After overrunning Byzantine ruled Egypt and giving the Coptic Christian population the choice Islam, death or Jizya, the Muslim armies attempted to penetrate deeper into Africa from the 7th century onwards.

This also speaks the mind of the Muslims to raid non-Muslim lands not only for spreading Islam but to loot, plunder, rape. In the absence of any significant wealth, the lands were not subject to occupation, although there were continuing raids through the millennium from the 7th up to the 18th centuries. But during these raids the aggressors did use force to compel the African (Bantu, Bushmen, Masai and other Negro clans), to join the Muslim Ummah, by embracing Islam at the point of the sword.

Migratory Tribal populations living at sustenance levels dissuaded the Muslims from concentrating on Africa up to the 18th century

When the Jihadis attacked Central Africa, South Central Africa, up to the Atlantic shore in Ghana, the people of that region were divided in to independent tribes. Each tribe worshipped its own tribal god. Witchcraft and Shamanism were prevalent. Many of the tribes were engaged in internecine warfare for cattle, control over grazing pastures and hunting grounds. There was no unity among the tribes. And till the Mameluke led Muslim invasion, no invader had ever penetrated in to the heartland of Africa.

It was the Arab slave traders who first garnered the slave contingents bound for the Muslim Middle East

It was these Arab slave traders who garnered the slave contingents bound for the Muslim Middle East who have been first mentioned by the Crusaders. The presence of significant numbers of black African Slaves many of and whom had their tongues cut off and were castrated, took the Crusaders by surprise and in the initial Crusades many of these slaves were also slaughtered by the Holy Warriors believing them to be Muslims. In fact these slaves had nominally been converted to Islam, but had no rights as Muslims under the Caliphate and in later times during the Crusades. Many of the black African women were also used as sex slaves and due to their presence in the harem, the Negroid black African strains found its way in to the Semitic Arab Middle East.

Islamic forays in to Central and West Africa were carried out between the 8th and the 15th centuries with the aim of capturing black African slaves and not primarily with the aim of converting the population to Islam

The point is that most of these Islamic forays in to Central and West Africa were carried out between the 8th and the 15th centuries with the aim of capturing black African slaves and not primarily with the aim of converting the population to Islam. In any case, the Arab raiders could not subdue and hold any significant parts of the heavily forested territories of Central and Western Africa for long. It was also these slave traders who contributed a bulk of the Slaves to the European Slave traders from the 16th up to the 19th centuries. These African slaves were nominally Muslims, and the Arab slave traders had no qualms in capturing their Muslim (albeit nominally so) co-religionists and transporting them bound and chained to the clutches of the European slave traders to be pushed on to the slave ships that lay in anchor at the ports of Accra and Abidjan along the coast of West Africa. Incidentally the name for the town Abidjan is derived from the Arabic term "Abeed" which means black.

The autobiography of Alex Haley throws light on the Muslim origin of many African slaves

We can recall the autobiography of Alex Haley who was the descendant of the African slaves. His forefather who was brought to the British American possessions (that later became the United States) as a slave. Kunta Kinte whom Alex refers to his forefather in the award winning novel �Roots�, was a Muslim. In spite of his being a Muslim, the Arab slave traders had transported him for de-humanizing usage as a commodity to the European slave traders in the 17th century.

The first sustained Arab invasion of Central Africa began in the 18th century to prevent Christian Missionaries from making in roads in to Tribal Africa.

The first sustained Arab invasion of Central Africa began in the 18th century. In fact this invasion itself was a result of the European incursions on the coast of Western and South Eastern Africa and the subsequent conversion of many of the African tribes of these areas to Christianity.

Why did the Muslims not convert the Central and Southern African population to Islam when they overran North Africa in 650 to 700 C.E.?

After Islam spread across North Africa in the 600’s, Muslim entrepreneurs in the 8th century charted routes from oasis to oasis and realized that if large numbers of slaves were brought from below the Sahara, they could start a profitable slave trade.

