By the early 1800s, the Islamic world was no longer the confident, expanding power it once had been. Centuries of internal corruption, slave-soldier rule, sectarian warfare, and economic decay had taken their toll. European powers—first Portugal and Spain, then the Dutch, British, French, and Russians—overtook Muslim empires in science, navigation, artillery, and finance. The same Ottoman Empire that had once terrified Vienna was now losing battles on multiple fronts. In India, British power steadily replaced Mughal rule. North African states slipped under French and Italian influence. Russia advanced into the Caucasus and Central Asia.

From the Muslim point of view, this was humiliation: territories lost to “infidels,” Christian flags flying over once-Islamic ports, Western diplomats dictating terms in Istanbul, Tehran, and Cairo. Theologically, however, this humiliation was not an accident. It exposed a fundamental weakness: a religion rooted in conquest suddenly found itself conquered.

Instead of turning to Jehovah’s Word and asking whether Muhammad had in fact been a false prophet, most Muslim thinkers searched for ways to regain the lost power. Some tried Western-style reforms, borrowing technology while keeping Islamic law. Others argued that Muslims had fallen because they had drifted from “true Islam” and needed to return to the model of Muhammad and his earliest followers in every detail. The result, especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, was not peace but a revival of jihad on global scale.

This chapter traces that path: the Wahhab–Saud alliance and the rise of modern Saudi Arabia, proudly rooted in the harshest readings of early Islam; the Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb, who recycled seventh-century jihad for the age of the nation-state; the bloodbath of India’s Partition; the Iranian revolution that brought back stoning and sanctified state violence; and the twenty-first-century horrors of ISIS, Boko Haram, and other groups who openly reopened slave markets in the name of the Qur’an and hadith. The same spirit that began in a cave near Mecca still drives men to kill, enslave, and terrorize in Allah’s name.

Wahhab–Saud Alliance and the Third Saudi State

The first wave of Wahhabi–Saudi jihad in the late 1700s and early 1800s, which we touched on in the previous chapter, was eventually crushed by Ottoman–Egyptian armies. Karbala’s shrines were rebuilt, and the first Saudi state in Dir‘iyya was destroyed. But the alliance between the Wahhabi doctrine and the House of Saud did not disappear. It retreated, regrouped, and, over the next century, prepared for a return.

In central Arabia, the Najdi heartland, branches of the Saud family continued to wield influence among tribes. Wahhabi scholars and preachers kept teaching that most of the Muslim world was steeped in shirk and that true Islam meant following Muhammad’s example rigorously: smashing shrines, forbidding practices that looked like intercession, enforcing strict dress and gender segregation, and treating Shia, Sufis, and “lax” Sunnis as near-apostates. The Wahhabi creed kept the embers of militant purism alive.

By the early twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was truly staggering. European powers had carved out colonial possessions in North Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. In Arabia itself, Britain courted local rulers to secure routes to India. Into this vacuum stepped Abdulaziz ibn Saud (Ibn Saud), a determined descendant of the earlier Saudi emirs. Through a mix of tribal alliances, conquest, and shrewd dealings with the British, he gradually reconquered Najd and then moved against the Hijaz, where the Hashemite sharifs, nominal Ottoman allies, controlled Mecca and Medina.

At Ibn Saud’s back stood the Wahhabi religious establishment and its militant foot soldiers, the Ikhwan. These were tribesmen indoctrinated in Wahhabi doctrine, turned from raiders into “holy warriors.” They attacked rival tribes, forced them to accept Wahhabi Islam, destroyed tombs and shrines, and imposed strict moral codes. When Ibn Saud’s forces captured Mecca and Medina in the 1920s, they demolished many traditional sites associated with Muhammad and his family, seeing them as potential idols.

From a Western perspective, some of Ibn Saud’s victories looked like nationalist consolidation. From a Wahhabi perspective, they were the restoration of Muhammad’s original order. The new Saudi state, eventually recognized as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, claimed guardianship of Islam’s holiest sites. Its legitimacy rested not on democratic consent or biblical justice, but on Wahhabi interpretations of the Qur’an and Sunnah and on a history of eliminating rivals through jihad.

Oil wealth transformed this alliance. In the 1930s, Western companies discovered vast petroleum reserves under Saudi sands. Over the next decades, oil money poured into the royal treasury. The Saud–Wahhabi compact used it to build modern infrastructure and, crucially, to spread their doctrine worldwide. Mosques, universities, publishing houses, and scholarships across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas were funded with Saudi money, carrying a hardline message: the only true Islam is the Islam of Muhammad and the salaf; everything else is deviation.

