By the middle of the thirteenth century, the Abbasid “Golden Age” was already rotting from inside. Corruption, factionalism, slave-soldier rule, and endless internal wars had weakened the Islamic heartlands. Then, in 1258, the Mongols arrived at Baghdad’s gates and did in a few weeks what centuries of internal decay had been preparing for: they shattered the caliphate.

Many modern writers treat the Mongol invasions as an outside catastrophe that temporarily interrupted a peaceful civilization. The reality is harsher. The Mongols smashed a system already built on violence and slavery. After the shock, the leading Muslim powers learned a lesson: survival and “recovery” would come not through repentance before the true God, but through becoming even more ruthless at jihad and internal control.

From 1258 to 1500, the pattern is unmistakable. Baghdad is drowned in blood and ink. Timur Lenk (Tamerlane) kills millions and builds literal towers of human skulls while claiming to champion Islam. The Mamluk slave dynasty in Egypt and Syria defeats the Mongols yet rules through an army of purchased boys, and Cairo descends at times into such misery that chroniclers record cannibalism. In Anatolia and the Balkans, the Ottomans rise using a child-abduction system—the devshirme—to staff their elite troops and bureaucracy. In India, the Delhi sultans turn entire regions into charnel houses, dragging away 180,000 Hindu slaves in a single campaign.

By the year 1500, conquest, slavery, and religious apartheid are not temporary features of Islam—they are permanent institutions. This is the fruit of Muhammad’s system centuries after his death, and it looks nothing like the congregation of Jehovah described in Scripture.

1258: Baghdad’s Rivers Run Black with Scholars’ Ink and Blood

The Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan and his successors expanded with terrifying speed across Eurasia. Their armies were ruthless, disciplined, and brutally efficient. When Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis, turned toward the Middle East, the fragmented Muslim world was unable to offer a united response. Rival dynasties, petty emirs, and a weakened Abbasid caliphate all jockeyed for advantage rather than humbling themselves before the true God and seeking His mercy.

Baghdad, once the pride of the Abbasids, faced Hulagu in 1258 under the caliph al-Mustasim. The caliph had little real power outside the city. Advisors gave conflicting counsel: some urged negotiation, others boasted that Baghdad’s name alone would frighten the Mongols. The caliph chose arrogance and hesitation. When Hulagu demanded his submission and tribute, al-Mustasim responded with insults and underprepared defenses.

The Mongols laid siege. Their engineers built siege towers and brought up catapults. The city’s walls were breached. Once inside, the Mongols unleashed a week of slaughter that shocked even hardened chroniclers. Men, women, and children were cut down without mercy. Houses, bazaars, mosques, and palaces were looted and burned. Some estimates of the death toll from Muslim sources run into the hundreds of thousands; whatever the exact number, Baghdad, once a bustling metropolis, was reduced to a corpse-strewn ruin.

The image of the Tigris River running black and red comes from reports that so many books from Baghdad’s libraries—especially the famous House of Wisdom—were thrown into it that the ink darkened the waters, while the blood of the slain stained it crimson. Whether that is literally precise or partly rhetorical, it captures reality: knowledge and human life were wasted together in a single catastrophic judgment.

The caliph himself was executed. Mongols avoided spilling royal blood on the earth, so accounts describe him being wrapped in a carpet and trampled by horses or beaten to death. This method of killing had a grim symbolism: the man who claimed to be the shadow of Allah on earth died like a crushed insect, without army, without miracle, without deliverance.

Muslim writers later portrayed the sack as a punishment from Allah for the Abbasids’ sins. In one sense, they were right—but they did not see the full picture. The Abbasid state had long oppressed Christians and Jews with jizya, exploited slaves, and used crucifixion and mutilation against rebels. The Mongols were not more wicked in kind; they were simply stronger and less restrained. The destruction of Baghdad was the harvest of centuries of violence and pride.

After the conquest, Hulagu’s new Ilkhanid realm in Persia remained largely non-Muslim for several decades. Nestorian Christians and Buddhists enjoyed favor at court. But by the early fourteenth century, successive Ilkhans converted to Islam. The conquerors adopted the very religion of the people they had destroyed, bringing their taste for terror with them. The Mongol sack did not end Islam; it reshaped it. Future Muslim powers, seeing what brute force could do, learned that only those who could match Mongol ferocity would survive.

Timur Lenk: 17 Million Dead, Towers of Skulls

If the sack of Baghdad was Islam’s great humiliation, Timur Lenk (Tamerlane) was Islam’s dark mirror: a conqueror who claimed to fight for Allah while exceeding even the Mongols in theatrical cruelty.