Slaver caravans from Muslim regions now known as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt struck out on dire southward journeys. For practical reasons Muslim slavers themselves did not raid for slaves among the northernmost black tribes such as the Hausa and the Fulani. Instead they coerced the Hausa, Fulani and others to be the ones who actually dirtied their hands as slave raiders. Muslims needed only to supply the most northerly black tribes with the chains, manacles and swords they needed to efficiently kidnap people from tribes living further south.

Muslim slave traders paid the northernmost black tribes a wholesale price for those seized. Slaves surviving the long march to North African cities were sold there at retail prices. Other Muslim slavers from Arabia and Egypt sailed down the East African cost and formed a slave-gathering base on an island called Zanzibar. Equipping mainland black tribes adjacent to Zanzibar as slave raiders, they too saw their profits grow.

To secure the loyalty of these black african intermediaries, the Muslim slavers brought teachers of the Koran to convert, not just any subSaharan black tribe, but only those that agreed to kidnap and sell their neighbors to the south. Islam thus established itself along the 4,000-mile southern edge of the Sahara form Senegal to Somalia, and among coastal tribes near Zanzibar.

Question! Why did Islam not spread much, much further across subSaharan Africa?

Alas, this is where the many historical accounts of slavery falter. Conventional history fails to even ask, let alone answer, such an intriguing question. Understandably, Islamic missionaries brought to subSaharan Africa by Muslim slavers could not convert more southerly African tribes. People harried by Muslim-induced slave raids were far from eager to convert to the religion of the raiders. In fact, those enterprising Muslim missionaries who ventured to convert the victimized tribes, even during times of intermittent peace, would meet vengeance.

Further, Islamic law forbids Muslims to enslave Muslims, hence converting tribes which were the source of slaves would interfere with slave-trading profits.

Christians in Europe thus unwittingly granted Islam a 1000-year head start in altering the destiny of subSaharan Africans. Yet Muslim missionaries, by siding with Muslim slavers instead of opposing them, forfeited the enviable advantage that 1000-year head start afforded. Had they opposed slavery instead of condoning it, Muslim missionaries could have spread Islam all the way from the Sahara to Africa’s southern tip. But history had willed otherwise.Teaching the Koran, building Mosques and founding Islamic schools with not a hint of contest from Christians, they could have Islamicized an entire continent.

Christian missionaries, arriving belatedly in the early 1800’s, would have had to struggle to win even a tiny beachhead anywhere in black Africa. Planting churches in Zimbabwe and Zululand would have been as difficult as planting churches in Algeria and Libya.

Muslims in those days little dreamed that a later century would bring scores of woefully late but zealous Christian missionaries from Europe and America to the very tribes Muslim missionaries had consigned as prey for Muslim slavers. Had such a premonition crossed Muslim minds, Islam might have ended its complicity with the slave trade industry.

All of black Africa as far as Cape Good Hope would then have been Islamicized with relative ease centuries before the first Christian incursion. Instead, though they arrived ruefully late in black African history, a relative handful of Christian missionaries have caused 250 million black Africans in subSaharan Africa to be categorized today as Christian!

Yes, Christian missionaries consistently opposed slavery everywhere they encountered it. In Uganda, David Livingstone often found himself looking into the muskets of Muslim slavers who were incensed at a Christian who urged them to end something they had been doing with impunity for a millennium.

The Muslim Arab slave traders who from the 7th up to the 18th century had not bothered to carry out any thorough conversion of the tribal folk of Central Africa, decided to move in belatedly after 1784 and establish a permanent rule over the tribal regions to prevent their conversion to Christianity. This fact is lost sight of by many historians.

In fact the competing proselytization activities of the Muslim raiders and of Christian missionaries led to the drawing of fault-lines of civilization in Central Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Southern Sudan, Northern Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and others parts of Africa, where populations of the Muslim and Christian converts faced-off each other. There were many cases where one tribe would have adherents of both Christianity and Islam.

