Compromise and Conceit

There is no worse calamity for knowledge and its people than when outsiders intrude

Everyone knows that the people of Christendom are lazy and morally weak. What else is to be expected of people who have been led so far from the path of righteousness as to believe Jesus is the son of Allah, the One and Only, who begets not nor is begotten? These people show themselves in all things to be misguided and confused; to eschew work where leisure could suffice; to revile hygiene where baser instincts can take hold; and to turn away from all enlightened thought to superstition and idolatry. Yet, it cannot be said that they are ignorant; for in Northern Italy and distant France lie almost all of the greatest institutions of learning in the modern world. How can it be that such idle and debased people – so weak of thought and ideals that even their skin is pale – could be in possession of all the greatest institutions of learning in the known world?

Of course they did not build that; they inherited this legacy of great thought from their predecessors in the Islamic world, and then they debased it. Their learning comes from the ancient Greeks through those most barbarous of idolaters, the Romans; and from the Arabs did they learn all they know of mathematics and science. Yet in the long dark era of our subjection and chaos, we allowed this learning to slip away, and a golden age of knowledge tarnished irrevocably, so that all that is great about modern science and philosophy is held in trust by the faithless sinners of western Europe.

Have we not sinned as a people, to allow this knowledge to pass from us into the hands of infidels? Did not Ibn Taymiyyah say that the people of the One True Faith should

Seek (beneficial) knowledge,
because seeking it for the sake of Allah is a worship.
And knowing it makes you more God-fearing;
and searching for it is jihad,
teaching it to those who do not know is charity,
reviewing and learning it more is like tasbeeh.
Through knowledge Allah will be known and worshiped

Sadly we have failed to respect this Islamic ideal for many years, and in the midst of our internecine strife we have allowed the unbeliever to take hold of all beneficial knowledge, and to keep it from us. Does our worship of Allah the Most Merciful not suffer because of this lapse in our vigilance over jihad?

However, those times of internecine strife have been replaced with a time of prosperity and glory, under the great Mehumet I, and now we are able to look to the west, to those nations near us that hold so much of the lost knowledge that is our rightful legacy; and we are able now to reach out, and to take that knowledge back. Of course, we cannot take knowledge from the minds of men, even of infidels; nor can we exert control over how new knowledge is found in the hearts and minds of men (and does not Allah decide in His infinite power, as the Great Teacher, what all men will know and when they will know it?) But we can control the physical spaces in which knowledge is gathered, taught, and protected for future generations. We cannot reclaim the mind of the unbeliever, but we can strike out to take physical possession of the places that teach that mind, that form it; and in so doing we can establish  an Islamic Enlightenment, that ensures all knowledge is right and proper, and attendant to its legacy of Islamic principles.

Of course, to do this we must invade and subjugate Northern Italy. But such are the trials of jihad.

Huseyn II reigned for 16 years after he conquered Hungary, and during this time he made some more small gains, taking islands in the Aegean sea that had long been home to pirates and crusaders. Rhodes, Naxos, Crete and Corfu fell to our glorious soldiers, and in the twilight of his years Huseyn II’s scholar and archivist was able to take ship from the most southern edge of the Aegean sea all the way to the tip of Croatia without ever losing sight of the Empire that Huseyn II had built. However, this was not enough for Huseyn II, who had glorious visions of reclaiming not just the physical domain of Islam, but also its cultural legacy. For this reason late in his reign he declared war on the newly-founded state of Naples, which incorporated the city-states of Firenze, Romagna and Siena. Though Naples had military technology far in advance of our own, and was protected by powerful allies, through Huseyn II’s cunning diplomacy we were able to fashion a war in which Naples was isolated from its powerful friends, and through bravery and force of numbers we subdued the entire Italian peninsula in a brutal two year war. Though our brave soldiers faced warfare against modern cannon and forts, in mountains and forests unfamiliar to them, as ever the Christians wilted before the heat of our righteous fury, and the university cities of Firenze, Romagna and Siena were taken. Thus, in the year 1560, did the Islamic Enlightenment begin …

In his wisdom, Huseyn II recognized that to rule all these lands would be impossible, so he opted to carve off only the Northern states, and to vassalize Sicily and the Papal State; he then cast the lesser pickings of Southern Italy back to the Napolitan dogs. All praise should be given to Huseyn II for his tolerance: here he stood, at the doors to the Vatican itself, in possession of the very centre of the unbeliever’s faith, but recognizing the value of art and history for itself, he chose not to raze the city and put all its infidels to the sword, as all accepted to be his right; instead he gave the city its freedom, and allowed the curia to remain as a symbol of the lower status of Christianity. Perhaps when intelligent Catholics look upon their vanquished city, they will reflect on who is the One True God. If they do not, perhaps in future they will be chastised again by our glorious armies. For does our Holy Book not say,

If they desist not from their word (of blasphemy), verily a grievous chastisement shall befall the blasphemers among them.