Jehovah’s Word calls rulers to administer justice, defend the poor, and humbly obey Him. It does not authorize them to enforce religious conformity by guns or to finance global indoctrination. The Saudi–Wahhabi project, however, explicitly seeks to remake the Muslim world in the image of Muhammad’s Medinan rule: strict, supremacist, and intolerant of dissent. That vision, backed by oil profits, became a seedbed for later jihadist movements even when those movements turned against the Saudi regime itself.

The modern Saudi state—sometimes presented as a “moderate ally” in Western diplomacy—still rests on that foundation. It was built by a dynasty that conquered fellow Muslims with Wahhabi swords and legitimized itself by promising to preserve and export what it saw as pure Islam. The fact that the third Saudi state is less openly expansionist than its predecessors does not change its doctrinal DNA.

Muslim Brotherhood, Qutb, and Modern Global Jihad

While Wahhabi doctrine flowed out of Arabia with Saudi funding, another current of Islamist revival rose in Egypt: the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 1924, the last Ottoman caliph—by then a powerless symbol—was formally abolished by the secular Turkish republic under Atatürk. To many Muslims, especially those educated in Westernized schools yet still attached to Islamic identity, this felt like a further humiliation. Not only had European powers colonized Muslim lands; now even the core symbol of Islamic unity was gone. In this atmosphere, Hasan al-Banna, a young Egyptian schoolteacher steeped in Islamic texts and resentful of Western influence, founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928.

The Brotherhood’s goal was simple and total: re-Islamize society from below and above. They preached personal piety—prayer, modest dress, abstention from Western vices. They built charity networks, schools, and hospitals. But their program went far beyond moral reform. They taught that Islam is a complete system covering politics, law, economics, and daily life, and that the only acceptable society is one governed by sharia. Democracy, in their vision, was a tool at best; the real aim was an Islamic state.

Brotherhood slogans proclaimed: “Islam is the solution,” “The Qur’an is our constitution,” and “Jihad is our path.” They organized paramilitary youth wings, drilled with sticks and then weapons, and participated in violence against British targets and Jewish communities. Although Egyptian governments alternately tried to co-opt and suppress them, the Brotherhood’s ideas seeped into universities, mosques, and the officer corps.

The Brotherhood’s most radical and enduring voice was Sayyid Qutb. Initially a literary critic who had studied in the United States and despised what he saw as Western moral decay, Qutb became an ideologue of militant Islam. His commentary on the Qur’an and his political writings argued that not only the West but most so-called Muslim regimes were in a state of jahiliyyah—pre-Islamic ignorance—because they did not truly implement sharia. Therefore, true Muslims had to form vanguard groups, separate themselves spiritually from “ignorant society,” and wage jihad to overthrow corrupt rulers.

Qutb’s books, written in the 1950s and 1960s and smuggled out of prison before his execution by Nasser’s regime, became scripture for later jihadists. He blended the language of revolution with Qur’anic concepts, calling for a global struggle to reestablish the caliphate. For him, Islamist activism was not reform within existing systems; it was revolution akin to what Muhammad had done in Mecca and Medina.

Jehovah’s Word knows nothing of this program. Christ calls His followers to holiness, yes, but also to live peaceably with all as far as it depends on them, to respect governing authorities as far as conscience allows, and to advance the Kingdom by proclaiming the Gospel, not by bombs and secret cells. Qutb, looking at Muhammad’s example rather than Christ’s, concluded that the path of the faithful is to declare most of the world apostate and to cleanse it with violence if needed.

From the 1970s onward, Qutb’s writings influenced groups such as Egyptian Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, and many others. The Brotherhood’s more political branches tried to take power through elections or alliances, but the radical core absorbed Qutb’s message: Islam must rule, and if peaceful means fail, armed jihad must resume. This was not a distortion of Muhammad’s model; it was a reapplication of it to an age of nation-states and global media.

Partition of India: 1–2 Million Dead in One Year

The Indian subcontinent under British rule was a mosaic of religions and communities, including a massive Muslim population whose ancestors had lived under sultans and Mughals. When the British began to withdraw after World War II, the question of what would happen to that Muslim population became urgent. Could Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and others share a single democratic state? Or must there be a separate homeland for Muslims?

The Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah pushed increasingly hard for partition: the creation of a separate Muslim-majority state, Pakistan, carved out of British India. Their argument rested partly on theology: Muslims and Hindus, they said, formed “two nations” with incompatible worldviews. The logic, though framed in political terms, echoed the earlier Islamic pattern of dividing the world into dar al-Islam (the house of Islam) and dar al-harb (the house of war).