The pre-Islamic history of Nigeria

The Muslim-Christian conflict in Nigerian cities like Kano that sometimes spills over to Ibadan, Lagos and to the capital city of Abuja is also due to differences in religion among the Nigerians all of whom are from related Negro stock.

The city of Kano is first mentioned by traders in the 10th century and was ruled by a non-Islamic clan viz., the Hausa. The pre-Islamic roots of the Hausa go to more than two hundred years before the origin of Islam Islam, i.e. between 500 C.E. and 700 C.E. In that period the Hausa people, who had been slowly moving west from Nubia and mixing in with the local Northern and Central Nigerian population, established a number of strong states in what is now Northern and Central Nigeria and Eastern Niger. The Hausa were able to emerge as the new power in the region in around the 500 C.E. after the decline of the Nok and Sokoto (other pre-islamic ruling clans in today's Niger and Nigeria), who had previously controlled Central and Northern Nigeria between 800 B.C.E. and 200 C.E.

The Hausa were closely linked with the Kanuri people of Kanem-Bornu (Lake Chad), the Hausa aristocracy was forced to adopt Islam by the first wave of Arabized Muslim invaders who ravaged Kano in the 11th century.

But the Hausa converts remained only nominally Muslims, in fact so very nominally, that the city was attacked once again by the Arabized Muslims who were this time led by the ethnic Fulanis in a jihad, or Holy War. Much like the way the Janjweed are today attacking the Fur Muslims of Darfur in Sudan and consider them to be infidels in spite of their being Muslims.

The population was once again forcibly re-converted to Islam in the 15th century 400 years after it had been initially converted to Islam. Its Hausa leaders were accused of having lapsed from Islam. This was typical of the conversion of the African clans to Islam. They never whole-heartedly embraced Islam, but looked upon conversion as a tactic to buy peace from their warlike Muslim tormentors.

The continuing Jihad against the Nigerians in our times

Ever since the Muslim invaders first came to Nigeria in the 11th century, the non-Muslim (animist and Christian) population has not been spared the Islamic sword.

In the 19th century, Uthman Dan Fodio launched a Jihad on this country after which Muslim have had the upper hand in victimizing Christians. Since then, the Christians have been continually living at the mercy of their Muslim neighbors.

In the North, with the full backing of local authorities, Churches are pulled down at will. The excuse? Northern Nigeria has been declared to be an Islamic State. In 1980, an Islamic-Maitatsine riot broke out there, killing 4,177 people (official figure) with millions of Naira worth of properties destroyed. The Maitatsine or Yan Tatsine (followers of the Maitatsine), a quasi-Muslim fringe group are considered to be Kafirs (infidels) by other Muslims.

In October 1982, the Islamic faithful were again destructive, setting eight big churches ablaze. In that same year, the Muslims in Kaduna went berserk, slaying 400 people (official figure). In 1984, the Islamic volcano erupted in Yola and Jimeta, killing 700 people, including some policemen, and rendered 5,913 people homeless.

In March 1987, Muslims in Kaduna, Zaria, Kafanchan and Katsina launched a half-week Jihad against Christians. In Zaria alone, all one hundred big churches were fire-bombed. Several Christians were butchered and many others were roasted to death. Many known Christian buildings were destroyed. In all those cities, any motor vehicle that displayed a Christian sticker was attacked.

In April 1991, Muslims in Bauchi went on an indiscriminate killing spree, burning down churches and destroying a great deal of personal property. About 350 people were killed. Almost simultaneously, Katsina was troubled. Ibrahim Zakari alias El-Zakzaki invaded the city with over 2,000 Shi’ite Muslim fundamentalists to help Yakubu Yahaya (his devout student) in a running battle with Colonel John Madaki, the State Governor. Lives were lost and property was destroyed.

On October 14th 1991, the Muslims in Kano went on rampage again, ostensibly to disrupt a crusade during which the German-born evangelist, Reinhard Bonnke, was to preach. They planned to murder Bonnke Himself, but mercifully they failed in this nefarious endeavor. It is difficult to arrive at the exact casualty figure there, because many of the murdered Christians were dumped in wells. However, it is estimated that over 2,000 Christians were cut down by the Islamic sword.