And are not our emperors just in offering this chastisement?

Before his death in 1564 Huseyn II implemented imperial rule across this whole vast land, but sadly his successor Seyfetim I achieved nothing with the fruits of Huseyn’s work or the new-found enlightenment, and died leaving only bastards. After a brief struggle amongst them, Mehmet I cousin of Huseyn II took the throne, and he rules to this day in glory from the centre of our Empire. In his wisdom Mehmet I realized that it is not enough to take possession of the great centres of learning in Christendom, and thus to restore the legacy of Islamic thought to the Empires of Islam; like a wise and learned father, the Ottoman Empire must also chastise those of its more junior and less educated Muslim brethren, and bring the true fruits of Islamic thought to them. Nowhere was this more the case than with the Golden Horde, that great seething sea of barbarity spreading east of our holy land, which was barely Islamic except in name, and ruled by degenerate horse-loving wretches from beyond the great deserts. This Horde was a constant problem on our borders, and served to destabilize all it was in contact with. What the folk of the Horde needed was discipline and education, in equal measure. And who else should offer such, but a loving and firm-handed father?

Thus it was that in the early years of his reign Mehmet I began war upon the Golden Horde. In this war the wisdom of Huseyn II’s belief in the power of education was made manifest. Our soldiers and our culture were so far in advance of the Horde that even our smallest army had but to stride onto the battlefield, and countless throngs of our enemies would be banished. In but two years of warfare a handful of divisions of our mighty army spread out across the Horde, taking its lands in our grip from Dagestan south of our Empire all the way to India. Behind us we left a trail of vanquished armies and unsettled local warlords; as the Horde’s client system fell apart under the pressure of our armies, and the subject peoples saw the vulnerability of their former masters, they rose up against the Khanate. By the time our armies had rampaged across these vast distances to India the land was aflame with rebellion. We retreated again, choosing instead to take only the lands closest to our own; and at the end of this huge crusade, the peoples of Dagestan, Qarabagh, Azow and Astrakhan had been brought into the loving embrace of the Ottomans. Closer to our own shores, those foolish nations that had previously allied with the Timurids, then turned to the Horde for protection, were suitably chastised, their lands taken and their leaders executed; the rump of the kingdoms of Crimea and Candar was left an empty shell, vassal to our will; but the rest of their territories were absorbed into ours. Now our grip on the Black Sea was complete but for those ports held by Poland, and the nearest of our Islamic neighbours who had fallen to the degeneracy of the Horde were back within our grasp. We also possessed the great trading posts of Astrakhan, and were within striking distance of the gold mines of Samara.

Of course I joined this crusade across the steppes of the Horde. From my vantage point on horseback, as I stood outside my Yurt staring up at the vast Eastern sky, or when we stood in the ransacked rooms of the Khans’ shabby castles, smelling the smoke and hearing the screams of dying prisoners, it became clear to me that the Ottoman Empire offers all of the Islamic world a better, more enlightened way to live; those that do not take it must one day be forced into it for their own good. It was also clear, as I looked into the eyes of freed slaves, or witnessed the violence-charged resentment of ordinary citizens of the Horde, or saw the explosive violence meted out to vanquished armies by the peasants they had previously oppressed, that the Horde was collapsing. Barely an empire any longer, it was held together by the twinned tyrannies of low men and huge distances, and was an anachronism in the modern era. To its north Muscowy grew in confidence; to its East, the Ming empire; to its south a brace of new empires jostling for power. The Golden Horde was going to collapse under internal division, and then be torn apart by these powers; and at some point we, the Ottomans, would have to step in to assure peace and to prevent the worst excesses that we saw in the end times of the Timurids, and were then powerless to stop.

But for now, we can do no more. Exhausted after two years of campaigning on those vast and open spaces, I returned to our capital to discover talk of a new and greater threat than any we had faced before: the Holy Roman Empire was looking eastward, to us; and the head of that greedy and evil Empire was none other than the King of Austria, our closest neighbour. Rumours grew that Austria hoped to retake Hungary from us and forge a new, larger Austro-Hungarian kingdom that would no doubt spell disaster for all Europe. It was our obligation to ourselves and also to all of Christendom to stifle that ambition. In the Autumn of 1582, war with eastern Europe’s greatest power loomed …