VDH Discusses Raymond Ibrahim's New Book on the History of Islam

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Hi there.

Thank you for joining the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is our interview series of American Thinkers and Public Officials.

And I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Today we have Raymond Ibrahim joining us and we will come back to talk to him after some messages.

We'll be right back.

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Welcome, Ray.

So I would like to say a few things about

Ray Ibrahim.

He is an American author, translator, columnist, and critic.

who is an authority on Islam and Arabic history.

His most recent book is The Defenders of the West, the Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam.

And we're excited to have a conversation today.

And it seems to me it's a strange turn of luck that Victor has scheduled this interview just a few days after the Zawahiri assassination.

So maybe we'll hear a little your thoughts on that as well, Ray.

But I would like to turn it over to Victor at this point.

And

Thank you, Sammy.

And this is part of our ongoing interview series.

We've just interviewed Stephen Kuay on the origins of COVID, distinguished immunologist and medical researcher, as well as a doctor.

And we've had former head of the House Intelligence Committee and now the CEO of Two Social, Devin Nunes.

Raymond Ibrahim, the book in question is The Defenders of the Rest.

And as Sammy said, the Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam.

I wrote the foreword through it.

And Ray Ibrahim was a student of mine at Cal State Froznal, what, Ray, 20 years ago, plus

2025.

Yes.

Some of you may know him.

He wrote a book, Sword and Scimitar.

That was 14 centuries of war between Islam and the West.

Then a more controversial book, perhaps, Crucified Again, exposing Islam's new war on Christians.

And his first one was the Al-Qaeda Reader.

And that was a very, very important book because it incorporated text from bin Laden, supposedly, and Dr.

Zawahiri, the now late Dr.

Zawahiri, that had not been translated or known before, but had come to Raymond Ibrahim's attention while he was an Arab linguist at the Library of Congress and a researcher there.

And so that was a very important book because it had primary sources, not that the others weren't, but it really gave us an insight into, I guess I could call it the cynicism of al-Qaeda.

Raymond has been all over at the U.S.

Army War College.

He's briefed government agencies.

He was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He's currently the Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

He's a Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

And some of you know the Gatestone Institute very well.

He's a senior fellow there.

And so we're happy to have you today, Ray.

And we might as well.

get to it.

I noticed right away with all of your titles, but this one in particular,

Sword and Scimitar, as I remember the subtitle was 14 Centuries, 14 Centuries of War Between Islam and the West.

Subtext being that what we are experiencing after 9-11 for the last 21 years is not unusual.

This subtitle is the Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam.

You didn't say radical Islam, you didn't have an adjective.

Be modern Islam, you didn't have any qualifier.

So it's just Islam.

And I guess my first question is

what we're seeing today with the Islamic tensions between the West, and it's not a product of modernism necessarily.

It could be a catalyst, modernism could, but it's something that's ancient and has always been a, what, challenge to the West?

Yeah, I would say,

I would say, Victor, that with sword and scimitar, what I essentially tried to demonstrate, and I think successfully so, was to show that what 9-11 brought about, which was attention to radical Islam, Islamism or Islam, depending on how one wants to call it, and I'll get into that.

It brought attention, but everyone presented it from George Bush Jr.

all the way on down, that it was an aberration.

that al-Qaeda had hit us, that was a hijacking of Islam, that true Islam doesn't do that sort of thing.

And so with the history that I actually presented in Sword and Scimitar, and which I actually began studying under you, but way back then, and

I think I first met you in 1997.

So yeah, about 25 years, as you recall, I did the Battle of Yarmouk, which was the MA thesis.

So I've really been delving for about a quarter of a century into the

military interaction between the West and Islam.

And what I found and what I tried to document was that actually what Al-Qaeda had done was part of a continuum.

In fact,

Islam from the very beginning with Muhammad himself, the prophet of Islam in the seventh century, all the way on down through a variety of iterations of caliphates and sultanates and emirates and what have you, with all kinds of national manifestations, beginning with the Arabs, the Moors in Spain and so forth, the Turks.

um

you know the the tatars even which were islamized mongols and the golden the golden Horde, so the Russian yoke under the Golden Horde was actually, it displayed the same Muslim-Christian dynamic that we see all throughout history.

But the point was to show that, you know, whether it's through the use of terror, which is promoted in the Quran,

and of course by Muhammad himself, who said, according to a canonical hadith, that he has been made victorious through terror.