From this onwards, however, the Muslims, too, suffered casualties. Here are a few lines from page 16 of the Oct. 28, 1991 edition of Newswatch magazine: “But unlike in previous religious riots in which non-indigenes (people not native to the area) and Christians turned the other cheek or ran for their lives, this time they hit back. Within hours of the fundamentalists unleashing a reign of terror, the non-indigenes mobilized themselves into a militia force, brandishing cutlasses, matchets, iron rods and broken bottles in a counter attack.”

We can point out here that Jesus Christ not only told his followers to turn the other cheek, but to do so until slapped 70 x 7 times. As this incident in Kano illustrates, Christians may have reached that 70 x 7 limit! Across the world we have suffered 1,400 years of relentless assault by Muslims. Our centuries of non-resistance were not weakness, as they wrongly imagined, but in obedience to the Bible and the innate humanness which we as human beings have nurtured.

In May 1992, Zangon-Kataf, a town about 200 km south of Kaduna was destroyed, the Muslim settlers clashing with the indigenous churchgoing Kataf. The entire town was devastated and farmlands destroyed. The destruction was so total that federal authorities embarked on reconstruction and rehabilitation. Within a few days, the war spread to Kaduna.

The Muslim plan was to attack Christians during their Sunday worship services. They struck at 8 PM, local time, slaughtering people from house to house, chanting “Allahu Akbar” as they went. Many churches were set ablaze, and as usual, other Christian buildings were targeted. Thousands perished. But many Christians in Kaduna didn’t want to be slaughtered like chickens anymore. In this crisis Muslims learned that mosques burn as easily as churches, and that Muslims can die as quickly as Christians. War is an ill wind that blows no one any good!

On September 14, 1994, the Islamic faithfuls struck Potiskum, Yobe State (North East Nigeria), killing three people including an ECWA church Pastor, Yahaya Tsalibi, who was conducting communion service. Nine churches were set ablaze and 15,000,000 Naira worth of property was destroyed (Police estimate).

In Kano, on December 26, 1994, Mr. Gideon Akaluka (a Christian) was openly beheaded by a mob of Muslim faithful for allegedly defiling a portion of the Koran. They paraded his dead body around the city with his severed head paled on it, chanting a victory slogan “Allahu Akbar”.

In Sokoto, northwest Nigeria, another Christian Mr. Azubuike, was mercilessly beaten because a Muslim beggar who asked of alms accused him of insulting the prophet Muhammad. Mr. Azubuike was more fortunate than most; he was thought dead and abandoned. July 1-7, 1995, Muslims attacked Sayawa Christian community of Tafawa Balewa, Local Govt. Area, Bauchi State (northeast Nigeria). The Muslim’s first port of call was the Tafawa Balewa central market, which they set ablaze. They burned down the home of the late Mr. Bukata Adamu who had lost the rest of his family to a similar riot in 1991. The Muslims then proceeded to attack and burn down 30 Sayawa Christian villages. Over 1,000 homes were razed in this inferno. Christians were killed by the thousands. Seventy-seven churches were burnt to the ground. Properties worth millions of Naira were destroyed.

Not even women and children were spared in this genocidal Jihad – the Islamic faithful slaughtering 36 women and children who had taken refuge at a church building in a village named Gungu-Zango. The women even had their bellies ripped open!

In a village called Bununu, in Bula district, which is not inhabited by the Sayawas, twenty-two school children (ages 11 to 16 years) were trapped and butchered by Muslims. Wouldn’t you think the police or military would come to the rescue of these defenseless people? Not a chance, and no Muslim ever stood before a court of law to answer for the numerous acts of vandalism, not to mention the countless murders they committed in Bauchi State.

