Jefferson's War Read Online Free PDF Page A

have been difficult to find more dissimilar nations than the United States and the four Barbary States in 1801. Except for its Native American population and a small percentage of Jews, the United States was solidly Christian, while the North African regencies were just as solidly Moslem—and openly hostile toward Christians. The new American republic was a laboratory of Enlightenment ideals, especially freedom, openness, and rationality; the Barbary Powers were medieval, closed, tyrannical, and corrupt. The United States was a new land, perched on the edge of a largely unexplored wilderness; Barbary—the name is derived from the Latin barbarus and Greek barbaros, ancient appellations for foreigners—was a burial ground for Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Byzantines, Goths, Christians, and Moslems. While America dreamed of global markets for its
growing profusion of products, the Barbary rulers’ narrow aims hadn’t changed in centuries: to invoke the Koran to extort money from Christian nations.
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    â€œJihad” is derived from the word “jahada,” meaning “to strive.” The Koran exhorts Moslems to strive to purify themselves spiritually and promote Islam in the world. The first is a battle fought and won within the heart by overcoming temptation, and the second is achieved by doing right in the world. In early Koran interpretations, jihad was nonviolent; the believer conquered his urges and peacefully disseminated Islam’s tenets throughout the world. War was permitted only in self-defense. As Islam exploded into a religion of conquest and contended with Christian Europe for territory during the Crusades, jihad took on a new meaning: It became a holy war to impose Moslem hegemony over nonbelievers.
    Jihad’s new interpretation became accepted practice in the Moslem world, regulated by a few simple rules. It could not be waged against other Moslem nations. It had to be authorized by an Islamic state’s spiritual leader. Infidels must be forewarned, and offered the opportunity to remain autonomous, if they agreed to pay a tax. Their refusal to pay permitted jihad to be declared, and any captives taken from ships or in battle could be enslaved and ransomed. The Barbary States stuck to this template in their dealings with America and Europe, while blithely ignoring the Koran’s many other strictures on war. Acting as their nations’ temporal and religious leaders, the bashaws, deys, beys, and emperors decided when their corsairs would hunt the European merchant ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic. They chose their enemies and fixed the price of ephemeral peace.

II
    THE DREADFUL CORSAIRS
    â€œYield dogs, yield!”
    â€”Barbary pirates’ exhortation before boarding European merchant ships
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    T he seeds of the Barbary States’ long jihad against Christian Europe and, later, America were planted by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain in 1492, the year they sponsored Christopher Columbus’s expedition into the Atlantic to find a western passage to India. The royal couple had grand ambitions for Spain, wishing to bring the entire peninsula under Christian rule. That meant finally crushing the Moors, the descendants of the Islamic conquerors of Iberia in 711.
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    The Moors were the progeny of invading Arab Moslems and of the North African Berbers whose origins predate the historical record, receding into the primordial mists millennia before Christ. Moslem cavalry pouring out of seventh-century Arabia reached Alexandria in 642 and began embarking on increasingly longer and larger expeditions into the Maghrib, the “land of sunset”—the vast arid region stretching from Egypt to the Atlantic, more
than 2,000 miles. In the oceanic sand dunes and craggy hills, the Arabs met and conquered North Africa’s indigenous Berber tribes in bloody clash after sharp, bloody clash, advancing