And as indicated, the Quran, which is supposed to be Allah himself speaking, calls on believers to terrorize so-called infidels and so forth.

So all of that basically coalesced to show that

what al-Qaeda had done, and even more so moving forward in time to the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria, that that sort of thing was perfectly duplicated from history.

And in fact, those people, whether it was bin Laden or Zawahri or al-Baghdadi, if you looked at their writings, as I did, it was very clear that they were consciously patterning themselves after these historical figures of islam the caliphs that i had mentioned including muammad um because they would always quote them so i think that was very important uh to show that history and um i think it's meat to offer a few words on ayman zawahiri in connection to all this as was mentioned earlier he died or was killed recently a couple days ago the u.s drone strikes i believe in kabul which of course itself is eye-opening because supposedly one of the treaties that the US-Biden administration made when they withdrew from Afghanistan is that the Taliban would no longer associate or host with al-Qaeda.

And lo and behold, of course, he was in Kabul and everyone knew it.

So I think that's eye-opening.

But, you know, Ayman Zawahiri, from the start, when you looked at the writings in 2001, and I think this was important to somewhat shift conversations, I think it has slightly.

But in 2001, Western analysts presented al-Qaeda's war and anger and hostility as a product of grievances.

And they did this, one, because that's exactly what Al-Qaeda said it was.

Al-Qaeda, bin Laden and El Zawahiri, at the time, who's chief, who was the chief ideologue before he became the leader when bin Laden died in 2011, whenever they would speak to the West, they would say,

we're doing this to you, attacking you and terrorizing you, because you're attacking and terrorizing Muslims.

And the list went on and on as to how the U.S.

was doing this, whether it was by supporting Israel, whether it was the Kyoto Protocol and harming nature.

Or whether it was blaspheming against Muhammad and hurting Muslim sensibilities.

And the Al-Qaeda Reader book, which really I started working on soon after I graduated in 2005, I believe.

What had happened is at the Library of Congress when I was working there, I had access to lots of Arabic publications, most of which weren't even

catalogued yet.

And I would just for fun go through them.

And I found many writings by Ayman Zawahri, especially who just died, and also Osama bin Laden.

And what I found interesting is they were, because they were written in Arabic and directed to fellow Muslims, Arab readers, they were a completely different story.

They didn't talk about grievances, they sounded more like ISIS.

Let me just stop just for a second to remind everybody that's listening.

So

you're a second-generation immigrant family, and your father and mother immigrated from Egypt.

And I guess we would, if we were to use labels, you were a family of the Coptic faith.

You grew up speaking Arab and then you refined those philological skills with training at the graduate level in Arabic and then you acquired Greek.

So it gives you a unique perspective, especially when you look at past texts, past meaning historical texts that tended to be written in a more, a less colloquial modern day Arabic as well as Greek.

Tell me, fill in the blanks with that description.

Yeah, if you could.

Yeah, that's pretty spot-on.

My parents come from Egypt, and they are of what's called the Coptic background, meaning they're of the indigenous Christian inhabitants.

And the word Coptic itself, I always

has an interesting etymology because it comes from the Greek word agyuptos, which of course you know for Egypt.

And so the Arabs took the middle syllable, aigyupt, and it became pipt.

And now in English, it's translated as Copt.

So really, the word itself means Egyptian.

And it's an indication and a reminder that the Egyptians originally actually were Christians.

It's one of the oldest Christian regions.

So the Copts, of which my family are, yeah, my parents left, making me a second generation.

I was born here in the United States.

And so I grew up, I knew Arabic.

I studied Arabic formally, studied Greek with you.

I also learned other Middle Eastern languages, very elementary skills, mostly Turkish and Persian and so forth, while I was at the Library of Congress.

But yeah, it's really given me access to a whole different world that other people, I don't think, really can look into who are limited to English material, often much of it being propaganda.

You know, I just learned recently, New York Times had featured a...

some op-ed by a man that now we know was working with Ayman Zalakri,

you know, an al-Qaeda propaganda piece, essentially.

So uh yeah that that that um background and also i studied for a time at georgetown university at catholic university but it's allowed me to really delve deep into the history and that's to me has been the most eye-opening revelation about what i call the long war between the west and the islamic world few few people for example understand that

In the seventh century, when Islam came into being,

what you would call the Christian world at the time was all of North Africa and the Middle East and Europe.