Timur was a Turkic warlord from Transoxiana (modern Uzbekistan) who rose in the late fourteenth century. Lame in one leg—hence “Timur the Lame”—he built a vast empire stretching from central Asia to Syria, from the Caucasus to northern India. Unlike the early Mongols, Timur presented himself explicitly as a champion of Sunni Islam and a restorer of the caliphate’s glory, even though no Abbasid caliph remained in Baghdad. He adopted the title “Sword of Islam,” patronized religious scholars and Sufi orders, and framed many campaigns as jihad.

His actual methods revealed the same spirit that animated earlier pagan steppe conquerors, amplified by Islamic justifications.

Timur waged war on both non-Muslims and Muslims. In India, he attacked the Delhi Sultanate in 1398. Under the pretext of punishing its Muslim rulers for being too lenient toward Hindus, he crossed the Indus, ravaged Punjab, and advanced toward Delhi. Before the decisive battle, his forces had already taken tens of thousands of Hindu captives. Fearing that these prisoners might revolt in the rear, Timur ordered a massacre. Chroniclers describe his troops killing around 100,000 captives in a single day by his command.

After defeating Delhi’s army, Timur allowed his men to plunder the city. For days, slaughter, rape, and looting continued. The capital of northern India, still recovering from previous invasions, was devastated. Artisans and skilled workers were carried off to embellish his own capital at Samarkand. For the Hindu population, this invasion was yet another confirmation that Islamic rule meant recurring waves of terror.

In Persia and Mesopotamia, Timur’s cruelty reached almost theatrical levels. When cities resisted, he ordered mass killings and then constructed towers of skulls at their gates. In Isfahan, after an initial peaceful surrender turned into a local uprising, Timur retaliated with a massacre. Chronicles speak of 70,000 dead and dozens of towers made from their heads. Similar atrocities occurred in Shiraz, Tikrit, and other towns. The skull towers served both as a warning and as a kind of sick monument to his power.

Timur also attacked Muslim rivals. He crushed the Golden Horde in the north, devastated the Christian kingdom of Georgia, and marched into Syria, capturing Aleppo and Damascus. The Mamluk Sultanate, long proud of having defeated the Mongols at Ayn Jalut, found its cities trampled by this new “Islamic” conqueror. In 1402, Timur inflicted a humiliating defeat on the rising Ottoman sultan Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara, capturing him and contributing to a period of Ottoman civil strife.

Estimates of the total number killed in Timur’s campaigns vary, but some modern historians put them in the vicinity of 15–17 million—an enormous figure for that era. Whatever the exact count, the slaughter was vast. And all of it was carried out by a man who built mosques, supported Islamic scholars, and framed his wars as purifying the world for Allah.

From Jehovah’s view, such a figure is not a defender of true faith; he is a scourge. The God of the Bible does not command His servants to build pyramids of skulls. Christ taught His followers to love even their enemies, to turn the other cheek, and to measure greatness by service, not by conquest. Timur Lenk embodies the exact opposite: glory measured by body count, piety used as a costume over savagery. That he could claim Islamic legitimacy, and that later Muslim chroniclers could admire his zeal, reveals how far Islamic thought had drifted from anything resembling biblical righteousness.

Ottoman Rise: Devshirme Child Abduction System

While Timur wreaked havoc in the east, another Islamic power was rising in the northwest: the Ottoman state in Anatolia and the Balkans. Founded by frontier warlords who combined Turkic tribal traditions with jihad ideology, the Ottomans gradually swallowed up rival beyliks and Byzantine territories. By 1453 they had captured Constantinople under Mehmed II, ending the Byzantine Empire and turning its greatest church, Hagia Sophia, into a mosque.

One of the most distinctive and sinister features of Ottoman rule was the devshirme—the child levy. Beginning in the late fourteenth century and lasting into the seventeenth, Ottoman authorities periodically seized Christian boys from Balkan provinces—Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, and others. These boys, often between eight and fourteen years old, were taken from their families, converted to Islam under compulsion, and trained for service in the Janissary corps or in the palace bureaucracy.

The devshirme system was deliberate and systematic. Officials would arrive in a village, assemble the population, and select the strongest and brightest boys. Families wept and pleaded; some tried to hide their children. Those taken were marched away, taught Turkish and Islamic doctrine, and subjected to military discipline. They were forbidden to speak their native languages or practice their ancestral faith. Many grew up to become powerful commanders, governors, or even grand viziers, loyal to the sultan but forever cut off from their own blood.

