ignores the far older and far more brutal legacy of Islamic imperialism. For over 1,400 years, Islam has expanded not through peaceful preaching, but through war, forced conversions, slavery, and institutionalized apartheid under Sharia law. From its inception in the 7th century, the Islamic empire was forged and maintained by violence, and its legacy of tyranny remains visible in nations where Islamic governance or ideology still dominates today.
Islam’s founder, Muhammad, openly declared, “I have been made victorious through terror” (Sahih Bukhari 4:52:220). This was not metaphorical. Within a century of Muhammad’s death, Islamic armies had conquered the Christian Levant, Zoroastrian Persia, Hindu Sindh, and large parts of North Africa. The so-called “Rightly Guided Caliphs” launched genocidal wars against indigenous peoples, destroyed temples, burned libraries, and enforced a humiliating tax called jizya on all non-Muslims, as mandated by Quran 9:29. These non-Muslims, called dhimmis, were allowed to live but only as second-class subjects, forbidden from public worship, bearing arms, building new places of worship, or testifying against Muslims in court.
Islamic imperialism did not stop with the Arabs. The Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals all inherited and extended this ideology. The Ottoman Turks, for example, enslaved millions through the devshirme system, stealing Christian boys from the Balkans, converting them by force, and turning them into Janissaries, slave soldiers for the Caliph. In 1915, the Ottoman Empire committed the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides, killing over 1.5 million Armenians alone. The Safavid Empire of Iran forcibly converted millions of Sunni and non-Muslim Iranians to Shiism, slaughtering dissenters in the name of religious purity. In India, Islamic invaders such as Mahmud of Ghazni and Aurangzeb massacred Hindus, demolished temples, and built mosques on top of them to assert Islamic superiority.
Even today, Islamic countries systematically oppress non-Muslims and enforce religious apartheid. In Saudi Arabia, Christianity is illegal, churches are forbidden, and apostates face the death penalty. In Pakistan, blasphemy laws are weaponized to lynch Christians and Ahmadis. In Iran, the Islamic Republic suppresses Baha’is, Christians, Zoroastrians, and even Sunni Muslims through state violence, imprisonment, and execution. While Western nations are condemned for colonialism long since abandoned, the ongoing Islamic imperialism, both historical and present, is largely ignored or even justified by leftist academia and media.
It is time the world recognizes that Islam was and still is a colonialist and imperialist force. Its oppression is not an accident, it is doctrinal. Islam does not separate religion from state. It commands the domination of all others until they submit (Quran 8:39). To deny this is to erase the suffering of millions and enable the continued spread of a totalitarian ideology masquerading as faith.
Citations
1. Sahih Bukhari 4:52:220 — https://sunnah.com/bukhari:3021
2. Quran 9:29 — https://quran.com/9/29
3. Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985
4. Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History, Yale University Press, 2006
5. Robert Spencer, The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS, Bombardier Books, 2018
6. William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, Oxford University Press, 2009
7. Raymond Ibrahim, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians, Regnery Publishing, 2013
8. Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924, Harvard University Press, 2019
9. William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, Bloomsbury, 2019
10. Open Doors USA, 2024 World Watch List — https://www.opendoorsusa.org
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