Did a “Dark Age”* English King convert to Islam? Some Muslims would like you to think so
Special to Western Voices
A popular claim doing the rounds in Muslim circles holds that Offa, the great King of the Mercians who reigned for four decades from AD 757 to 796, was a Muslim. The only piece of evidence for the supposed Islamic faith of this King, ruler of one of the Saxon Heptarchies, comes from a gold coin now on display in the British Museum. The coin is a copy of an Abbasid dinar bearing on its obverse a garbled copy of part of the Shahada, the Muslim creed that states “there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.” The coin also shows the Latin title “Offa Rex,” King Offa. The reverse likewise shows a copied portion of Islamic text. Such inscriptions are called Pseudo-Kufic, copies of Arabic rendered by people not familiar with the Arabic script. Experts say that the coiner clearly was not conversant in that language, while Islamists seriously claim that the Latin title, not the Arab text, is “upside down”!
The coin is the only extant “evidence” of Offa’s alleged Muslim faith. In http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3308. Offa was intimately connected with European developments, especially in the Church. He was so closely linked to the Papacy that in 787 Pope Adrian I took the unprecedented step of actually creating a new Archdiocese of Lichfield at Offa’s request, close to his capital. The act diminished the power of the Archbishop of Canterbury, seated in Offa’s rival Kingdom of Kent. It is a mark of Offa’s importance that the archdiocese was dissolved and returned to Canterbury at his death.
In the face of this and much more evidence, Muslim polemicists now often state that Offa was a crypto-Muslim, though two problems immediately present themselves with this claim. First, it would hardly be “cryptic” to mint coins bearing the slogan of the militant new Islamic religion then storming across whole regions of Christendom, and then send these religious statements emblazoned in solid gold to the headquarters of the Christian religion itself. Second, Offa would have had no reason to remain “cryptic.” In those days the subjects of Kings were required to follow his religion, as happened with Offa’s own royal ancestors when they converted from heathenism. When necessary, violence was used, so much so that Offa’s contemporary admirer Alcuin was the first person to urge religious tolerance in Europe when he advised Charlemagne to abstain from the use of force in conversions of the pagans. Offa himself was a secure ruler, a power broker in English politics whose Offa’s Dyke, an earthen wall built to keep out the Celtic Welsh, still stands as England’s Western border. If he was a Muslim, Offa would have had no compunction about making it well known, as was required by Islam’s tenets. (Offa’s own direct ancestor, Penda, King of the Mercians and the last of their heathen monarchs, carried out wars against his Christianized neighbors in the name of re-converting them to his religion).
While the story of Offa’s Islamic faith is a fable, why would the tale be so important? Why would Muslims currently resident in the United Kingdom push it?
According to Islamic law, any nation that was at any time conquered by Islam or ruled by a Muslim, or even physically claimed is forever rightfully Islamic. This seems like it is a fine distinction, considering that Muslims are commanded to spread the faith around the planet. However, “lost” territories are to be regained before the “true faith of the Prophet” will succeed elsewhere. The territory “lost” to Islam, thanks to our “racist” ancestors who didn’t follow ideas like “diversity” and “tolerance,” is surprising to the millions of whites who are historically illiterate thanks to media and schools. The Muslims “rightfully” claim all of Spain and Portugal. They were driven out of France by http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4013 in 1571 off the coast of Greece which, like all of the Balkans, is claimed by Islamists. Hungary, Russia, Poland, Austria and Lithuania are also “lost” Muslim lands according to the Islamist formula. In fact, those deluded whites in these lands who become Muslims are said to “revert,” not “convert” to their “historic faith.” Even places as far afield as Iceland, subject to the slave raids of Muslim corsairs, could be considered to be lost lands.
(To be clear, while neocons and other Zionists have sought to take advantage of this very real Muslim current of thought to cynically portray Israel as some kind of “outpost” of Western Civilization and our natural ally, Western support for the Jewish state, whose partisans historically have supported open borders Muslim immigration into Europe and oppose any independent nationalist dissent, is a stumbling block to the kind of moderate, secularist movements in the Muslim world that would be in the best interets of Europe and America.)