Ottoman apologists sometimes describe the devshirme as a path of opportunity, noting that some Christian-born boys rose to great influence. That is like calling kidnapping “career placement.” Jehovah’s standard is clear: stealing human beings and selling them, or using them as forced servants, is a grave sin. In the Mosaic Law, kidnapping someone from Israel to treat him as a slave was punishable by death. The fact that some captives adapted, excelled, or even embraced their captors’ culture does not transform evil into good.

For the Christian populations of the Balkans, the devshirme was a recurring nightmare. Songs and laments remembered children torn from parents, sisters wailing as brothers disappeared down the road, and the knowledge that the empire’s most feared soldiers—the Janissaries—were drawn from the flesh of the very peoples they now oppressed. These Janissaries fought at Kosovo, Nicopolis, Varna, and finally at Constantinople, turning their guns and swords against Christian armies and cities.

Again, we see the logical unfolding of Muhammad’s model. The early caliphs had used slave-soldiers; the Abbasids had imported Turkish boys as ghilman; the Mamluks themselves were slaves who seized power. The Ottomans perfected the pattern by making child-abduction a regular institution. The Quran’s teaching that Muslims may own those whom their “right hands possess” and that they are superior to unbelievers provided the justification. The devshirme was not a betrayal of Islam; it was an application of its principles to maximize state power.

Mamluk Slave Warriors and Cannibalism in Cairo

Before the Ottomans dethroned them, the Mamluks dominated Egypt and Syria for over two centuries. Their very name—Mamluk—means “owned,” “possessed.” They were slave warriors who seized control of the state they had been purchased to defend.

Originating mostly from Turkic and Caucasian boys bought as slaves, converted, and trained militarily, the Mamluks had risen under the Ayyubid dynasty (the line of Saladin). In 1250, they overthrew their masters and took the throne. In 1260 they achieved fame in the Muslim world by defeating a Mongol force at Ayn Jalut, halting Mongol advance into Egypt. For centuries they fought Crusaders, Mongols, and internal rivals, projecting themselves as defenders of Islam’s heartlands.

Their internal rule, however, was harsh and chaotic. Power circulated among military factions, who made and unmade sultans with alarming frequency. Assassinations, palace coups, and brutal punishments were common. Peasants bore heavy tax burdens; urban workers suffered under inflation and insecurity. The entire system depended on constant import of new slave boys, since Mamluk sons were often barred from joining the ruling military caste.

Cairo, their capital, grew into a major center of trade and scholarship. Yet beneath its mosques and markets lay deep social strain. The fourteenth century brought the Black Death, repeated plagues, and famines. Chroniclers report horrific scenes in some of these crises: streets filled with corpses, parents unable to feed their children, and, in extreme cases, cannibalism. Some accounts describe bodies dug from graves and eaten, or meat sold in markets that authorities later discovered to be human. While such reports must be weighed carefully, their very existence signals how desperate conditions became.

Cannibalism in Cairo’s famines was not caused by a brief, isolated disaster. It emerged from a system in which rulers cared more about maintaining their own privileges than about the well-being of their subjects. Mamluk factions fought over titles and stipends while common people starved. Wealthy households hoarded grain; speculators profited from scarcity. In a society where justice and mercy are valued, such crises lead to repentance, sharing, and structural reform. Under Mamluk rule, they led to deeper bitterness and social breakdown.

Jehovah commands His people to care for the hungry and the oppressed. In the Law, Israelites were forbidden to exploit the poor through usury and were told to leave gleanings in their fields for the needy. The early congregation in Acts shared possessions so that no one lacked necessities. The world of the Mamluks, by contrast, normalized exploitation. That cannibalism could appear in its capital during hard times is a gruesome testimony to a system devoid of true biblical compassion.

Delhi Sultanate: 180,000 Hindu Slaves in One Campaign

While Mongols, Mamluks, and Ottomans fought around the Middle East, India endured century after century of Islamic invasions and rule—the Delhi Sultanate being the most prominent expression between roughly 1206 and 1526.

The sultans of Delhi were mostly Turkic and Afghan in origin, often former slave-soldiers who seized power in the subcontinent’s north. They ruled over a vast majority Hindu and Buddhist population, with pockets of Jains and others. Their legitimacy rested on two pillars: the sword and Islamic doctrine. Many of them prided themselves on their zeal in smashing “idols,” imposing jizya on unbelievers, and carrying out campaigns deep into the Deccan.

