PrintMay 5, 2005
Jihad begot the Crusades (2)
[Part 1 of this article can be found here]
Jihad conquests and early Muslim rule in Syro—Palestine
Moshe Gil, in his seminal analysis A History of Palestine, 634—1099, emphasizes the singular centrality that Palestine occupied in the mind of its pre—Islamic Jewish inhabitants, who referred to the land as 'al—Sham.' Indeed, as Gil observes, the sizable Jewish population in Palestine (who formed a majority of its inhabitants, when grouped with the Samaritans) at the dawn of the Arab Muslim conquest were '...the direct descendants of the generations of Jews who had lived there since the days of Joshua bin Nun, in other words for some 2000 years...'. [42] He also explodes the ahistorical thesis of scholars who, [43]
...perceive an ethnic motivation behind the [jihad] conquests. They see Arabs everywhere: even the Canaanites and the Philistines were Arabs, according to their theories. This applies to an even greater degree to the population of Palestine and Syria...(Read Full Article)
