Jihad: The Hunt That Never Ended

In the year 630, Prince Ukaydir was celebrating his 35th birthday when he rode out from Dumat al-Jandal for an early-morning hunt, carrying only a light spear and bow. A Christian Arab prince and ally of Byzantium, he led his brother and his most trusted retainers, men who had hunted with him since childhood.

The desert was cool with oryx grazing in the half-light, as dawn stained the horizon. This ride should have affirmed Ukaydir’s strength and his command of the terrain that encircled his principality. Instead, Ukaydir was the one being hunted.

Weeks earlier, Muhammad had commissioned Khalid ibn al‑Walid (the “Sword of Allah”) to bring Dumat al‐Jandal under Islamic control, securing the northern trade routes into the Arabian Peninsula, and Khalid’s scouts had shadowed Ukaydir’s movements. Before dawn, hidden riders took up position on the ridgelines, and, just as Ukaydir raised his spear toward a grazing oryx, the horizon erupted in hoofbeats. Khalid’s cavalry descended like a storm, cutting off every escape path.

Bound and brought before Khalid, Ukaydir was offered a choice: conversion, death, or dhimmitude, a covenant of surrender that permitted survival under a legal code of subservience and humiliation.

Khalid took Ukaydir’s robe, his ornaments, and his sword as trophies, then sent him to Muhammad in Medina. There, the Prophet ordered his release in exchange for tribute. Ukaydir agreed to pay the annual jizyah on behalf of his people, and to dismantle the crosses that adorned the churches of Dumat al-Jandal.

The prince returned home stripped of sovereignty, his city a frontier post of the caliphate, and its tribute a symbol of subordination.

For the region’s non-Muslim communities, this event foreshadowed a new phase of conquest, and the hunting of infidels would never end.

After the Arab conquests, Islam’s expansion carried it across the Middle East and North Africa, through Spain into France, and all the way in the east to Vienna. The Crusades were not an unprovoked assault on a “religion of peace,” but a coordinated response to centuries of invasion and enslavement. Before the Crusades, Islam was invading Europe from both ends and seemed prepared to tighten the noose.

We forget today that the Middle East and North Africa were once overwhelmingly Christian. The decline occurred through conquest, discrimination, social coercion, and, of course, violence. Under Islamic rule, Christians were permitted to exist, but only if they paid special taxes. They were subjected to rules of humiliation, and violence against them was common. 

Islam sent the message that Christian men are subhumans whose wives could be raped “as that which the right hand possess[es]” (Qur’an 4:24), whose sons would convert to avoid the fate of their fathers, and whose daughters would be made to “marry bearded men” (a policy reflected in works such as al-Mawardi’s Ahkam al-Sultaniyya and noted by Evliya Çelebi’s Travels).

Under the Ottomans, Christian numbers collapsed over time.

In Iraq, just this century, Christians numbered roughly one and a half million; today, fewer than 150,000 remain. In Syria, entire Christian communities once shaped whole cities; today, their population is estimated to be just 300,000.

Turkey entered the twentieth century with a population that was about one-fifth Christian; today, they account for less than one quarter of 1%. Egypt, which historically had a Christian majority, now retains a Coptic minority of about 10%.

North Africa produced Augustine and some of the greatest thinkers of early Christianity. It is now almost entirely Muslim. From Morocco to Libya, the indigenous Christian populations were targeted, generation by generation, until they vanished. By the time European colonialism returned a temporary Christian presence in the nineteenth century, the original communities had been gone for centuries.

In Iraq and Syria, the rise of the Islamic State emptied entire Christian towns. Families who had traced their faith straight back to the Apostles fled. 

In Iran, conversion to Christianity is illegal. Yousef Nour was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for attending a home church and owning Christian literature. His wife Zahra was fired from her job for refusing to reveal fellow believers. Their children were taken away after authorities confiscated their home. 

Such stories are common. Hundreds of Iranian Christians now worship in secret, knowing that a single knock on the door could end in prison, or death.

In August of 2023, two Christian men in the Pakistani city of Jaranwala were accused of defiling a Qur’an. Within hours, mobs swept through Christian neighborhoods, burning churches and homes. Twenty-six churches were destroyed and hundreds of families fled. One teacher, Shazia, hid under a bed with her children as rioters set fire to her home. She later said “the men outside were laughing as they chanted that this was Allah’s justice.” Few attackers were ever held accountable.

In Egypt, persecution takes both violent and institutional forms. On Palm Sunday of 2017, two coordinated bombings struck Coptic cathedrals in Tanta and Alexandria. More than 40 people were killed as they gathered to celebrate one of their holiest days. A 10-year-old altar boy named Mina died wearing his white robe, proud to serve God. 

