And yes, Aishat is correct: once upon a time, in its fledgling youth,
the United States succumbed to paying jizya to appease Muslim
terrorists. That story is instructive — not least as it includes the
genesis of the U.S. Navy.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Muslims of North
Africa (“Barbary”) thrived on enslaving Europeans. According to the
conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis, “between 1530
and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as
many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by
the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.” (With countless European women
selling for the price of an onion, little wonder by the late 1700s,
European observers noted how “the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather
white complexion.”)
As Barbary slaving was a seafaring venture, nearly no part of Europe
was untouched. From 1627 to 1633, Lundy, an island off the west coast of
Britain, was actually occupied by the pirates, whence they pillaged
England at will. In 1627 they raided Denmark and even far-off Iceland,
hauling a total of some 800 slaves.
Such raids were accompanied by the trademark hate. One English
captive writing around 1614 noted that the Muslim pirates “abhor the
ringing of the [church] bells being contrary to their Prophet’s
command,” and so destroyed them whenever they could. In 1631, nearly the
entire fishing village of Baltimore in Ireland was raided, and “237
persons, men, women, and children, even those in the cradle” were
seized.
By the late eighteenth century, Barbary’s strength relative to Europe
had plummeted, and the Muslims could no longer raid the European
coastline for slaves — certainly not on the scale of previous centuries —
so its full energy was spent on raiding non-Muslim merchant vessels.
European powers responded by buying peace through tribute, which the
Muslims accepted as jizya.
Fresh and fair meat appeared on the horizon once the newly born
United States broke free of Great Britain and was therefore no longer
protected by the latter’s jizya payments. In 1785, Muslim pirates from
Algiers captured two American vessels, the Maria and Dauphin. They
enslaved and paraded the sailors through the streets to jeers and
whistles. Considering the horrific ways Christian slaves were treated in
Barbary — sadistically tortured, pressured to convert, and sodomized,
as described in the writings of missionaries, redeemers, and others
(e.g., John Foxe, Fr. Dan, Fr. Jerome Maurand, Robert Playfair; see pp. 279-283)
— when the Dauphin’s Captain O’Brian later wrote to Thomas Jefferson
that “our sufferings are beyond our expression or your conception,” he
was not exaggerating.
Jefferson and John Adams, then ambassadors to France and England
respectively, met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain, Abdul Rahman
Adja, in an effort to ransom the enslaved Americans and establish
peaceful relations. In a letter to Congress dated March 28, 1786, the
hitherto puzzled American ambassadors laid out the source of the
Barbary’s unprovoked animosity:
We took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the
grounds of their pretentions to make war upon nations who had done them
no injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends
who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation. The
ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet,
that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not
have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right
and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make
slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Musselman
who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
This, of course, was a paraphrase of Islam’s so-called “Sword Verse” (Koran 9:5), which ISIS invoked earlier this year.
At any rate, the ransom demanded to release the American sailors was
over fifteen times greater than what Congress had approved, and little
came of the meeting.
Back in Congress, some agreed with Jefferson that “it will be more
easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than
money to bribe them.” In a letter to a friend, George Washington
wondered:
In such an enlightened, in such a liberal age, how is it
possible that the great maritime powers of Europe should submit to pay
an annual tribute to the little piratical States of Barbary? Would to
Heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush
them into nonexistence.
But the majority of Congress agreed with John Adams: “We ought not to
fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.”
Considering the perpetual, existential nature of Islamic hostility,
Adams was probably more right than he knew.
Congress settled on emulating the Europeans and paying off the
terrorists, though it would take years to raise the demanded ransom. In
1794 Algerian pirates captured eleven more American merchant vessels.
Two things resulted: the Naval Act of 1794 was passed, and a
permanent standing U.S. naval force was established. But because the
first war vessels would not be ready until 1800, American jizya payments
— which took up 16% of the entire federal budget — began to be made to
Algeria in 1795. In return, some 115 American sailors were released, and
the Islamic sea raids formally ceased.
American jizya and “gifts” over the following years caused the
increasingly emboldened pirates to respond with increasingly capricious
demands.
One of the more ignoble instances occurred in 1800, when Captain
William Bainbridge of the George Washington sailed to the Dey of Algiers
(an Ottoman honorific for the pirate lords of Barbary) with what the
latter deemed insufficient tribute. Referring to the American crew as
“my slaves,” Dey Mustapha proceeded to order Bainbridge to transport the
Muslim’s own annual tribute — hundreds of black slaves and exotic
animals — to the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople (Istanbul).
Adding insult to insult, the Dey commanded the U.S. flag taken down
from the George Washington and the Islamic flag hoisted in its place;
and, no matter how rough the seas might be during the long voyage,
Bainbridge was ordered to make sure the vessel faced Mecca five times a
day for the prayers of Mustapha’s ambassador and entourage. Bainbridge
condescended to being the Muslim pirate’s delivery boy.
Soon after Jefferson became president in 1801, Tripoli demanded
another, especially exorbitant payment, followed by an increase in
annual payments — or else. “I know,” Jefferson concluded, “that nothing
will stop the eternal increase of demand from these pirates but the
presence of an armed force.” So he refused the ultimatum, and, on May
10, 1801, the pasha of Tripoli, having not received his timely jizya
installment, proclaimed jihad on the United States.
Thus began America’s first war as a nation, the First Barbary War
(1801-1805) — and it was with Muslims who think and act just like ISIS.
