By 1500 C.E., the patterns set in motion by Muhammad and the early caliphs were no longer experiments. They were institutions. Jihad, slavery, and dhimmi humiliation had been woven into the law codes, tax systems, and military structures of Islamic empires from the Atlantic to Bengal. What changed in the early modern period was not the basic character of Islam, but its scale and technology.

The three major powers of this era—the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean and Balkans, the Safavid Empire in Persia, and the Mughal Empire in India—are sometimes praised as models of tolerance and high culture. Schoolbooks talk about miniature paintings, poetry, architecture, and trade routes. They rarely dwell on how those systems were funded and defended: by child abduction, by systematic enslavement of Europeans and Asians, by mass slaughter and forced conversion of Hindus, and by sectarian wars that wiped out entire regions.

At the same time, the older patterns of piracy and slave raiding on the North African coast flourished under Islamic law. The Barbary corsairs made the Mediterranean a hunting ground, dragging perhaps a million and a half Europeans into bondage. In Arabia, a puritanical preacher named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab forged an alliance with the House of Saud, launching a first wave of Wahhabi jihad that bathed Shia towns in blood and began reshaping the Arabian Peninsula.

By the end of the 1700s, the Ottoman Empire had earned the label “the sick man,” yet it was still dripping blood. Weakness in technology and administration did not mean moral reform. The same Qur’an, the same hadith, and the same prophetic model still justified devshirme child levies, slave markets, and religious cleansing. Compared with the New Testament picture of Jehovah’s congregation—holy ones drawn from all nations by the preaching of Christ’s atoning death—this period of Islamic history stands as one more witness that the spirit driving Muhammad’s religion is not the Holy Spirit of God.

Janissaries: Christian Boys Torn from Families

The Janissaries were the elite infantry of the Ottoman Empire, feared across Europe for their discipline and ferocity. Modern writers sometimes romanticize them as the first “modern standing army.” What is quietly forgotten is how they were created: by ripping Christian boys from their families in a regular, state-run slave raid called the devshirme.

Starting in the late 1300s and lasting into the 17th century, Ottoman officials periodically swept through conquered Christian lands in the Balkans—Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Bosnian, and others. Villages were ordered to assemble. Parents lined up as officials inspected their sons: teeth, height, strength, intelligence. The best boys were taken. Some families tried to bribe officials to spare their children; some mutilated sons slightly to make them ineligible; others fled into the mountains when rumors of the levy spread. None of this always worked. The state claimed the right to harvest its human tribute.

Once in Ottoman hands, the boys were marched away, often hundreds of miles, never to see their families again. They were converted to Islam under pressure, taught Turkish, and forbidden to speak their mother tongues. Many were placed with Muslim farming families in Anatolia to be “Turkified.” The most promising were sent to palace schools, trained in administration and warfare, and ultimately became Janissaries or high officials.

From the state’s viewpoint, the system was brilliant. These uprooted children had no tribal base in Anatolia and no loyalty to any local nobility. Their only future lay in serving the sultan. A Christian boy from a mountain village might one day command armies, govern provinces, or even become grand vizier. Ottoman apologists sometimes point to this upward mobility as proof that devshirme was “beneficial.”

Jehovah’s standard calls it what it is: kidnapping and forced assimilation. In His Law, stealing a person and selling him is a capital crime. Scripture never treats the possibility that a kidnapped victim might later rise in status as an excuse. Sin is sin whether the victim ends in a palace or in a mine.

We should not miss the spiritual betrayal involved. Those boys had been baptized into churches that, however imperfect, confessed Christ as Lord. They were taken, often still children, and indoctrinated into Islam, taught to call Muhammad “messenger of Allah,” and trained to see Christians—people like their own parents—as enemies on the battlefield. Janissaries fought at Kosovo against Serbian armies, at Varna and Nicopolis against crusading coalitions, and finally at Constantinople in 1453, storming the last bastion of the Eastern Roman Empire. The swords that hacked down defenders on the Theodosian walls were wielded by men who, in many cases, had been born into Christian homes.

