The West Learned From Defeat. So Must Islamic Civilization.

Shmuel Klatzkin

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Three gentlemen in Istanbul/Ottoman empire circa 1900, shortly before defeat in WWI (Istanbulphotos/Shutterstock)

Hebrew Scripture has many accounts of great victories, such as Joshua’s conquest of the Holy Land and King David’s many successful battles against his enemies all around. But its pages are also filled with accounts of defeat, destruction and exile.

All are part of sacred history. The Biblical texts teach defeat was a result of our own failings, whatever else might be going on. Conquerors like Nebuchadnezzar are not excused, but our first responsibility is not their evil, but our own.

The Abraham Accords give real hope that we all may choose life .. and so help the cults of victimhood … die a swift, painless, and, natural death.

Why should the Bible not focus on the greater evil of the Babylonian emperor? It is because it is teaching us a great lesson — even in defeat, one still has agency that no conqueror can ever take away. Even in defeat, we justify what happened as an act of Providence from which we may recover and even gain if we learn its hard truth. The alternative is to be stuck in rationalizations and excuses that keep us subservient to something other than truth and truth’s Author.

The late Professor Bernard Lewis pointed out that defeat and persecution were suffered in the formative years of the Jewish and Christian faith communities. Lewis compared this to Islamic history. Islam knew only victory for nearly a century after its founding. It established an empire that stretched eastward, northward, and westward from its birthplace in the Arabian Peninsula, until it stretched all across northern Africa and into Europe. Only there, after a hundred years, was its expansion decisively checked for the first time at Tours, France.

This proved only a breathing spell. Islam survived the brief setback at Tours and later of the Crusades. It recouped from its loss in the Holy Land and went on to expel the Christian kingdom from there. By the middle of the 15th century, the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople and ended the Roman Empire that had been officially Christian for more than a thousand years. Constantinople became the home of the caliphate and the conquering Ottoman armies forged on ever deeper into the middle of Europe until it was, at last, twice turned back at the gates of Vienna, in 1529 and again in 1683.