Islam’s ‘Humanitarian’ Conquests? Dismantling Egypt’s Latest Myth By Raymond Ibrahim December 12, 2025

Clerics adept at rewriting history

ME Forum : The Conquest Tradition, Proud and Unembarrassed in the Classical Sources, Is Incompatible with Modern Ideals. Muslim clerics have become remarkably adept at rewriting Islamic history.

Faced with a Western audience that prizes individual liberty and human rights, they increasingly refashion Islam’s early military expansion into a kind of seventh-century humanitarian NGO mission — a myth as historically untenable as it is intellectually insulting. 

The latest example comes from Egyptian sheikh, Khaled El-Gendy, a member of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, who recently proclaimed that Islam’s sweeping jihadist conquests were “not for expansion,” but “in defense of human freedom and the human right to choose.” 

El-Gendy’s presentation begins with a textbook example of what can only be described as Orwellian inversion. He cites Muhammad’s famous ultimatum to the Byzantine governor of Egypt — “Submit and you will be safe, otherwise you will bear the sin of the Copts” — as evidence of Islam’s concern for “human freedom.” 

That this threat — using a variation (aslam taslam) on Islam — is held up as a model of liberty is astonishing. The letter is not an invitation to religious self-determination but a coercive demand: accept Islam—or else.

If this is a blueprint for “human rights,” then words have lost their meaning.

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