Chroniclers close to the court recorded their deeds with chilling enthusiasm. One sultan is praised for converting temple complexes into mosques and for beheading stubborn brahmins. Another boasts of sending thousands of captives back to Delhi to be sold in markets. Hindu men were slaughtered or enslaved; women and children were taken as concubines and domestic slaves. Cities that resisted were sacked, their populations put to the sword.

The specific figure of 180,000 Hindu slaves in one campaign comes from accounts of Firuz Shah Tughlaq or a comparable ruler, describing a punitive expedition in which an enormous number of captives were marched north. Even if the exact number is debated, the narrative itself is clear: tens of thousands of human beings were processed like cattle, sorted, and assigned as spoils.

The pattern repeated again and again. Under Alauddin Khalji, raids into Gujarat and the Deccan yielded so many slaves that prices dropped. Under later sultans, jizya was reimposed whenever briefly relaxed, and Hindus were systematically reminded of their inferior status. Temples were destroyed or taxed heavily; conversions under pressure were common. Some local Hindu rulers became vassals and adopted Islamic customs to preserve power; their populations bore the cost.

In evaluating this, we must remember Islam’s own teaching. The Qur’an portrays polytheism as the worst sin and commands Muslims to fight until all religion is for Allah. The legal tradition defines idol-worshippers as having fewer protections than Jews or Christians. When Delhi’s sultans killed “infidels” and enslaved their families, they believed they were carrying out the Prophet’s model. They stocked their palace harems with Hindu women and staffed their cities with Hindu slaves without thinking they had violated God’s will.

By Jehovah’s standards, this is an abomination. The God of Scripture forbids stealing human beings and condemns worship of idols, but He never authorizes “missionary work” by massacring idolaters and dragging survivors into slavery. When the apostle Paul entered pagan cities filled with idols, he did not call for armed conquest. He preached about the unknown God, urging people to repent, and accepted persecution rather than inflicting it. The Delhi Sultanate’s record is yet another confirmation that the spirit driving Islamic expansion is not the Holy Spirit.

Permanent Institutionalization of Conquest

By 1500, after the Mongol shocks, Timur’s rampages, the rise of Mamluks and Ottomans, and centuries of Delhi Sultanate rule, one thing was clear: conquest in Islam was no longer merely an early historical phase. It had become a permanent institution.

The pattern first laid down by Muhammad in Arabia—call to Islam, demand for submission and jizya, war against those who refuse—was now woven into the political culture from Spain to India. Empires rose and fell, but the basic assumptions remained:

Islamic rulers had a duty to expand the realm of Islam whenever possible.
Non-Muslim populations could be tolerated only as humiliated dhimmis paying jizya.
War captives, especially women and children, were legitimate booty.
Slave-soldiers recruited from conquered peoples could be used to prop up regimes.
Religious dissent within Islam itself could be met with execution.

The Mongol sack of Baghdad did not reset this system; it hardened it. Survivors concluded that only greater internal cohesion and external aggression could prevent a repeat. The Mamluks boasted of saving the Muslim world from Mongols and Crusaders, but they did so with an army of slaves and by crushing their own peoples. The Ottomans presented themselves as defenders of the faith after defeating Crusaders and seizing Constantinople, but their triumph rested in part on stolen children and the subjugation of Christians as dhimmis. The Delhi sultans framed their massacres as purification of the land from idol worship.

From Jehovah’s vantage point, this is not sanctification; it is entrenchment of sin. The congregation of Christ is called to permanent mission, not permanent conquest. Evangelism is to go on until the Lord returns, but it is carried out by preaching, prayer, and holy living, not by sword and slave market. The Great Commission sends believers to make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them—not to impose head taxes on them or to drag their sons into barracks.

The enduring shape of Islamic civilization by 1500 proves that the earlier centuries were not a misunderstanding of Muhammad’s intent. The later rulers read the same Qur’an, studied the same hadith, and imitated the same prophetic model. They believed they were faithful when they carried out jihad, practiced devshirme, kept harems stocked with slave concubines, and treated dhimmis as a permanent, inferior tax base.

Jesus said, “By their fruits you will recognize them.” Looking at the fruits of Islam from 1258 to 1500—Baghdad drowned in blood, Timur’s skull towers, child abduction in the Balkans, slave empires in Cairo, and mountains of Hindu captives in India—we are forced to a conclusion. Whatever spirit began in the cave near Mecca, it did not come from Jehovah. The God who revealed Himself in Scripture does not build His Kingdom on human pyramids of skulls and rivers of enslaved families. Only a counterfeit “revelation” could sanctify such things and call them holy.

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