The devshirme was not a betrayal of Islam’s principles; it was an application of them. The Qur’an privileges Muslims over unbelievers. Islamic law allows slavery of non-Muslims and sees bringing them into Islam—even by compulsion—as ultimately “good” for them. A society built on those principles will, when it is strong enough, rationalize child theft as a tool of statecraft.

The congregation of Christ operates by a completely different pattern. The Lord Jesus never authorized His followers to abduct children to staff His kingdom. He takes children into His arms and warns that anyone who causes one of these little ones to stumble faces severe judgment. He sends His disciples to make converts by preaching and teaching, not by ripping sons from their mothers’ arms and training them at spear point.

Janissaries, for all their discipline and military achievements, are a monument to how far the Ottoman system stood from Jehovah’s righteousness.

Barbary Corsairs: 1.5 Million Europeans Enslaved

While Janissaries marched across land, another Islamic institution terrorized the seas: the Barbary corsairs of North Africa. Operating from ports like Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Sale, these Muslim pirates turned the Mediterranean—and even parts of the Atlantic—into slave-hunting grounds from the 1500s into the early 1800s.

Their targets were coastal villages and ships manned by Christians: Spanish and Italian fishermen, French and English merchants, even as far north as the British Isles and Iceland. Raiders appeared suddenly in fast galleys, armed with bows, muskets, and swords. Ships were seized, crews chained. Towns on the Spanish and Italian coasts were sacked, their churches looted, inhabitants bound and marched to the waiting vessels. In some raids, entire villages disappeared; their people vanished into the slave markets of Algiers or Tunis.

Estimates vary, but a substantial body of research suggests that somewhere around one to one and a half million Europeans were captured and enslaved by Barbary corsairs between the 1500s and early 1800s. These captives joined a broader slave population that included sub-Saharan Africans, Slavs, Greeks, and others.

The fate of these slaves was grim. Men might be sent to oar benches on galleys, chained in place, pulling on heavy oars for hours, sometimes until they died, half-naked and sick under the lash. Others worked in quarries, construction, or city labor. Women and attractive boys were taken into households and harems as domestic servants and sex slaves. Some were ransomed if their families or European religious orders could raise the money, but many died in bondage under Muslim masters who saw them as the spoils Allah had permitted.

The corsairs justified their activities as jihad against Christian powers. The Ottoman sultan or local beys often gave formal recognition to corsair leaders, granting them letters that legalized their piracy as “war at sea.” Some famous corsairs, like Barbarossa and Dragut, became admirals in Ottoman service, blending piracy with imperial strategy.

European powers responded inconsistently. Sometimes they sent fleets to bombard pirate havens. Sometimes they paid tribute to secure their own shipping while leaving others to suffer. What rarely happened was any sustained moral outcry that connected Barbary slavery directly with the religious ideology behind it. Even today, the subject is largely suppressed or softened in public history.

Measured by the Bible, Barbary piracy is unambiguous wickedness. The apostle Paul, himself frequently traveling by sea, condemned kidnappers in his letters. Jehovah’s Law forbids unjust gain and calls rulers to defend the innocent, not to prey on them. When Christians in later centuries engaged in the Atlantic slave trade, they sinned grievously against their own Scriptures. However, they did so in rebellion against clear commandments. The Barbary corsairs, by contrast, acted in line with Islamic teaching that grants Muslims permanent rights over captured unbelievers.

The sight of Christian men and women kneeling on North African auction blocks while buyers prodded them like cattle, all under the shadow of minarets and muezzins, exposes the lie that Islam in this era was primarily a tolerant, cultured civilization. For countless families from Ireland to Sicily, the Barbary regencies were a nightmare in Allah’s name.