But most of it, and there's a very good quote from Bernard Lewis when he says, most, you know, the older, richer, more intellectually active and deeper rooted form of Christianity was in North Africa from modern day Morocco to Egypt and then Syria, Greater Syria and Anatolia, Asia Minor, modern day Turkey.

And all of those in just one century were completely conquered in the name of Islam and slowly and gradually Islamized.

And when you look at how that happened, it happened essentially the way ISIS would do it by conquering infidels, giving them three choices, either convert, which many did because it was the easiest option, or pay a tax jizya and live as a second class citizen

or fight to the death.

And so really, if you think about it, and if you look at maps and other historians have given the statistics, three quarters, think of it, of the Christian world and really the Roman or post-Roman Empire were just swallowed up in the name of Islam.

And very few people in America certainly are aware of this historical fact.

When you mention Egypt or Algeria or Libya or Syria, it's taken for granted that they're Muslim countries and people just seem to think that Islam just somehow just somehow spread there.

It's very peculiar how Islam draws arbitrary lines throughout the historical timeline.

And I guess the operating principle is that once we conquered an area at that moment, it is forever Islamic.

And so even, you know, El Andalus, Spain, but we forget that Islam is

Islam is late into the world in the seventh century and beyond.

So I want to look at the book.

The book again is The Defenders of the West.

And it's based on eight chapters.

And it's roughly, not all, but within a 500-year period, maybe 1,000 to 1,500.

And what you've done is you've taken figures from the West.

I think most people, I think this is a great value of the book, don't know who they are.

We've heard of Duke Jeffrey or the Cid or King Richard, St.

Ferdinand, St.

Louis, John Huniadi, Skanderberg, and then the more controversial Vlad Dracula, but they're either considered

historical figures confined to a particular place or just warrior kings or

characters, but your choice of them thematically seems to be that all of these people at various times were facing Islamic conquest and aggression, and that even though they did not have a lot of resources, I think people should remember that one of the reasons that Islam was so successful, especially

say from 1400 to 1600 or 1700, the West was trisected.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's a fine, that, that's a really important point that people aren't aware.

You know, the Ottoman, as one example, the Ottoman Empire, which, of course, was an Islamic caliphate in essence.

When you read the book, you'll see, and it's amazing the numbers of fighters that they could marshal

easily 100,000, 150,000.

And this is taking into account the exaggeration.

that comes from these primary sources.

But even, yeah, it's

we're going to take a break, Ray, real quick.

But remember, when I say trisected, we're talking about Christendom that's divided eventually by Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy, and then divided as well between East and West, the discovery of the new world that diverted attention, etc., etc.

So we're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more discussion of Defenders of the West.

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We're back with Ray Ibrahim with Defenders of the West.

So these eight people, let me just focus on one that maybe our listeners have heard, the Cid, El Cid, Lord and Master of War.

To what degree was he a dominant role in the reconquest or the Reconquista, we called it?

And we had admiration for all of them, but you know, we usually say that these are illiberal people from our dark western past, but yours is sort of latatory, especially with the case of Sid.

Yeah, And that's because, and I understand exactly what you mean and say, and the latitory approach is because when you understand the context that he was the way he was, which of course would today be

dismissed as toxic masculinity and patriarchy and the rest and racism and so forth.

But when you see what he was really up to, and

it wasn't what you saw in the Charlton Heston movie from the 1960s, which was really a watered-down version.

But El El Sid

and his name, it even shows you the admiration that Arabs had for him.

Because as much of a staunch and fierce fighter who actually terrorized the Moors of

Spain during the Reconquista and the jihad, because it was a back and forth,

they called him Lord.

El Cid comes from El Sayyid in Arabic.

And so that was his moniker.

He was the Lord because he was just that impressive.

And it's also another, to me, it's also another reflection of how, despite so many people in the modern West, think that the more you appease Islamic radicals, the more they will like you.

It's actually the opposite.

They end up having more contempt for you and try to take more advantage.

And that was not the case with the Sid.

So again, we have to remember, and going back to the long history, that in the eighth century, Spain was actually all conquered in the name of Islam and Jihad.

In the year 711, it began, the conquest.

And, you know, the Christians were actually holed up

in the northwest quadrant of Spain,

in the inhospitable mountainous region of the Asturias, very small amount.

And from there, the Reconquista actually began bit by bit to spread back south and fight the Muslims.

And El Cid was certainly a pivotal figure in that.

