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On this day 1,294 years ago Charles Martel led a Frankish army that defeated a Muslim army crossing from conquered Spain into France. Without his leadership, his consolidation of Frankish power and building a highly trained, disciplined army, there would have been no stopping a Muslim invasion of a divided Europe. Historian Edward Gibbon:
A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.
In his taped rants from his various hideouts, Osama bin Laden often decried the loss of Andalusia under the rubric of waqf, that conquered lands and peoples can never be free of Muslim rule and whatever was done to subject peoples was beyond reproach if done in the name of jihad. Western peoples invariably reject ancestral practices such as colonialism and the slave trade. Muslims do not regret or condemn the destruction of tens of thousands of churches, synagogues, temples and shrines. Nor do they feel any Western-style collective guilt for the enslavement of fourteen million across Europe, North Africa and Central Asia and ten million sub-Saharan Africans any more than they currently condemn Nigerian massacres of Christians, persecution of Egyptian and Pakistani Christians nor even Janjaweed Arab slave raids in Sudan.
Multiculturalist eloi refuse to acknowledge the existence of a struggle that has never ended. The presumptions of freedom, diversity of belief and sexual equality are a mortal threat to militant Islam, which has never ceased its hostility to our civilization nor found a way to reform and adapt to a world that has left the eighth century behind forever.
Discussion (14)
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Although there might be another candidate for "Most Important Battle Ever" that we ought to consider (Lepanto, Oct. 7 1571, perhaps?) I find myself in agreement with the underlying thesis of the OP.
I disagree with Gibbon; The Koran would never be taught at Oxford, or any similar university, because Dar al-Islam has never produced such institutions of higher learning or systematic study. Even at it's zenith, the Caliphate was never able to produce the learning communities that evolved into Universities.
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Funny that I didn't think about their invasion never really ending. It's been going on for centuries, and if they have their way, it will continue.
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I would rank Lepanto a notch behind the victorious end to the siege of Vienna. If Yarmuk had gone the other way, Islam's advance may have been stymied altogether.
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Here is an article by Raymond Ibrahim about Martel's victory: Christians Save Western Civilization From Islam—to Hitler's Dismay.
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Vienna was actually my first choice, but neither would have happened but for Tours in A.D. 732.
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