While such terror attacks are vivid, the everyday discrimination faced by Egyptian Christians is relentless: abductions, forced conversions, and attacks go unpunished. Coptic families report that building or repairing churches is often blocked by local officials, permits denied or delayed for years.

Across the Islamic, world these stories repeat. In Nigeria, Christians are targeted by Boko Haram and Fulani militants who burn churches and massacre worshippers. In Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen, the few Christians who remain live entirely in secrecy. 

Islamic societies have historically tolerated Christians only as long as they remain silent, hidden, and submissive. Those who speak their faith aloud risk their homes, their freedom, and often their lives.

Though Christians were relegated to second-class status under the dhimmi laws, Jews were often treated even more harshly. From the earliest Islamic expansions, Jewish communities found themselves caught in a cycle of forced submission, mass expulsions, and outright slaughter. 

In 627, much of the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza was annihilated in Medina after refusing to convert; the men were executed, and, after a siege at Khaibar a year later, the rest of the tribe surrendered and the women and children were enslaved. This event set a precedent that echoed through subsequent centuries: Jewish existence would be tolerated only at the pleasure of their rulers.

Across North Africa, the Middle East, and the Iberian Peninsula, Jews endured alternating periods of conditional tolerance and sudden violence. 

The so-called “Golden Age” of Spain, often romanticized today, was pockmarked with massacres such as the pogrom of Granada in 1066, when a Muslim mob crucified the Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and slaughtered around 4,000 Jews in a single day. 

In Yemen, Jews were periodically forced to convert, forbidden to build synagogues, and compelled to wear distinguishing garments long before similar degrading codes appeared in Europe. The notorious 1679 expulsion decree, the Mawza Exile, drove thousands of Yemenite Jews from their homes into the desert. Many died on this death march.

In Morocco, Jewish populations were repeatedly confined to mellahs (walled ghettos), where they lived at the mercy of local rulers. Violent outbreaks such as the Tétouan massacres (1790–1792) left entire communities devastated. In Persia, Jews suffered forced conversions under the Safavid dynasty, and, well into the nineteenth century, Jewish girls could be seized by Muslim men for marriage against their will, without recourse.

The trend continued into the modern era. When Israel declared independence in 1948, nearly 900,000 Jews lived across the Islamic world. Within a single generation, roughly 99% of them had been killed, expelled, dispossessed, or forced to flee. Ancient communities in Baghdad, Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis disappeared.

Chants of “From the river to the sea” terrify Jewish people based on a history that taught them—certainly the descendants of those expelled—exactly what Islamic supremacy means for their survival. They have experienced it for more than 13 centuries.

In every region where Islam becomes dominant, Christian and Jewish communities are destroyed, and Hindu civilization has perhaps suffered more from jihad than any other people on earth. 

Beginning in the eighth century, wave after wave of Islamic invasions tore through the Indian subcontinent. Historian Will Durant called the Islamic conquest of India “probably the bloodiest story in human history,” taking perhaps 80 million lives between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries.

The early raids of Muhammad bin Qasim in Sindh, the brutal campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni, and later the Ghurid invasions left vast regions depopulated. Ghazni alone destroyed hundreds of Hindu temples, including the sacred site of Somnath, whose defenders were slaughtered and whose idol was smashed and taken back to Afghanistan as a trophy of victory. 

Chroniclers from the era record massacres so large that corpses clogged rivers and turned fields to ash.

Under the Delhi Sultanate, Hindu populations were subjected to forced conversions, mass enslavement, and systematic destruction of their sacred architecture. Entire regions saw the abolition of local customs under threat of death. The jizyah was imposed with maximum humiliation, sometimes collected by forcing Hindus to present themselves barefoot before tax collectors.

The invasion campaigns of Timur (1398–1399) were catastrophic. His own writings in the Tuzk-i-Timuri brag about killing 100,000 Hindus in a single day. The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb later oversaw the tearing down of thousands of temples, replacing some with mosques constructed using the original stones. His reinstitution of the jizyah and enforcement of Sharia brought one of the largest non-Muslim populations in the world under a regime of fear and coercion.

Many Hindu communities see modern Islamist movements, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and ISIS-inspired cells as continuations of the same historical pattern: a civilizational struggle between jihadist expansionism and a culture that has fought to survive it for over 1,200 years.

We think of intifada as a “struggle” against Israel, and even when we hear “Globalize the Intifada,” we think of it as anti-Semitic.

