By Raymond Ibrahim – Coptic Solidarity –
Muslim clerics have become remarkably adept at rewriting Islamic history. Faced with a Western audience that prizes individual liberty and human rights, they increasingly refashion Islam’s early military expansion into a kind of seventh-century humanitarian NGO mission — a myth as historically untenable as it is intellectually insulting.
The latest example comes from Egyptian sheikh, Khaled El-Gendy, a member of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, who recently proclaimed that Islam’s sweeping jihadist conquests were “not for expansion,” but “in defense of human freedom and the human right to choose.”
El-Gendy’s presentation begins with a textbook example of what can only be described as Orwellian inversion. He cites Muhammad’s famous ultimatum to the Byzantine governor of Egypt — “Submit and you will be safe, otherwise you will bear the sin of the Copts” — as evidence of Islam’s concern for “human freedom.” That this threat — using a variation (eslam teslam) on Islam — is held up as a model of liberty is astonishing. The letter is not an invitation to religious self-determination but a coercive demand: accept Islam—or else.
If this is a blueprint for “human rights,” then words have lost their meaning.
Back in the real world, for well over a millennium, Muslim historians never dissembled the nature of Islam’s conquests. They celebrated them. They recorded the vast booty, the slaves, the tribute, the rapid expansion of the Dar al-Islam “by the sword,” and the humiliation of conquered peoples—all as “proof” that God was on their side. Only in the modern era, under the gaze of Western humanists, do clerics like El-Gendy suddenly pretend the conquests were defensive struggles conducted in the name of “universal dignity.”
That narrative collapses immediately under historical scrutiny. When the Islamic armies burst out of Arabia around 636 AD, they brutally conquered — in a single century — more territory than Rome acquired in five centuries. From Spain to India, cities fell, populations were enslaved, churches were seized or destroyed, and local peoples were subjugated under the now-infamous Conditions of Omar, which reduced Christians and Jews to second-class status. These dhimmis were forbidden to bear arms, forbidden to build new churches, forbidden to publicly practice their faith. They lived under a crushing poll tax — the jizya — levied precisely because they refused to convert and were even required to give up their seats if Muslims demanded them.
This is not human “freedom” or “dignity.” This is engineered submission and inequality backed by the threat of violence.
The same applies to El-Gendy’s invocation of the Abyssinian migration. Yes, early Muslims fled to Christian Ethiopia — precisely because the Christian king offered them protections which competing tribes in Arabia did not provide. Ethiopia’s tolerance is a credit to Christianity, not Islam. The irony of using Christian mercy as proof of Islamic humanitarianism would be laughable if it weren’t so brazen.
Such dishonesty concerning Islamic expansion is hardly new. Fifteen years ago, I responded to an even more brazen claim—also by an Egyptian cleric: that Egypt’s Coptic who were conquered by the early Islamic armies were not really Christians at all, but “proto-Muslims” just waiting to be liberated. The argument was absurd then; it is no less absurd now.
More importantly: these Christians never asked for liberation. They resisted it — with their lives, their blood, and their testimony. The chronicles of the era overflow with accounts of resistance, martyrdom, and pleas for outside help. Conquered Christians did not welcome the advancing armies as brothers in monotheism. The oldest Christian chronicle by John of Nikiou — a Coptic bishop who lived in Egypt during Islam’s invasion – is riddled with bloodshed, suffering, and resistance from the Copts against their supposed “brothers in monotheism.”
That El-Gendy and others now describe these episodes as “defending freedom” is both insulting and historically grotesque.
Furthermore, El-Gendy, like all modern apologists, clings to the verse “There is no compulsion in religion” as if it cancels out the entire body of Islamic jurisprudence on jihad, conquest, and the treatment of non-Muslims. He omits the well-established fact — known to classical Muslim exegetes, and no doubt known to him — that this verse was considered abrogated by later, more militant verses, such as Koran 9:5 and 9:29.
Why, then, do influential clerics like El-Gendy engage in intellectual gymnastics? Because the truth is unsellable today. The conquest tradition, proud and unembarrassed in the classical sources, is incompatible with modern ideals. And so it must be reinterpreted, smoothed over, sanitized, and dressed up in the language of human “rights” and “dignity.”
Even so, this brand of fake history continues to achieve its goal: fooling Western people who know nothing about Islamic history. Meanwhile, past and present Muslims would and could not recognize the watered-down version of history El-Gendy and his ilk peddle.
In the end, the facts speak for themselves:
- Non-Muslim populations—including Egypt’s most indigenous group, the Christian Copts—were invaded, defeated, and subjugated.
- Those who survived were taxed, restricted, and humiliated into conversion.
- Churches were destroyed or repurposed; Christian public life was suppressed.
- The conquests spread not human rights, but a brutal empire.
To present any of this as a defense of “freedom,” “equality” or “human rights” is to replace history with fantasy.