And it's unfortunate, again, because if you take the secondary accounts that are published about him now, or look at movies, they really minimize the Islamic element.

They show him as a friend of Muslims.

And there is some truth to that, but again, it has to be understood in context and sort of tolerant and all this sort of thing.

Well, when you look at the real sources, yeah, he would be friendly with Muslims, in fact, as long as they were his vassal and were, and putting Muslim kingdoms was actually a strategy in the Reconquista of actually weakening them and bleeding them dry, as was articulated.

In the first two chapters of your book, you sort of set, again, a theme that by quoting original sources, primary sources, not what we think Muslim writers or thinkers or historians or government officials, intellectuals, what we think they thought, you just quoted them.

And

most of them give a very different picture from the present, I think, therapeutic view.

We look back at the past and we say, well,

the Christian Reconquista was intolerant, that

there were exotic gardens, centers of learning, all true throughout Muslim Spain.

North Africa had a renaissance after the Byzantine.

We look at this, but we don't understand what people at the time thought.

And that was that it was a religion of conquest, and it was very unapologetic about the means necessary for those ends.

And Christians tended to be on the periphery of the old Roman Empire, or they were in retreat.

And there was no quarter given in these confrontations.

But now we seem to, it's sort of analogous to wars for the western part of the United States with indigenous people, that we tend to concentrate on the atrocities or the violence used by settlers rather than, you know, that it's not melodrama.

It's tragedy when two different peoples with contrary or antithetical systems of belief, et cetera.

collide.

And so when you read this and you see what Muslims themselves thought and what their agendas were, you get a very different picture than what we see today.

Moving on to King Richard, Ray,

why do you think he didn't take Jerusalem?

And when he, I mean, he was victorious at the Battle of Arsuf.

Was he unable to do it or could he have taken it and not held it?

Or what was surprising?

You actually touched on it earlier.

The vast difference between the First Crusade and Richard's Crusade, which is accounted the third crusade of history, is that in the First Crusade, which did take Jerusalem from the Muslims, you had a very committed and collective effort by many great lords and dukes and counts, including one that I highlight, chapter one, Duke Godfrey of Beyond.

In Richard's case, he was very committed and

he spent a lot via blood and treasure and so forth for Jerusalem, but his own allies turned on him.

And in the end, it was just him alone fighting.

His brother John, of course, notoriously turned on him.

This is, of course, the era where we, you know, the Robin Hood legends and so forth.

And then King Richard finally comes back, but also king uh king philip ii of france who went crusading with richard initially um and they made a pact that they would leave each other's lands alone and then after you know after it got pretty rough in the crusades uh philip packed up and returned to france and then he started trying to absorb richard's lands he even um allied with it with john so they really turned on him and so it's really known that it's because of that that he had to end his crusade short, Richard, and hurry back home while he could still call it home.

And it's really interesting because he, as you mentioned in Arsuf and various other battles that I document in the book, was really terrorizing Saladin, who before this was himself terrorizing the Christians.

And it was, you know, he had really demoralized the Muslims, but he had to leave.

And then three or four months after Richard packed up and left, Saladin died.

So not a few historians have surmised what might have been if this great charismatic Muslim leader had died when Richard was still there doing what he was doing.

Arguably, he would have not only taken Jerusalem, but had an even more, greater impact than the First Crusaders did.

Tell us a little bit about your fourth chapter, Ferdinand of Spain.

We have different contexts.

We remember Ferdinand, but you say Saint Ferdinand, what

Savior of Spain?

So, you know, he's actually a good way to continue El Cid.

El Cid was chapter two of the book, and Ferdinand is chapter four.

And he's basically, whereas I sort of position El Cid at the beginning of the Reconquista, Saint Ferdinand or Ferdinand III of Castile really all but concludes the Reconquista in the year 1248 with the conquest of Seville in the southern portion of Spain.

And what's interesting about him, again, is, you know, So he's a saint, not of my doing, of course.

He was actually what, I think, the only Spanish monarch to ever be given that honorific by the Catholic Church and sainted.

And that is, it's, you know, when you hear that again from a Western secular mentality, you think, well, he must have been a nice, peaceful, charitable sort of man.

And yeah, he was, but really his whole life was dedicated to reconquering Christian Spain from the Islamic yoke.

And just like the Sid, he went through, but because he was a king, he could really marshal so many forces as opposed to the Cid,

who was just a noble.

