(Part 1)
By Abu Umair al‑Afghani
The West, whose majority population has historically been Jewish and Christian, and whose governance from its inception to the present has largely been controlled by these two groups, aligned itself against Islam from the very emergence of the religion. Throughout history, it has waged intellectual, military, economic, and intelligence-based battles against Islam. Since the conflict between the West and Islam has a long historical background, we will skip most of the detailed explanations and mention it only briefly.
At the time of the emergence of Islam, when the West was still under the shadow of the Church, Christian popes and feudal lords considered poor people as their slaves, to the extent that they could not even marry without permission. Landlords had the right to spend the first night with a peasant’s wife instead of the husband, and the popes of the Church held absolute authority. They sold “tickets to heaven” to the people and decided at their discretion who would enter heaven and who would go to hell. They considered themselves direct representatives of God and exempt from all forms of punishment. No one had the right to question them.
Similarly, feudal lords and landowners were also exempt from punishment, women were considered the embodiment of Satan’s spirit, and some even claimed that women were not human and had no soul. The order of life in the West had completely collapsed. Slaves, women, and the poor had no rights, and they were regarded even worse than animals. The popes would condemn people to fiery punishments, and every word of the pope was, God forbid, considered the word of God.
When Islam emerged in the Hijaz like the rising sun, the Christian popes were deeply frightened by its radiance. They realized that Islam posed a direct threat to their personal interests and authority, so they committed themselves to opposing it. But why did they choose enmity against Islam?
Because Islam declared that all human beings have equal rights, there is no distinction between the ruler and the poor. Popes are not absolute rulers, and people have the right to question them. Orphans, slaves, and women are also human beings with rights. The authority over heaven and hell belongs solely to Allah, and no one can sell Heaven to others. In short, Islam proclaimed that popes and scholars are human too; if they commit a crime, they must face punishment like everyone else, and they cannot burn people in fire according to their own whims.
The truths of Islam exposed all the lies of the Christian popes, the aristocracy, and the feudal lords, and they blocked their unjust actions. That is why they began their enmity against Islam. In the early days of Islam, the Christians relied solely on force, they wanted to destroy Islam by the sword and erase its name and symbols. In their view, Islam was a group that had to be eliminated. Yet, despite their military efforts, Islam continued to spread. They waged the Crusades and carried out military invasions, but the result was zero, they achieved nothing except defeat.
Later, they realized that Islam was not merely a group, but a religion and a system of thought, and it could not be easily destroyed. Therefore, they adopted new strategies:
1. Propaganda and intellectual warfare
2. Military invasions
3. Intelligence warfare
4. Economic warfare
If we look at history, the West achieved its greatest success against Islam through intellectual and intelligence warfare. When they realized that it was not the bodies of Muslims, but their minds that needed to be broken, they turned to intellectual and intelligence strategies.
In the mid-12th and 13th centuries, when Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi captured Jerusalem, both Jews and Christians realized that the strength of Muslims lay not in weapons, but in their faith and ideology. At the beginning of the 13th century, the Westerners introduced a new and dangerous concept known as the Orientalists. They launched a project to study Islam, examining the Qur’an, Hadith, jurisprudence, and history in detail.