uring a recent mosque sermon at the North Hudson Islamic Center in New Jersey, a CAIR official, Ayman Aishat, made a seemingly startling claim:
We
live in America, the United States of America. Brothers and sisters,
those who do not know history, not too long ago, the USA was paying the
jizya to the Ottoman Caliph.
Could this be?
First, let us define jizya. In brief (full discussion here),
it is the monetary tribute that conquered or cowed infidels pay their
Islamic overlords in exchange for peace, according to Koran 9:29:
Fight
those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not
believe in Allah, nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his
Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth [Islam],
until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves
subdued.
And yes, Aishat is correct: once upon a
time, in its fledgling youth, the United States succumbed to paying
jizya to appease Muslim terrorists. That story is instructive — not
least as it includes the genesis of the U.S. Navy.
Between the
sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Muslims of North Africa
(“Barbary”) thrived on enslaving Europeans. According to the
conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis, “between 1530
and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as
many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by
the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.” (With countless European women
selling for the price of an onion, little wonder by the late 1700s,
European observers noted how “the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather
white complexion.”)
As Barbary slaving was a seafaring venture, nearly no part of Europe
was untouched. From 1627 to 1633, Lundy, an island off the west coast of
Britain, was actually occupied by the pirates, whence they pillaged
England at will. In 1627 they raided Denmark and even far-off Iceland,
hauling a total of some 800 slaves.
Such raids were accompanied
by the trademark hate. One English captive writing around 1614 noted
that the Muslim pirates “abhor the ringing of the [church] bells being
contrary to their Prophet’s command,” and so destroyed them whenever
they could. In 1631, nearly the entire fishing village of Baltimore in
Ireland was raided, and “237 persons, men, women, and children, even
those in the cradle” were seized.
By the late eighteenth century,
Barbary’s strength relative to Europe had plummeted, and the Muslims
could no longer raid the European coastline for slaves — certainly not
on the scale of previous centuries — so its full energy was spent on
raiding non-Muslim merchant vessels. European powers responded by buying
peace through tribute, which the Muslims accepted as jizya.
Fresh
and fair meat appeared on the horizon once the newly born United States
broke free of Great Britain and was therefore no longer protected by
the latter’s jizya payments. In 1785, Muslim pirates from Algiers
captured two American vessels, the Maria and Dauphin. They enslaved and
paraded the sailors through the streets to jeers and whistles.
Considering the horrific ways Christian slaves were treated in Barbary —
sadistically tortured, pressured to convert, and sodomized, as
described in the writings of missionaries, redeemers, and others (e.g.,
John Foxe, Fr. Dan, Fr. Jerome Maurand, Robert Playfair; see pp. 279-283)
— when the Dauphin’s Captain O’Brian later wrote to Thomas Jefferson
that “our sufferings are beyond our expression or your conception,” he
was not exaggerating.
Jefferson and John Adams, then ambassadors to France and England
respectively, met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain, Abdul Rahman
Adja, in an effort to ransom the enslaved Americans and establish
peaceful relations. In a letter to Congress dated March 28, 1786, the
hitherto puzzled American ambassadors laid out the source of the
Barbary’s unprovoked animosity:
We took the liberty
to make some inquiries concerning the grounds of their pretentions to
make war upon nations who had done them no injury, and observed that we
considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had
given us any provocation. The ambassador answered us that it was founded
on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that
all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were
sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever
they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as
prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was
sure to go to Paradise.
This, of course, was a paraphrase of Islam’s so-called “Sword Verse” (Koran 9:5), which ISIS invoked earlier this year.
At
any rate, the ransom demanded to release the American sailors was over
fifteen times greater than what Congress had approved, and little came
of the meeting.
Back in Congress, some agreed with Jefferson that “it will be more
easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than
money to bribe them.” In a letter to a friend, George Washington
wondered:
In such an enlightened, in such a liberal
age, how is it possible that the great maritime powers of Europe should
submit to pay an annual tribute to the little piratical States of
Barbary? Would to Heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to
mankind, or crush them into nonexistence.
But the
majority of Congress agreed with John Adams: “We ought not to fight them
at all unless we determine to fight them forever.” Considering the
perpetual, existential nature of Islamic hostility, Adams was probably
more right than he knew.
Congress settled on emulating the
Europeans and paying off the terrorists, though it would take years to
raise the demanded ransom. In 1794 Algerian pirates captured eleven more
American merchant vessels.
Two things resulted: the Naval Act of
1794 was passed, and a permanent standing U.S. naval force was
established. But because the first war vessels would not be ready until
1800, American jizya payments — which took up 16% of the entire federal
budget — began to be made to Algeria in 1795. In return, some 115
American sailors were released, and the Islamic sea raids formally
ceased.
American jizya and “gifts” over the following years caused the
increasingly emboldened pirates to respond with increasingly capricious
demands.
One of the more ignoble instances occurred in 1800, when
Captain William Bainbridge of the George Washington sailed to the Dey
of Algiers (an Ottoman honorific for the pirate lords of Barbary) with
what the latter deemed insufficient tribute. Referring to the American
crew as “my slaves,” Dey Mustapha proceeded to order Bainbridge to
transport the Muslim’s own annual tribute — hundreds of black slaves and
exotic animals — to the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople (Istanbul).
Adding
insult to insult, the Dey commanded the U.S. flag taken down from the
George Washington and the Islamic flag hoisted in its place; and, no
matter how rough the seas might be during the long voyage, Bainbridge
was ordered to make sure the vessel faced Mecca five times a day for the
prayers of Mustapha’s ambassador and entourage. Bainbridge condescended
to being the Muslim pirate’s delivery boy.
Soon after Jefferson
became president in 1801, Tripoli demanded another, especially
exorbitant payment, followed by an increase in annual payments — or
else. “I know,” Jefferson concluded, “that nothing will stop the eternal
increase of demand from these pirates but the presence of an armed
force.” So he refused the ultimatum, and, on May 10, 1801, the pasha of
Tripoli, having not received his timely jizya installment, proclaimed
jihad on the United States.
Thus began America's first war as a nation, the First Barbary War
(1801-1805) — and it was with Muslims who think and act just like ISIS.