Instead, Sayawa Christians, the victims of that Jihad, had to stand trial before a military tribunal for causing of the trouble. By true Islamic law, it is not only permissible but laudable to lie, cheat, steal and even murder all those who are not Muslims! Islamic terrorists will not depart from their stated intent of forcibly converting or murdering non-Muslims across the globe till they are themselves eliminated all over this planet. Only that can lead to the salvation of Nigeria.. and of the rest of the world

How the Jihad against the animist tribals of Darfur began in 1784

The sustained Muslim invasion and permanent occupation of African tribal lands began after the 1784 by the Mamluks (Mameluks) invasion of Central Africa. This invasion led to the conversion of many of the tribes, which included the Fur tribe of Darfur (from Dar = home), along with the tribes of adjoining Chad, Central Africa up to Northern Nigeria, Mauritania and Ghana in the West and up to Northern Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda in the South. These conversions happened as late as the 19th century.

It is the descendants of these late converts who are today�s darker-skinned tribesmen of Darfur (and Chad, Mauritania, Nigeria, Ghana) who were forcibly converted to Islam late in the 18th century when Areadi Gaya, the ruler of Futa Bandu State in West Sudan was forced to embrace Islam after he was defeated by the Mameluks of Egypt in 1764.

Subsequently the Mameluks led proselytising campaigns deep in to Central Africa up to Northern Nigeria and today�s Ghana in West Africa. These converts still practice a mix of animism and Islam. While most of them in Northern Nigeria, Ghana, and other parts of Central Africa are insulated from Arab tyranny, those in Mauritania, suffer tyranny, that is a mostly unreported, in the form of slavery that is imposed upon them by the relatively lighter skinned Arabized Muslims of Algeria and Morocco who have migrated from the Mediterranean coast.

But the converts in Darfur and Chad are even more unfortunate. They had reverted to animism after their forced conversion in 1784, and were Muslims only in name till more than a century after their conversion. Even today they practice animism mixed with Islam, do not speak Arabic and their womenfolk do not use the Hijab, but wear colorful African traditional tribal dresses. This is seen among all African Muslim converts in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana, etc.

These black African Muslim converts continue to bear the brunt of the onslaught of Islam. The sufferings of the people of Darfur and Chad at the hands of the Arabized Janjweed is but one example. The slave status of the black African converts under the suzerainty of the lighter skinned Arabized Muslims in Mauritania is another example.

These Africans suffered the first wave of Arabization when Othman Dan Fodio established Islamic State of Sokoto in Central Sudan in 1804 and led raids across different parts of Central Africa to reconvert the Abeeds (blacks) who in his view had lapsed out of Islam. These attacks were the precursor of the Janjaweed attacks of today.

But in spite of these efforts the people of Central Africa were never fully Arabized, due to their late conversion and continuing resistance to Arabization. They inhabit what is today the belt stretching from Darfur in Western Sudan through Chad, Mauritania, up to Ghana and Northern Nigeria up to Northern Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. But the conflit is stark only in Darfur where this struggle is publicized due to their being constantly subjected to attacks from the Janjaweed who are the Arabized Muslims of Northern Sudan who consider the African black Muslims to be infidels by virtue of their being non-Arabized.

Lessons from the struggle of black Africans against Islam

The lessons from the continuing suffering of the black African Muslims at the hands of the Arabized lighter skinned Muslims of which only Darfur is in the limelight, is that the sneaky and ruthless tactics of the Muslims can only be outmatched by we being more sneaky and ruthless ourselves. The old English adage "Everything is fair in love and war" holds greatest relevance while battling the Muslims. The only way out is give the defeated Muslims a choice of abandoning Islam and embracing any other religion or getting purged in an exercise that ends in their mercy killing. And only when we in the Non-Muslim world realize this and go into an overreach with subterfuge against the Terrorists (all of whom are Muslims), and use our still prevailing (but fast closing) edge of superior weapons against the enemy, can Islam finally be defeated and eliminated in the looming Third World War.