In 1947, the British government, eager to leave, accepted partition. Borders were hastily drawn, often ignoring local realities. Two new states emerged: India, officially secular but Hindu-majority, and Pakistan, designated as a homeland for South Asian Muslims, split into West and East wings separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory. What followed was one of the bloodiest population transfers in modern history.

Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims found themselves on the “wrong” side of new lines. Panic and rumors spread. Armed gangs from all communities attacked trains, caravans, and villages. Estimates vary, but in roughly one year, somewhere between one and two million people were killed. Women were raped and mutilated; children murdered; entire convoys of refugees massacred on roads and rails. Around ten to twelve million people fled or were driven from their homes, Hindus and Sikhs moving toward India, Muslims toward Pakistan.

It would be dishonest to blame this violence solely on Muslims. Hindu and Sikh mobs committed atrocities as well. Partition was a savage, mutual bloodletting that revealed fallen human nature across the board. Yet we must also note that the ideology driving the demand for Pakistan drew heavily on Islamic separateness. The idea that Muslims could not live safely as a minority under non-Muslim rule had deep roots in centuries of Islamic theology. The creation of Pakistan, officially “in the name of Allah,” cemented the principle that religion justifies carving entire populations into separate political entities.

After partition, both India and Pakistan struggled with their identities. Pakistan in particular wrestled with what it meant to be a “Muslim state.” Military dictators, religious parties, and secular elites alternated in power. Blasphemy laws, harsh hudud ordinances, and the persecution of religious minorities like Christians and Ahmadis grew out of a desire to make Pakistan more “Islamic”—a desire rooted in the same impulses that had made partition seem necessary.

Jehovah’s pattern for His congregation is different. The New Testament envisions believers scattered among nations, not gathered into a single earthly state defined by one ethnicity or law code. Christians are “aliens and strangers” whose citizenship is in heaven. When political borders shift, their primary identity in Christ remains. Islam, by contrast, has always leaned toward political embodiment, toward creating zones where sharia reigns. Partition shows what happens when that impulse meets twentieth-century mass politics: lines of blood and endless grievance.

Iran 1979: Return of Slavery and Stoning

In the 1960s and 1970s, Iran under the Shah was heavily Westernized on the surface: education expanded, women gained some legal reforms, and the economy modernized unevenly. Yet beneath the glitter lay repression, inequality, and moral emptiness. Secular nationalism could not satisfy spiritual hunger or address real injustices. Into this vacuum stepped Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his vision of velayat-e faqih—rule by the Islamic jurist.

Khomeini spent years in exile denouncing both the Shah and Western influence. He argued that only full implementation of sharia under clerical leadership could restore justice. When popular discontent exploded in the late 1970s—from bazaar merchants, students, leftists, and religious forces—the Shah fell, and Khomeini returned to Iran to mass acclaim. The revolution that followed was not simply nationalist; it was explicitly Islamist.

The new Islamic Republic drafted a constitution that placed ultimate authority in the hands of a Supreme Leader, a cleric whose interpretations of Islamic law guided all branches of government. Revolutionary courts tried former officials, military officers, and dissidents, often in summary fashion, sending thousands to execution squads. Women were ordered to wear the hijab; mixed-gender spaces were segregated; Western cultural forms were purged.

Legally, one of the most significant shifts was the reintroduction of classical sharia penalties—hudud—into the penal code. Adultery, under certain conditions, became punishable by stoning. Theft could result in amputation. “Enemies of God” and “corrupters on earth” could be hanged or shot after opaque trials. Public executions in squares, with cranes lifting bodies as warnings, became part of the regime’s moral theater.

Regarding slavery, the Islamic Republic did not set up slave markets like ISIS later would. But it did re-legitimize, on paper and in doctrine, the classical Islamic acceptance of slavery and concubinage. Khomeini’s legal writings affirmed that Muslims may, in principle, own slaves and have sexual relations with female captives. He also vigorously defended muta—temporary marriage—as part of sharia. Under the thin veil of “marriage,” muta has been used in Iran as a religiously sanctioned form of prostitution, allowing men to exploit vulnerable women and even minors in the name of piety.

In war, especially during the Iran–Iraq conflict of the 1980s, the regime treated young volunteers as expendable. Basij teenagers were sent in human waves against minefields and machine guns, promised paradise if they died. While not slavery in the narrow sense, this willingness to treat lives as cheap reflected the same underlying disregard for the individual that characterizes systems built on jihad.