The word intifadah—a product of Yasser Arafat’s meticulous KGB training—means “uprising,” “rebellion,” or “shaking off,” and it can describe any revolt against perceived oppression, corruption, or occupation, regardless of who the target is. This has, of course, been used against Israel, but intifada is more than that.

Many Islamic scholars define “oppression” based on whether or not societies submit to Allah’s law. Sayyid Qutb, in Milestones, wrote that “when, in a society, the sovereignty belongs to Allah alone, expressed in its obedience to the Shari‘ah… only then is every person in that society free from servitude to others.”

Abul A‘la Maududi echoed the same: “If an Islamic society consciously resolves not to accept the Shari‘a, and decides to enact its own constitution and laws… such a society breaks its contract with God and forfeits its right to be called Islamic.” This framework, shared by movements like Hizb ut-Tahrir, judges the legitimacy of nations solely by their conformity to Sharia. From this perspective, every secular or non-Islamic government, whether in Europe, North America, Asia, or the Muslim world, is viewed as a realm of unbelief (kufr) to be “shaken off.”

And it is not only Christians, Jews, and Hindus who have endured this. 

Buddhists saw their monasteries burned from Afghanistan to Bengal. Yazidis have suffered more than 70 genocidal campaigns, the most recent at the hands of ISIS between 2014 and 2017. Persian Zoroastrians were nearly erased from the land of their birth. Sikhs in India arose in direct resistance to Islamic persecution. Animist communities across Africa are slaughtered by Boko Haram and ISIS affiliates. The pattern is not regional, ethnic, or even political. Jihad is best understood as civilizational conquest. 

Wherever jihad becomes ascendant, religious diversity collapses, and ancient peoples vanish. Every religion but Islam is hunted and slaughtered like wild game. “Globalize the intifada” means “globalize Islam.”

The hunt continues through Europe today, where Islamic scholars and imams claim to be “oppressed” by the corrupt governments of Germany, France, England, Canada, Australia, and various other countries around the Western world. Modern militancy makes the era of spears and ridgelines look like a relic from the past, but the hunt against Christians, Jews, and Hindus does not stop. Open acts of terrorism, whether with knives, vehicles, or bombs, are becoming increasingly common.

Father Jacques Hamel, an 85-year-old Catholic priest, was murdered on July 26, 2016, while celebrating morning Mass at his parish church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen in France. Two men, Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean, both 19-years-old, stormed the church, taking the small congregation hostage. They forced Father Hamel to kneel at the altar and slit his throat, killing him in front of two nuns and several parishioners. The Islamic State later claimed responsibility, calling the attackers its “soldiers.”

During the 2015–2016 New Year’s celebrations in Cologne, over 1,200 women were sexually assaulted by mobs of mostly North African and Middle Eastern men. In most cases, the men would form a wall around the victim, force her to the ground, and take turns gang raping her.

A German federal investigation found the attackers acted from a collective belief in “male entitlement” and “contempt for Western women.” Western women now count as “that which the right hand possess[es].” Raping them is seen as forcing them to submit, and is exalted (Qur’an 4:24 and 23:5–6).

An English parliamentary debate noted that, “In Rotherham, hundreds of children were sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013. Girls as young as 11 were raped by multiple attackers, trafficked to other towns and cities, and abducted and beaten.” 

One teenager in Rochdale was groomed at 13 and then passed around for sex by up to 18 men at a time. She later told the court that the abuse “destroyed my childhood” and left her grieving “for the little girl I was once, with the world at my feet.” These girls are forced into heroin addiction to keep them obedient.

That story was repeated across England against thousands of young girls, for at least a decade. The authorities knew it was happening and refused to admit it publicly, much less to take action against it, out of fear of looking “Islamophobic.”

If that is what happens to Christian girls in Christian countries, imagine what happens to them once Sharia becomes the law of the land.

A government that cannot protect 11-year-old girls does not deserve to exist. We need to do more.

Innocent Jewish children were killed on October 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel. Hamas did not descend on Israeli towns as an army confronting another army, but as a jihadist movement entering what it sees as a land populated by what Qur’an 98:6 calls “the worst of creatures.” 

Families were murdered in their homes, women raped, and children abducted. Jewish lives were deemed inherently illegitimate in the shadow of Islamic supremacy. At the Nova music festival, 378 young Israeli adults were killed after gathering to hear music.

A 30-year-old DJ at the festival was dancing when the first rocket struck. Within seconds, the ground exploded in terror: music silenced, lights shattered, thousands of young people running and screaming. He survived, but every time he closes his eyes he sees the bodies, and every time he hears a beat, he tastes ash. He became one of the living testimonies of how a night of hope turned into a massacre.