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* For those uninitiated, PBUH expands to Perpetual Battle Upon Hagarism (Islam) "founded by the mass-murderer and pedophile pretender prophet Mohammed-ibn-Abdallah (Yimach Shmo "May his name and memory be obliterated).

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Select Bibliography The Mummy, Funeral Rites & Customs in Ancient Egypt, by Ernest A. Wallis Budge, reprint of 1893 edition by Senate Studio Editions 1995

The Twilight of Ancient Egypt, First Millennium B.C.E., by Karol Mysliwiec, translated by David Lorton, Cornell University Press2000

Egypt in The Age of Cleopatra, by Michel Chauveau, translated by David Lorton, Cornell University Press, 2000

Women in Ancient Egypt, by Gay Robins, Harvard University Press, 1996

Women and Society in Greek and Roman Egypt: A Source Book by Jane Rowlandson, Cambridge University Press, 1998

The Chronicle of John Coptic Bishop of Nikiu (circa 690 A.D.), translated by Robert Henry Charles, reprint from 1916 edition, APA-Philo Press Amsterdam, Holland

The Vanished Library, A Wonder of The Ancient World, by Luciano Canfora, University of California Press

The Story of The Church of Egypt, Volumes I and II, by Edith L. Butcher, reprint of 1897 edition by AMS Press Inc, New York, N.Y 1975

Coptic Egypt, by Murad Kamil, Le Scribe Egyptien, 1968

Traditional Egyptian Christianity, A History of the Coptic Church, by Theodore. Hall Patrick, Fisher Park Press, 1999

Muslim Extremism in Egypt, The Prophet and the Pharaoh, by Gilles Kepel, University of California Press 1993

Ancient Egyptian Culture, published by Chartwell Books, Edison, N.J. 1998.

Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict, by Obadiah Shoher

Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries (Hardcover) by Paul Fregosi

The Sword of the Prophet: History, Theology, Impact on the World by Srdja Trifkovic

Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith by Robert Spencer

Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam) by David Cook

Why I Am Not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq

Onward Muslim Soldiers by Robert Spencer

Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye'Or

Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide by Bat Yeor

What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text, and Commentary by Ibn Warraq

Islam and Terrorism: What the Quran Really Teaches About Christianity, Violence and the Goals of the Islamic Jihad by Mark A. Gabriel, Mark A. Gabriel

A Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas F. Madden

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) by Robert Spencer

The Great Divide: The failure of Islam and the Triumph of the West by Marvin Olasky

The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims by Robert Spencer

Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith by Robert Spencer, David Pryce-Jones

The Koran (Penguin Classics) by N. J. Dawood

Don't Keep me Silent! One Woman's Escape from the Chains of Islam by Mina Nevisa

Christianity And Islam: The Final Clash by Robert Livingston

Holiest Wars : Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden by Timothy R. Furnish

The Last Trumpet: A Comparative Study in Christian-Islamic Eschatology by Samuel, Ph.D. Shahid

Unleashing the beast: How a fanatical islamic dictator will form a ten-nation coalition and terrorize the world for forty-two months by Perry Stone

Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature (Religion and Politics) by David Cook

Islam and the Jews: The Unfinished Battle by Mark A., Ph.D. Gabriel

The Challenge of Islam to Christians by David Pawson

The Prophetic Fall of the Islamic Regime by Glenn Miller, Roger Loomis

Prophet of Doom : Islam's Terrorist Dogma in Muhammad's Own Words by Craig Winn

The False Prophet by Ellis H. Skolfield

The Approach of Armageddon: An Islamic Perspective by Muhammad Hisham Kabbani

The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God by George Weigel

Infiltration : How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington by Paul Sperry

Unholy Alliance : Radical Islam and the American Left by David Horowitz

Unveiling Islam : An Insider's Look at Muslim Life and Beliefs by Ergun Mehmet Caner

Perfect Soldiers : The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It by Terry McDermott

Islam Revealed A Christian Arab's View Of Islam by Anis Shorrosh

Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out by Ibn Warraq

The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book by Ibn Warraq