Safavid–Ottoman Wars: Millions Dead for Sect

While the Ottomans dominated the western and central Islamic world as a Sunni empire, Persia took a different path. In the early 1500s, the Safavid dynasty seized control of Iran and imposed Twelver Shia Islam as the state creed. What followed was not a peaceful religious reformation but a series of brutal wars with the Sunni Ottomans that turned the lands between Anatolia and the Persian plateau into a killing field.

Shia and Sunni had clashed before, but the Safavid–Ottoman rivalry lifted sectarian hatred to a new level. Safavid rulers like Shah Ismail presented themselves as both kings and quasi-messianic figures, champions of Ali and his descendants. Their propaganda reviled Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman as usurpers. They encouraged public cursing of the early caliphs beloved by Sunnis. In response, Ottoman clerics denounced the Safavids as heretics and declared jihad against them.

The geopolitical stakes were immense. Control of Mesopotamia, eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and parts of the Arabian Gulf see-saw between the two empires. Major battles, such as Chaldiran in 1514, saw massive casualties. In Chaldiran, Ottoman forces armed with artillery and firearms crushed the Safavid cavalry, slaughtering thousands and seizing Tabriz. Yet the Safavid state survived and rebuilt, leading to repeated conflicts over the next two centuries.

These wars were not gentlemanly contests. Armies plundered, burned villages, and deported entire populations. In border regions, tribal groups switched allegiance under pressure, and civilians endured ravaging from both sides. Some chroniclers describe forced deportations of Armenians, Kurds, and others, used as pawns between the rival powers. Cities like Baghdad changed hands multiple times, each conquest bringing purges of officials and reprisals against communities suspected of favoring the other sect.

Theologically, both sides justified their actions by appealing to Islam. The Ottomans claimed to defend Sunni orthodoxy and the broader Islamic world from Shia heresy. The Safavids claimed to avenge Karbala and establish true devotion to the family of the Prophet. Neither side looked to the Scriptures of Jehovah, which call believers to love even enemies, never to slaughter fellow worshipers over disputed leadership. The New Testament condemns quarrels and factions in the congregation; Paul rebuked Christians who said “I am of Paul” or “I am of Apollos,” pointing them back to Christ as the only foundation. In the Safavid–Ottoman wars, entire armies marched under banners saying, in effect, “I am of Ali” or “I am of the first caliphs,” and millions paid with their lives.

The scars of these wars remain. The hard Shia–Sunni boundary through Iraq and the Persian Gulf, the mutual distrust and sectarian rhetoric, and the bitter memories invoked in modern conflicts all trace back in part to this period. Far from being a unified ummah, Islam in the 1500–1700s was a fractured world where sectarian identity could sentence whole villages to death.

Mughal India: Temples Destroyed, Millions Killed or Converted

In India, the heirs of earlier Turkic sultans consolidated Islamic rule under the Mughal dynasty, founded by Babur in 1526. Textbooks often present the Mughals as tolerant, pointing to Akbar’s interest in interfaith dialogue and to the artistic splendor of the Taj Mahal under Shah Jahan. That selective memory hides the darker reality: repeated waves of temple destruction, mass killings, and forced conversions, especially under more zealous emperors.

Even Akbar, often praised for relative openness, built his power on the existing Delhi Sultanate legacy of conquest. Under his successors, the jihad edge sharpened. Jahangir and Shah Jahan continued campaigns against Hindu Rajputs and Deccan states. The most notorious was Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707), whose rule marked a conscious shift back toward strict Islamic enforcement.

Aurangzeb reimposed the jizya tax on non-Muslims, which Akbar had suspended. He ordered systematic destruction of prominent Hindu temples in rebellious areas and erected mosques on their remains. Chroniclers loyal to him proudly list shrines that were razed—Kashi Vishwanath in Varanasi, Kesava Deo in Mathura, and countless others. These acts were not isolated vandalism; they were official policy: crush the spiritual heart of resistance by erasing its physical symbols.