And he really combined all his forces and just took one Muslim kingdom after another, Cordoba and Seville.

And it's very interesting in the sources to see the elaborate rituals that they would go through, which a lot of modern people

criticize because what they would do is they would take mosques and pour holy water on them and try to exercise them of the demon of Islam and so forth.

But what people don't understand is more often than not, those mosques were originally churches, and Muslims themselves actually began that sort of behavior of trying to cleanse it from being an infidel place of worship.

And

he really had an interesting

personality because he was a student of history.

And in the late 900s, one Muslim leader who was really terrorizing the Christians of the North when they were still hold up actually stole the church bells of Santiago, Saint James, who's the patron saint of Spain, who's known as James Maramoros, James the Moorslayer, which again underscores

the constant fight between Muslim and Christians in Spain.

But Ferdinand, 300 years later, found those bells in Cordoba.

And just as Al Manzura had done, Al Manzura, after taking the bells, he sent them to Cordoba on the backs of Christian slaves.

And so now Ferdinand, to write that wrong, sent the bells back to their shrine on the back of Muslim captives.

So again, you know, by our modern day sensibilities, we can judge that as extremely harsh and so forth.

But I think one of the things that I'm trying to do with the book is really place it in context and show people,

because we always hear how bad the Christians and Europeans were, especially with the Crusade.

But it's always in a vacuum and we're never told, well, what provoked such anger and hostility and violence, what provoked them to travel all the way.

to Jerusalem.

So it's always that's what I tried to show as a balance, trying to show what actually the side had done to create so much rage.

One thing that happened when you get to the sixth and seventh and eighth chapters, that is on John Hanyadi and Skanderberg and Vlad, the theater changed gradually because Islam in the 13th, but especially the 14th and 15th century is now more successfully united than it has ever been under the Ottoman or the Seljuk Turks.

And the famous Greek city of Byzantium that became the famous Roman Constantinople

on Black Tuesday, May 29, 1453, it falls to the Ottomans.

And at that point, within the next 60 years, almost all of Greece, all of Greece, Mistras, the great citadel of Greece, is conquered.

Most of the Balkans, or at least much of the Balkans, come under Ottoman dominance, North Africa.

And we have sort of a uniparty at the time, as I said, there had been this rivalry between Orthodoxy and Catholicism and then the Protestant Revolution, the idea that the way to handle the Ottomans wasn't to go into the Eastern Mediterranean, if you were a Westerner, and fight them to ensure the trade routes in India and China, but to go to this vast new world and sail west.

And any nation that had a Western port.

developed a sophisticated nautical science, went around the Cape of Good Hope or found out that they didn't have to go around the world.

They could hit the New World and it was as rich or richer than India or China.

So my point is that these last three chapters are isolated

regional kings, most of them in eastern parts of Europe, that don't have a lot of resources and they find themselves pitted against the combined power.

of what is now a united Islamic nation almost, a nation in arms, an imperial power.

And it's not just an imperial power, it's imperial power that's absorbed Byzantium and it's inherited a lot of the scientific intellectual traditions that made at one point Constantinople the great city of the ancient world and so it's not as if the odds are even with Richard and Sid and Ferdinand there were some equality of forces or force structure or there was a idea that the West was going into the heart of Islam to reclaim what they considered was Western territory.

But now it's sort of very different dynamic.

It's this huge imperial juggernaut, and there's very few people between that juggernaut and Western Europe except these people in the last three chapters.

Why don't you talk a little bit about any one of them or all three of them, Arre?

Sure, Victor, man, that's a great point.

And again, you know, the Ottoman Empire...

it just and i discussed this and i documented in the book but it was so committed of all its predecessors to the concept of jihad that virtually any Turk

was supposed to be first and foremost a warrior, a mujahid, essentially, or a ghezi, as they would call it.

And the fact that it could become rich and opulent and sophisticated and all that was because they absorbed and bled dry the Christians of the Balkans and used their skills.

So just one famous example would be the Janissaries.

And these were, you know, it was a blood tribute where the Ottomans, whatever subject territories they had conquered, let's say Serbia or

Romania or Albania, they would send their men to take the strongest, the healthiest, and the smartest boys forcibly.

And if the mom or the father interfered, they'd be killed on the spot.

First of all, they'd convert them to Islam forcibly.

And then they would train them as jihadists, as opposed to the ones who were just used for their scientific knowledge and skills and architecture.