The brutality shocked the world only because we had forgotten the long history behind it, from the Farhud pogrom in Baghdad in 1941 to the expulsions of nearly 900,000 Jews from Arab lands after 1948. To the victims, the massacre of October 7 felt less like the eruption of something new than the resurfacing of a hunt that never ends.

The reaction in the West was equally revealing. Crowds in Western capitals celebrated the attack, praising it as “resistance” while Jewish families buried their dead. This was a response to decades of propaganda portraying Israel as an intruder and as an apartheid state. Qatar—Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief funder, which the U.S. treats as if it were Japan or Denmark—spends billions spreading such lies throughout the Western world. 

The children killed on October 7 were not victims of geopolitics; they were victims of an ideology that has hunted Jewish people for over a millennium. The world may pretend that such violence is confined to the borders of Israel, but jihad is global. The same hatred that slaughtered Jewish children in Israel is already marching through London, Paris, Berlin, and New York, chanting for an intifada that does not end at the Mediterranean. 

October 7 was a warning of what happens whenever the hunt is allowed to rise again.

These patterns continue for Hindus as well. In Kashmir, targeted killings of Hindu teachers, shopkeepers, and migrant laborers have accelerated in recent years, with jihadist groups vowing to purge the region of its remaining non-Muslim population. 

In 2021, terrorists walked into a school in Srinagar, singled out two Hindu educators by name, and executed them in front of their students. Bombings and attacks on Hindu pilgrims traveling the Amarnath route have become routine, with militants openly declaring such pilgrims fair game under jihad.

In Bangladesh, Islamist mobs have repeatedly burned Hindu temples and villages, including the 2021 riots in Comilla and Noakhali, where dozens of Hindu homes were torched and idols smashed as police stood aside.

Outside South Asia, ISIS-K has explicitly named Hindus as targets, claiming responsibility for attacks on Hindu gatherings in Afghanistan, including the suicide bombing of a Sikh-Hindu temple in Kabul in 2020 that killed dozens. 

In Kenya and Mozambique, ISIS-affiliated groups have murdered Hindu shopkeepers and business owners as part of broader campaigns against non-Muslims. 

Some Islamic scholars in the West present Islam’s expansion into Europe and North America as a moral correction for Western decadence. Yasir Qadhi, an American Muslim academic and unskilled defender of child marriage, has declared that Islam is not a private faith but “a complete system that governs every part of life, including politics and law.” Tariq Ramadan, once celebrated in Western media before being accused of molesting underage girls and recently convicted of rape in Switzerland, has written that the West must accept Islam not as a guest but as a participant in shaping its future.

Muslims believe that Sharia is Allah’s law, given from Allah. They do not believe they need to pass Sharia into law. The law is not what is passed in hallowed halls, but whatever is enforced on the street.

This belief echoes the writings of early Islamic jurists, who divided the world into two spheres: the Dār al-Islām (“House of Islam”) and Dār al-Ḥarb (“House of War”). Those phrases are literal such that if you are not a part of the House of Islam, you are considered at war with Islam (Qur’an 8:39 and 9:29).

Israel is particularly hated, partially because Muhammad felt rejected by Jewish leaders in his day, and partially because Israel stands on ground Islam once conquered that was later taken back. It goes against Islamic Law to ever give land back, and if Israel ever fell, Spain, Portugal, and vast swaths of Eastern Europe would be looked at next. All of that land was once conquered as well, making it, by Islamic law, a part of Dār al-Islām, to be ruled by Islam until the end of time (per Qur’an 2:191).

Sayyid Qutb described Western freedom as an illusion that leads only to moral corruption. His writings remain taught in study circles across the West. The idea is consistent: the West is not tolerated, but transformed.

Islam now shelters beneath the very liberties it condemns, demanding protection from criticism while denying the moral foundations that make protection possible. Its advocates call truth hate speech, even as they press for a supremacy that will one day silence the freedoms they now exploit.

Western governments, anxious to prove their tolerance, have mistaken appeasement for virtue. In shielding Islam from offense, they shield a political theology that seeks to replace them.

This ancient division never disappeared; it only changed form. The struggle between the House of Islam and the House of War has shifted from the battlefield to the courtroom, the classroom, and the public square, but the objective remains the complete submission of all that lies beyond Islam. 

Will Durant once said, “There is always a hungrier tribe still in the bush.” Islam is hungry. We are not. If the Western world will not face this, we will be conquered in time.

The oryx still grazes in the half-light of the Arabian desert, as it did on Prince Ukaydir’s 35th birthday, but the horizon that trembles with the sound of approaching hooves is now our own.