Military campaigns in the Deccan and against Sikh communities in the north were brutal. Entire regions were devastated as Mughal armies fought Maratha guerrillas and local rulers. Famine and displacement followed. Hindus who resisted faced execution, enslavement, or forced conversion. Some Rajput and Maratha leaders made temporary peace, accepting titles and lands in exchange for tribute and participation in Mughal structures, but their populations often bore the cost in taxes and insecurity.

Reports from this period speak of hundreds of thousands, even millions, dying in warfare, famine worsened by war taxes, and punitive massacres. In some campaigns, captives were marched long distances, chained together, to be sold as slaves or resettled as a labor force and a means of demographic control. The legacy of deep Hindu resentment toward Islamic rule, which later contributed to violent partition in the twentieth century, was forged in these centuries.

From a Christian point of view, the Mughal pattern is familiar by now: Islamic rulers measuring their piety by how many temples they topple and how many “infidels” they bring under jizya or into Islam. When Paul walked through Athens and saw the city full of idols, his spirit was provoked—not to call in an army, but to preach the true God who “does not live in temples made by hands.” He grieved at idolatry and sought to win idolaters through the message of the risen Christ. The Mughals, reading Muhammad’s example, took swords to idols and to idolaters alike.

The Taj Mahal may be beautiful, but it was built by an emperor whose system of rule killed untold numbers and whose successors left a subcontinent scarred by communal hatreds. A palace of marble does not erase rivers of blood. The God of the Bible will not overlook “temple reform” carried out by genocide.

Wahhabi First Wave and the Massacre of Shia

While Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals battled from Morocco to Bengal, a quieter but equally explosive development started in the deserts of central Arabia in the 1700s. A preacher named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, from Najd, launched a rigorous call to return to what he saw as the pure Islam of Muhammad and the early caliphs. His doctrine was simple and unforgiving: anything that smelled like “innovation” or “shirk” (associating partners with Allah) had to be crushed.

He condemned popular Sufi practices, veneration of saints, and visits to tombs. He attacked Shia rituals as outright idolatry. He declared that most of the Muslims around him were not true Muslims at all but apostates. In theological terms, he was calling for internal purging. In political terms, he needed an armed ally.

He found one in Muhammad ibn Saud, a local tribal leader. In 1744 they sealed a pact: the preacher would provide religious legitimacy; the emir would provide swords. Together, their descendants created the first Saudi–Wahhabi state. Small at first, their movement grew through a mixture of preaching, intimidation, and war against neighboring tribes and towns.

Their zeal soon took them into confrontation with Shia communities and with the Ottoman world. Wahhabi fighters attacked pilgrimage routes and peripheral towns, accusing their inhabitants of corruption and false Islam. The most infamous episode of this early wave came slightly after 1800 but grew directly out of the 18th-century alliance: the sack of Karbala in 1802. Wahhabi–Saudi forces stormed the Shia holy city in Iraq, killing thousands of inhabitants, destroying the shrine of Husayn, and seizing enormous amounts of wealth.

For Shia Muslims, Karbala is the place where Husayn, Muhammad’s grandson, was martyred by Umayyad forces in 680. For Wahhabis, the shrine and the rituals around it were idolatrous. They saw smashing the tomb and killing the pilgrims as an act of pious purification. Later they would also attack Ta’if and threaten Mecca and Medina, forcing the Ottomans to respond militarily.

Here we see the circle close. The Umayyads had slaughtered Husayn at Karbala for political power. Over a thousand years later, people calling themselves the truest followers of Muhammad returned to the same city and slaughtered Shia in the name of doctrinal purity. Shia communities rightly saw this as a renewal of the ancient curse: once again, Sunnis wielding state power turned Husayn’s memory into a target.

From Jehovah’s perspective, this is not reform; it is fanaticism built on a false foundation. True reform in the Bible calls people back to the written Word of God, to repentance, justice, and mercy. When Josiah rediscovered the Law, he tore his garments, humbled himself, and cleansed the land of idols—but he did so within the covenant God had made, not by inventing extreme doctrines of takfir (declaring others apostates) that legitimized killing fellow Israelites who still worshiped Jehovah imperfectly.