They also worked, of course, for the Ottomans in the same capacity.

But the Janissaris were turned into these ferocious, indoctrinated jihadists, essentially.

And they're also, you know, one of recorded history's first examples of Stockholm syndrome, because all they were were kidnapped children, you know, wrested from their mother's bosom, who were turned into Islamic terrorists.

And then they were released back at their families when the time was ripe.

to conquer and more territory and extrapolate more wealth and children and resources and continue the cycle.

So the Ottoman Empire became a massive juggernaut, as you say, and it because it existed entirely on the principles of jihad.

And everyone there was a

every capable

Turk was a jihadist.

And I have to emphasize that this isn't my own words.

This is how they describe it in their own texts.

Sometimes I feel when I use the word jihadist in a historical context, it seems that people think this is, I'm sort of anachronizing that the people back then, Ottomans or whatever, were certainly fighters and plunderers, but they weren't so committed to the concept or the doctrinal underpinnings of Islamic jihad, but they actually were.

And that comes out from their own writings and their own sources.

Yeah, I think that's an important point.

That

we in the West, I guess Barack Obama said it was overseas contingency operations, and he tried to borrow the word jihadist and terrorist.

But and remember the attack on forthwith, it was workplace violence.

So, besides the euphemism, the anachronisms are not committed by Western observers because the Islamic radicals of today don't really see it's an anachronism.

They see jihad as a word of pride and traditional Muslim history that reflects well on Islam.

And so when they say they're Islamic jihad or they're a jihadist, What they're really saying is they're in line with or in sympathy with or the natural inheritors of all of these people who have been fighting some of the people in your book since the seventh century.

And they feel that the dream of a world of Islam has been unrealized.

And in the modern world, maybe for all of the advantages of the West, they feel that they have certain advantages or martial superiority or religious intensity lacking in a secular agnostic West.

So my point is that for us to say he's a jihadist or they're Islamicist or they they wanted to kill you is considered inflammatory, but not all people in the Muslim world, but for a large number, they feel that this is just an inevitable and continuous, kind of an insidious struggle.

And I think that's important to point out.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more discussion of Defenders of the West.

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We're back with Ray Ibrahim with Defenders of the West.

I had not heard until I read your book, tell us about the White Knight of Wallachia.

Yeah, that's John Hunyadi.

Sure, John Hunyadi, another important figure that I profile in chapter six.

So basically, he's born in Transylvania.

And as I tell you this story,

he may remind you of someone else, a more contemporary political figure.

But he's born in Transylvania of the minor nobility.

And through just great feats of arms and so forth, he and his family rise up in the ranks and echelons and become pretty wealthy.

And then he becomes a captain for the Hungarians and works with the Hungarians and for the Hungarian kingdom.

And he really spearheads a counter against the Ottomans in a way that shocks them because his whole idea and his whole logic revolved around the concept of taking the war to the Turks instead of doing what most Europeans did then, which is wait for them to come, attack them, and then they would go into a defensive posture.

So he would constantly go, he did what was called in history the long campaign, where he actually, with the Hungarians and another coalition, started their campaign, I think, in November, and it went on until January and February, where no one, you know, at a time when no one campaigns because it's winter and there's snow and so forth.

And he completely just terrorized the Turks to the point that they actually sued for peace, which was unexpected.

At any rate, what's interesting about this.

I'm just asking you a question because I think a lot of people,

because this is in a pre-I don't want to say pre-nation circumstance, but it's pre-what we see as the traditional boundaries and borders of Eastern Europe.

So when we say he was born into Transylvania, would we classify him linguistically as a Romanian or what is his family?

I'm glad you bring that up.

Or Hungarian or I know that a lot of people he wouldn't.

Yeah, this is a contentious issue.

Yes, it is.

It's a very contentious issue.

And I can't really, I haven't even gotten to the bottom of it.

All I know is he was born in Transylvania, which is part of Romania today, but apparently was not.

That wasn't necessarily the case

back in Hunyadi's day.

So all the Hungarians will tell you he's Hungarian.

And then you'll have some Romanians say, no, he's actually one of our guys.

So I tried to stay away from that when writing about it.

I just gave the facts where he was born.

And

yeah, that's a very, it's funny because, I mean,

so many of these resistance fighters reflect the fragmentation of the Balkans.

And,

I mean, it's sort of a Roman strategy that the Ottomans incorporate divide and conquer.