From Jehovah’s standpoint, this is not righteous governance. The Torah’s death penalties existed within a covenant with safeguards, and even those pointed forward to Christ’s ultimate atonement, after which the congregation no longer wields the sword to punish sin. Jesus confronted a crowd ready to stone an adulteress with the words, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone,” exposing their hypocrisy and offering the woman a call to repentance. The Iranian regime, claiming to act in Allah’s name, revived stoning as public spectacle.

The 1979 revolution thus stands as a clear warning. When a modern state fully embraces Muhammad’s model rather than Christ’s, it does not create a haven of justice. It produces a theocratic machine that crushes dissent, oppresses women, and calls it holiness.

21st Century: ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Slave Markets Reopened

The fall of the Soviet Union, the first Gulf War, the Afghan jihad against the Soviets, and the spread of Wahhabi and Qutbist ideas set the stage for a new wave of militant Islam in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Al-Qaeda’s attacks, including those of September 11, 2001, were only one facet of this revival. The more shocking—and revealing—phase came with groups like ISIS and Boko Haram, which openly resurrected practices that many in the West assumed were medieval relics: explicit slave markets, formal concubinage, and public beheadings.

ISIS, the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” emerged from the chaos of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Syrian civil war. Its leaders fused al-Qaeda-style jihad with Ba’athist military expertise and an apocalyptic reading of Islamic sources. In 2014, they proclaimed a caliphate under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Black flags flew over captured cities like Mosul and Raqqa. Their propaganda videos showed not only battles and executions, but also scenes of “normal” sharia life—courts, markets, religious police.

Most horrifying was their treatment of non-Muslims, especially the Yazidis of northern Iraq and Christians in both Iraq and Syria. Yazidis, whose faith blends ancient elements and who were classified by ISIS as “idolaters,” were targeted for extermination and enslavement. When ISIS fighters overran Yazidi villages in the Sinjar region, they separated men and older boys from women and young children. Men were shot or beheaded. Women and girls were taken as sabaya—concubine-slaves—transported to holding sites, inspected, and sold or “allocated” to individual fighters.

ISIS’s own magazines and sermons boasted about this. They cited Qur’anic verses about “those whom your right hands possess,” quoted hadith on the permissibility of intercourse with captives, and framed everything as a return to the pure practice of Muhammad and his companions. Price lists circulated for Yazidi women and children, with amounts differing by age and beauty. Some captives were traded multiple times, raped by successive “owners.” Others were “married” off in name only to fighters many decades older. Rescue testimonies from Yazidi survivors confirm the scale and cruelty of this trafficking.

Christians under ISIS faced forced conversion, heavy jizya, expulsion, or death. Ancient communities in Mosul and the Khabur valley, whose roots went back to early centuries of Christian history, were uprooted. Churches were desecrated or turned into Islamic sites. Crosses were ripped down. In some cases, ISIS fighters marked Christian homes with the Arabic letter “nun” (for Nasrani, “Nazarene”), echoing practices of dhimmi labeling from earlier eras.

In West Africa, Boko Haram followed a similar pattern. Originating in northeastern Nigeria with an Islamist movement opposed to Western-style education and governance, Boko Haram radicalized into a violent insurgency. They attacked schools, markets, churches, and government buildings. Their most infamous action was the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls from Chibok in 2014. Many of these girls were forced into “marriages,” effectively sexual slavery, with fighters. Boko Haram’s leaders justified their actions in sermons that cited the early Islamic allowance for enslaving captured women and girls.

When confronted, ISIS and Boko Haram did not apologize or claim misunderstanding. They insisted that they were reviving authentic Islamic practice and that Muslims who rejected slavery and jihad were the ones who had deviated. They pointed to Muhammad’s own treatment of captives, to the caliphs’ conquests, to juristic manuals that codified rules for slave ownership and warfare. In other words, they read Islamic sources honestly and drew consistent conclusions.

Many Muslims around the world were horrified. They insisted, from the heart, that “this is not Islam.” And on a human level, we can sympathize. No decent person wants their faith associated with rape markets and mass executions. Yet the uncomfortable truth remains: ISIS and Boko Haram did not invent their theology from thin air. They followed a particular, but textually grounded, reading of Qur’an and hadith. The fact that their behavior so closely matches early Islamic history is precisely why they seared the conscience of the world.

