I am from a city called Jarash. Today, it’s insignificant, a decaying, forgotten place. But once, it was Jarasa, a thriving Greco-Roman city, a hub of trade, knowledge, and culture. Then came the Islamic conquest. My ancestors were forced to convert. Their history was erased. Their city stripped of its brilliance and left to crumble. This wasn’t just Jerash. It was Lebanon. It was Syria. It was Iraq. It was Egypt. For centuries before Islam, these lands were centers of civilization, philosophy, science, commerce, and empire. Then Islam arrived and broke them. Egypt, the land of the Pharaohs, of monumental architecture, of one of the greatest empires in history, was reduced to a province of a 7th-century Arab warlord’s empire. Islam was not a victim of colonialism. It was the greatest colonial project in history. It conquered by force, erased entire civilizations, and replaced them with what you see today. Israel, by contrast, is the most successful decolonization project in history. A people returning to their land. Restoring what was stolen from them. Resisting the ideology that wrecked the Middle East and North Africa.
