The Washington Examiner recently published an argument against Christians playing “crusader” in Dearborn, Michigan. Good. Modern American Muslims are not seventh-century armies, and political argument becomes diseased when ancestry is treated like perpetual criminal liability.
But the mirror-image mistake matters too: Defending modern Muslims does not require us to sanitize medieval Muslim conquest.
When Arab-Muslim armies crossed borders, defeated existing political orders, took territory, and established rule over populations that had not collectively consented to incorporation, conquest is the correct analytical noun. The Arabic futuh tradition, often rendered as “openings,” is historically important because it tells us how early Muslim writers remembered and legitimized expansion. It should be taught as the conqueror’s vocabulary, not inherited as the historian’s neutral description.
This distinction gets us out of a political trap. One side treats today’s Muslim neighbor as if he were personally responsible for the Umayyad army. The other side fears that calling the Umayyad army a conquering army somehow indicts today’s Muslim neighbor. Both confuse a person with a historical institution.
North Africa shows why the categories have to be separated. Modern Amazigh and Arab identities are real. So are centuries of Arabic language, Islamic religious life, intermarriage, and cultural creation. Population-genetic research nevertheless finds deep North African continuity, heterogeneity, and repeated admixture rather than a cartoon of total population replacement.
The relevant population-genetics study is Lara Arauna et al., Molecular Biology and Evolution (2017), which examined Arab- and Berber-identified North African populations and reconstructed layered migration and admixture histories.
Egypt makes the same point through religious history. Arab forces conquered Byzantine Egypt in the seventh century — Egypt did not become an Arabic-speaking Muslim-majority society in an afternoon. Mohamed Saleh’s research on medieval taxation and conversion finds evidence that the poll tax on non-Muslims affected conversion incentives over time. See Saleh, Journal of Economic History (2018).
That history does not make an Egyptian Muslim counterfeit. It makes Egyptian history layered.
The same principle should govern how Americans talk about Muslims now. A Muslim family in Michigan is not the army that conquered Egypt. An Arab-American citizen is not a medieval caliphate. A descendant is not a conqueror.
And the second half matters just as much: The conquest is still a conquest.
That distinction is not moral cowardice. It is what lets a plural society inherit history without turning ancestry into caste. We can ask what obligations survive conquest — truth, memory, protection of minorities, recovery of suppressed languages and names — without pretending that a Muslim born in Dearborn inherited either a medieval right to rule or a medieval debt of guilt.
We should be capable of rejecting hereditary guilt without granting any civilization a historical innocence exception. European “pacification,” Christian “civilizing missions,” Muslim “openings,” imperial “protectorates” — all of these terms can be studied as evidence about how power described itself. None should be allowed to decide the analytical vocabulary before the investigation begins.
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Modern Muslims deserve to be judged as modern people. Medieval Muslim empires deserve to be studied as empires. Those propositions reinforce each other.
You do not fight anti-Muslim prejudice by asking history to lie. You fight it by refusing to confuse the living person with the dead army — while refusing to let the dead army rewrite what it did.
Joshua W.J. Brown is a Toronto-based writer, filmmaker, and independent systems researcher whose work spans political thought, public history, identity systems, genealogy, and AI-enabled research.