And throughout these pages, these last chapters, there's all of these major figures that are resisting Islam.

But on the other hand, even members of their own family have, I guess we'd say, cut deals with invaders or they're given principalities.

given their service to the Ottomans.

And those fault lines, as we know, from Montenegro and Albania and Serbia

and Kosovo and Macedonia, they exist today.

And a lot of it goes back, way, way back, this accusation that you people, you committed atrocities against Muslims that were working or allied with Ottomans or you converted and we didn't.

It's a very complex menu.

And that's really to understand the mess.

I don't want to say mess in the pejorative, but the complexity of the Balkans, you have to really go back to the 15th or 16th century.

And your last chapters reflect a lot of these figures, whether it's Vlad or Anyadi, is that a simplistic analysis, say that half of their time was spent fighting other Christians or other appeasers or other people that were ambiguous about what they were doing?

No, not at all.

You know, first you had the Catholic Orthodox divide, which was there from the Middle Ages.

And then it really got exasperated with

the Protestant Reformation.

Then you really had three different entities fighting.

But I'm actually going to quote you in the foreword to the book, because I think this is an interesting point that touches on what you're saying.

You wrote, I quote, I once asked a middle-aged Greek friend why he harbored such hostility to Roman Catholicism in Western Europe.

Without hesitation, he answered, we paid the price for keeping the Turks out of Western Europe.

By we, he meant that fellow Greeks of 500 years past were near living entities.

By price, he inferred the now less dynamic economies of the frontline nations of Eastern Europe.

And that's actually absolutely true.

Much of the West really turned its back on Eastern Europe and the Balkans with what they were going through, whether it was at the hands of the Ottomans and more frequently than not, also the Tatars and the Mongols, the Islamized Mongols, who really surrounded Northeast Europe and Russia and those Slavic regions.

I think that's a good point.

When I was 20, I moved to Greece and was there a year, then later another year, and then probably off and on over the last 30 years, probably a combined time of six months to a year.

And when you're in Eastern Europe or Southern Europe, you get an entire different perspective that people feel very deeply that

the stereotype Western or Northwestern European or Americans from that area have never given them.

And it came up kind of in the Euro crisis, the monetary crisis of the so-called pigs.

That was Portugal and Spain and Greece.

I know Ireland was one of them, but it was that divide.

And you're seeing it today again, a little bit with German, the Deutsche Bank and the pipeline and Russia.

All of these complexities and divides, there's something there that the Eastern and Southern Europeans will try to say that we were on the front lines with Islam.

We were not able to have an Atlantic port.

We were locked within the Mediterranean.

Yes, we were still using galleys in the 15th century while you were sailing to the new world, but we did that because we didn't have an Atlantic for and we had this huge Ottoman presence that was constantly probing and looking for weaknesses.

We had some winds at Malta or Lepanto, but it was still get to Vienna, get to the West.

And we stopped them.

And that has been unduly appreciated.

So it's coming up today when Erdogan has been openly bragging about,

at least idealistically, he thinks he's reconfigurating the Ottoman Empire.

And he said that some of the Dodecanese islands, of which 70, 80 overflights a day occur by Turkish planes, that they really,

in essence, are Turkish and should be Turkish and should return to Turkey someday, as they were, he says, for 400 years, forgetting, of course, that they were Greek from time eternal before that.

And so this attitude is not as crazy as we in the West that dismiss it.

I know that a lot of people in the West would go to Greece, diplomats, journalists, they say, wow, these people are just so weird.

They're so paranoid about Muslims or they're 96% Orthodox or they don't want to go to Turkey or they're always telling NATO don't trust Turkey or they're just you can't even discuss Cyprus with them, the Cyprus incident.

For them, that brings back not just history, but family lore going back generations to the

not even generations, 1920, 21, when the great idea, the megal idea evaporated we're getting close to running out of time ray but we didn't get to everybody i just wanted to do two things before we end and one because i know that dracula is such a popular figure in american film and literature ever since bram stroker's novel so why don't you just give us three or four minutes if that's possible what

When we say Dracula,

we're talking about Vlad the Impaler, and to what degree is there any historical basis for what later became this literary figure?

Sure, Victor.

So Vlad the Impaler was in fact an impaler, and he impaled lots of people, mostly Muslims and Turks

in their wars, as I show in the book.

And, you know, so he definitely did that and engaged in cruelty.