Wahhabism, by contrast, weaponized doctrine to justify tribal conquest. The alliance with the House of Saud created a model that would later, in other forms, inspire extremist movements across the Muslim world: find a preacher who will declare most Muslims “apostates,” unite with a warlord, and conquer in the name of “pure Islam.” Whatever differences exist between Wahhabi theology and other brands of jihadism, the pattern remains recognizably Islamic, not biblical.

The Sick Man of Europe Still Dripping Blood

By the late 1700s, the Ottoman Empire was visibly weakening. European powers had advanced in technology, finance, and administration. Russia pushed south into the Black Sea region. Austria probed the Balkans. Britain and France projected naval power into the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. Ottoman armies, once feared siege machines, now often lost against smaller but better-organized European forces.

Diplomats in European capitals began calling the empire “the sick man of Europe.” They meant that it was declining, no longer able to defend its vast frontiers or to modernize effectively. Some Christians, influenced by romantic ideas of a lost, noble “Islamic civilization,” look back on this period with a hint of nostalgia, as if the Ottomans were tragic victims of Western aggression.

What they forget is that the sick man was still dripping blood.

Even in decline, the empire maintained jizya and other discriminatory taxes on non-Muslims where it could. In many Balkan regions, Christians remained dhimmis, subject to legal disabilities and occasional waves of repression. The devshirme slackened and eventually ended, but only after centuries of child theft. Internal rebellions—Greek independence, Serbian uprisings, Arab revolts—were frequently met with harsh crackdowns, including massacres and forced conversions.

In the 18th century, Ottoman officials and local Muslim populations committed atrocities against Armenians and other Christian communities, foreshadowing horrors that would peak in the early 20th century. In North Africa, nominally under Ottoman suzerainty, the Barbary regencies continued to raid European shipping and enslave captives until Western navies finally forced them to stop. In Arabia, the Ottoman–Egyptian campaigns against the first Wahhabi–Saudi state involved brutal battles, sieges, and population displacement.

The empire’s weakness did not lead it to repent of the system it had inherited from Muhammad. It tried, instead, to reform its army, borrow European techniques, and play foreign powers against each other. Some sultans sponsored limited legal reforms and granted temporary relief to non-Muslim subjects, but the underlying theology remained: Islam is superior; Muslims rule; others submit and pay.

Jehovah’s kingdom works differently. When the church in Ephesus lost its first love, the Lord Jesus warned that He would remove its lampstand if it did not repent. Power and prestige were not guarantees of permanent favor; they were opportunities that could be lost through unfaithfulness. True reform came through returning to the Gospel, not through copying the world’s armies.

The Ottoman state never turned to the Gospel. Its decline was not a story of a godly empire betrayed; it was the slow collapse of a system that had always been built on coerced submission. Even as its armies limped and its finances crumbled, its legal codes still enshrined the subordination of Jews and Christians, and its memory still contained centuries of devshirme, Barbary slavery, sectarian wars, and genocidal campaigns in India and beyond.

When we view the 1500–1800s through the lens of Jehovah’s Word, the conclusion is unavoidable. Islam’s “classical age” did not mellow into gentle coexistence. It hardened into a permanent machinery of conquest, slavery, and religious apartheid. Janissaries, Barbary corsairs, Safavid–Ottoman wars, Mughal persecutions, and Wahhabi purges are not distortions of Muhammad’s legacy; they are its natural, consistent outworking across centuries.

For anyone seeking truth, this history should weigh heavily. The same tree that produced Meccan raids, Medinan beheadings, and the conquest of Jerusalem also produced child levies in the Balkans and skull towers in India. By their fruits you will know them. The God who revealed Himself through the prophets and finally in Jesus Christ does not build His people this way.

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