Jehovah’s people, in contrast, are called to defend the vulnerable, not sell them. The early congregation rescued unwanted infants left to die, cared for widows and orphans, and condemned sexual exploitation. Paul commanded Christian men to treat older women as mothers and younger women as sisters, in all purity. The Gospel never condones taking war captives as concubines; it calls believers to lay down their lives rather than take others’ freedom.

When ISIS set up slave markets in 2014 and Boko Haram paraded kidnapped girls as trophies, they were not anomalies. They were mirrors held up to Muhammad’s legacy. And that is why the world’s elites, obsessed with “interfaith harmony,” prefer not to look too closely.

The Truth They Still Don’t Want You to Know

From Muhammad’s caravan raids to ISIS’s slave auctions, from Banu Qurayza’s trench to Karbala’s plain, from Abbasid harems to Janissary child levies, from Delhi’s temple rubble to the Yazidi hills, the story of Islam is coherent. The names change. The weapons evolve. Empires rise and fall. But the driving pattern remains the same: a religious system that ties God’s favor to earthly power, that sanctifies conquest, slavery, and domination, and that refuses to submit to Jehovah’s final revelation in Jesus Christ.

In the 1800s and 1900s, colonial powers temporarily suppressed some traditional Islamic practices, not out of love for Jehovah but out of their own political calculations. European administrators curtailed slave raids, outlawed some sharia penalties, and imposed new legal codes. For a time, it seemed as if Islam might soften into a private spirituality. But as decolonization unfolded, the old impulses resurfaced: revive the caliphate, reimpose sharia, cleanse society of Western influence, fight jihad wherever the “House of Islam” feels threatened.

Western governments, universities, and media, unwilling to acknowledge that a major world religion might be fundamentally false and dangerous, tell a different story. They say that extremists “hijacked” Islam, that terrorism is about poverty or politics, that Muhammad was a misunderstood reformer, that slavery and concubinage were mere “products of their time.” They invite imams to offer generic prayers at public events, edit school textbooks to gloss over jihad, and label serious criticism as “phobia.”

Yet the facts remain. The Wahhabi–Saud alliance that shapes Saudi Arabia explicitly models itself on Muhammad’s harshest practices. The Muslim Brotherhood and Qutb’s heirs openly teach that Islam must rule and that violent jihad is legitimate. Pakistan’s laws still strip Christians and other minorities of dignity and, in blasphemy cases, sometimes of life. Iran’s regime hangs dissidents from cranes and stones alleged adulterers. ISIS and Boko Haram only took off the mask and showed the inner logic in its pure form.

The truth they still do not want you to know is simple but hard: this is not a religion that lost its way. This is a religion that followed the way of its founder.

Jehovah has already given the world His final and complete revelation in Christ. Jesus did not seize territory; He healed the sick, cast out demons, and preached the Kingdom. He did not take child brides; He welcomed children and protected them. He did not own slaves; He washed His disciples’ feet. He did not order beheadings; He allowed Himself to be arrested and executed, offering His blood for our sins. He did not promise paradise for killers; He promised forgiveness for those who repent and believe.

The church has often failed to live up to this standard. There have been crusades, inquisitions, and colonialisms wrongly done in Christ’s name. But those sins stand under His judgment, not under His approval. We can open the New Testament and see plainly that such behavior contradicts His commands. When Christians have repented, they have done so by returning to the Scriptures.

Islam has no such corrective. When its most zealous followers open their sources, they find a warlord-prophet who married a nine-year-old, oversaw massacres, and took captives as concubines. They find caliphs who crushed apostates, crucified opponents, and taxed dhimmis. They find jurists who codified slavery and made jihad a permanent obligation. When modern jihadists imitate that pattern, they are not betraying Islam; they are obeying it.

For the sake of Muslims themselves—millions of men, women, and children made in Jehovah’s image, trapped in a system that cannot save—this truth must be told. They are not the enemy. The enemy is the lie that Muhammad was sent by God and that the Qur’an corrects the Bible. Christians must speak clearly, not with hatred but with courage, exposing the darkness of this history and holding out the light of the Gospel.

Jehovah calls all people everywhere to repent and to believe in His Son, who died for our sins and rose from the dead. In Him there is no Jew or Greek, Arab or European, slave or free, male or female, but all are one. In His Kingdom there is no devshirme, no Barbary auction, no muta contract, no Yazidi market. There is only the freedom of forgiven sinners, worshiping the Lamb who was slain.

That is the truth the world does not want you to hear—but it is the only truth that can set Muslims and non-Muslims alike free.

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