But again, it's all presented in a vacuum.

And what we're not told is that he, too, like Skanderbeg, was abducted in his youth and kept hostage under the Ottomans, where he actually learned all about impaling, because the ones who really perfected the art of impalement were the Ottomans, especially Muhammad II or Mahmet II.

So, and even other Wallachians engaged in impalement.

So, the idea, it's not that what he did was strange, but rather it was used as propaganda against him by his enemies, because at the time of all this was happening is when the printing press came out.

And some of the first printed material literature of our time is actually all these tracts that were dedicated to demonizing him, calling him a bloodsucker and so forth.

But again, these were politically motivated propaganda.

So that's, and because of that, you know,

Bram Stoker in the early 20th century or late 19th,

he wrote the, you know, the Dracula novel.

He just used that name of Vlad Tepes, slapped it on the antagonist of his novel because he believes he drinks blood and so forth.

But in the book, you'll see that Vlad really falls within a pattern that begins all the way with chapter one with Godfrey, which is he was fighting for his faith, for his culture, for his nation, for his civilization against an implacable foe who was also ideologically driven, the Ottomans.

And he just was fighting fire with fire, as far as I can see.

Just to finish then, I mean, what are you working on now?

And are you going to continue this defenders of the West, say, from I don't know, 1500 up to the modern period?

Or what are you going in different directions?

Why don't we just tell our listeners what

I think there's a dearth of information, historical and otherwise, about the colonial era and the true interaction.

Once again, we're given

the one side, which is Muslims and non-Muslims who are under colonial influence or have grievances and they're angry and they're upset.

And really, again,

it's the exact opposite.

Oftentimes, the greatest prosperity and wealth and general well-being in Muslim nations was during the colonial era.

Even Muslims themselves from that era will say that.

So I might be able to do that.

So when you say colonial, you mean the period French and British colonialism, say, from 1700 all the way up until post-World War II period in places like North Africa or

the Middle East.

Basically, I started at 1800 with Napoleon in Egypt.

Yeah, and just go from there.

You know, before we leave, I'd like to actually leave you with a quote that's in the book from U.S.

President Theodore Teddy Roosevelt, just to really, you know, let your audience understand.

I mean, he was actually a historian, as I'm sure you know.

Very well, very good,

a very good historian.

And look, here's what he writes: and I quote, Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought.

If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries and on up to, and including the 17th century, had not possessed a military equality with and gradually a growing superiority over the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this very moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated.

Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared.

And he's spot on.

And in my book, I think that's what I try to show.

Those Europeans who fought back and gave it their all, including their lives, as most of the guys that I profile really die in their 40s and 50s, even though they were kings and lords who had much to live for.

Well, thank thank you very much, Ray.

Ibrahim, it's Raymond Ibrahim.

The book is Defenders of the West, the Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam.

I think anybody who reads this or his prior work, Sword and Scimitar, 14 Centuries of War Between Islam and the West, will get a very different picture than something like Kingdom of Heaven or a popular movie.

Karen Armstrong.

Yes, yes, or probably what you would find in the op-ed pages.

It's a different view, but it's a view based on close reading of Arab and Greek text in the historical context, as well as collation of modern Arabic literature and propaganda and pamphleteering coming out of the Middle East without any apologies for, I guess I would call it, an Islamic chauvinistic point of view, that one that doesn't seem to find its way into English-speaking or English print areas as much as we think it should.

And so whether it's history or present day, Raymond Ibrahim has tried to use his philological background, linguistics ability, his knowledge of the area itself, and try to bring text to the Western audiences, both historical and contemporary, and try to show them, not in a chauvinistic way, I don't think, and I've known you, Ray, and I've read everything you've written, but try to explain to people that it's not politically incorrect, it's not racist, it's not ethnocentric simply to try to put Islam in a context of a war of ambition and aggression against non-Muslims, especially in the West.

It's not to say that there's not modern secular people in the Middle East, or there's not modern Muslims who are no more like 15th century Islam than, say, Christians are like 15th century Christians.

But I think that the texts that Ray presents to us, contemporary again, and ancient, show us that there's a far greater number of people in the Middle East who believe that classical Islam or pre-modern Islam is a force in their life than is true of Christianity.

And there's a fundamental difference between the message of the Sermon on the Mount and the message of Jihad.

And with that, thank everybody for listening and thank you, Ray, for appearing with us.

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