““Muhammad’s violent end years and final violent words were quickly followed by those who succeeded him in power, after his death in 632 AD. “Within thirty years after Muhammad’s death Islam achieved the most spectacular expansion in its history. During the caliphate of Muhammad’s immediate successors from 632 to 661, Islam conquered the whole Arabian peninsula and invaded territories which had been in Greco-Roman hands since the reign of Alexander the Great….Damascus fell in 635. Jerusalem was captured in 638. In the same year Antioch fell, and the other great Hellenistic capital, Alexandria, became a permanent Arab possession in 646. Coastal cities in Syria, Palestine and Egypt, as well as the island of Cyprus were successively occupied by Arabs in a short period of time…The rapid advance of Islam spread panic and consternation among the Christians in the Greek Near East…The Arabic wars against the Greeks were not only political and economic wars, but holy wars of Islam against Christianity.” (“Greek Christian and Other Accounts of the Muslim Conquests of the Near East,” Demetrios Constantelos, article in The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus Books, 2005, Edited by Andrew Bostom, MD).””
