Considering the occasion of the speech and the speech deliverer himself, Grand Imam Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb—arguably “the most influential Muslim in the world”—Islam was praised to the ceiling.  Of especial interest, however, was al-Tayeb’s rendition of history.  At one point he said:

In just a few years after the death of the prophet Muhammad (Allah pray on and grant him peace), the Islamic conquests [literally, “openings,” futuhat] caused the two most powerful empires that divided and controlled every corner of the Middle East to collapse, and their lands in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa to become Islamic lands to this very day.

This, of course, is true.  The two empires the sheikh refers to are the Eastern Roman Empire (“Byzantium”) and the Sassanian Empire of Persia.  Most of the lands cited by al-Tayeb—from Syria and Egypt in the east, to Morocco and Algeria in the west—were Christian and governed by the Eastern Roman Empire.  Only Iran and parts of Iraq were under Sassanian rule and Zoroastrian in religion.  During the seventh century, Muslims conquered and Islamized all of these lands.

As usual, however, when it comes to Islamic retellings, facts are quickly mingled with fiction.  After making the above statement, al-Tayeb offered this:

These [Muslim] conquests were not conquests of colonization that rely on the methods of plunder, oppression, control, and the policies of domination and dependency, [all of which] which leave nations in ruin.

He went on to condemn conquests of colonization that are about oppression and plunder—a swipe at Europe’s historic colonization of the Middle East—before continuing: Read it all here.........