Shortly after the collapse of Roman rule in what is now England a number of small kingdoms was established by ethnically Germanic invaders, the famous Angles, Saxons and Jutes, collectively called the Anglo-Saxons. Their Heptarchy of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex established the boundaries of what would become England (Angle Land). Their legal system formed the basis of the Common Law practiced across the http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=6267 world. Traditional history once held that the indigenous Romanized Celts, led by semi-mythical heroes like King Arthur, were driven en masse northward into Scotland and westward into Wales and Cornwall by the continental invaders. However, recent DNA evidence has shown that the genetic legacy of not only the Saxons but of the Celts themselves is much less prominent than expected, and that the peoples of Great Britain are largely the genetic descendants of Ice Age hunter gatherers. The invasions of the UK by Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans have been used in spurious arguments in favor of Third World immigration, despite the fact that all these groups were racially identical and had a minimal genetic impact anyhow.
The changes wrought by the Anglo-Saxons were cultural and deep. The Romano-Celts were Christians, practiced the Roman legal system, and enjoyed the high technological achievements of the Roman world. In contrast, they viewed the Anglo-Saxons as barbarians who worshipped heathen gods and lacked the cultural level of the Romans. Yet from the jury system to the names of the days of the week to the language itself the Anglo-Saxons laid down the foundations of a civilization that would change the world.
History in the hands of unscrupulous people with agendas is a political weapon. No group of people have faced the kind and level of concerted, malicious editing of their history as much as white people have, a daunting task considering the range and scope of white achievement. The constant theme is to portray whites as hateful and genocidal, whose only progress was manufactured by stealing the achievements of more enlightened peoples. Yes, the religion of egalitarianism is dependent on the paradox of claiming that white people, and our civilization, are inferior.
According to politically correct orthodoxy, white people are historic imperialists. In those cases where whites have been the victims of what would otherwise be called imperialism, our backward ancestors allegedly prospered from our “contact” with nonwhites. We have all heard the tales that seek to explain the centuries of Muslim imperialist aggression, from Spain and the Balkans to Central Europe as a flowering of cultural enrichment thanks to the diversity and tolerance of Islam. We are told that in Spain, especially, in which a Moorish Muslim elite and its Jewish henchmen dominated the indigenous Christian Spaniards for over seven hundred years, a culture of breathtaking achievement flourished, only to be eviscerated by the Reconquista of the white Catholic hatemongers in 1492. This narrative has been strenghtened by the Black Legend, which dates back to the Reconquista itself and holds the legacy of Spain up as uniquely evil and, despite cultural relativity being standard when dealings with nonwhites, backward.
Originally promulgated by Protestant extremists, Jewish propagandists and political operatives, the Black Legend has become a http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=6152 widely accepted as fact in the English speaking white world. The word “Inquisition” alone conjures up a whole set of images that are all rooted in the Legend. Yet since the time of Bartolomé de las Casas, the bishop who began the Black Legend chapters on alleged Spanish treatment of the Indians, the Legend has grown past the Spaniards themselves to encompass the history and alleged crimes of all white people.
Given the manufactured, cartoonish history presented to whites in films, books and schools, it is little wonder that many white people have internalized their own oppression. This is seen in laughable cases like whites in “dreadlocks” or hip-hop uniforms, and more seriously in the small but sadly growing number of white Muslim http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2957. But to one degree or another all whites have at least some self-hatred as a result of misunderstood history and conscious lies of those who know better.
At least one company hasn’t bought the hype about England’s “Muslim King.” Near Hoffa’s Dyke in Hereford, headquarters base of the Special Air Service (SAS) commandos, and once a staging point for Offa’s army (called a “here”) for his Welsh campaigns you’ll find the Cider Museum, dedicated to the alcoholic apple beverage enjoyed by our ancestors since European antiquity. At the museum visitors sample King Offa brand cider, poking fun at the idea of a Muslim Mercian King and at the tee-total Islamists who claim him as their own.
* The term “Dark Ages” was originally not meant as a value statement, but instead referred to the lack of information historians had about the period. The term has since come to represent the idea that European culture was frozen until at least the Middle Ages or even the Renaissance. Of course, according to modern political correctness, the Middle Ages were a time of ignorance and superstition, “a world lit only by fire,” and only dissipated thanks to the importation of Jewish and Muslim learning. We now know that even the immediate post-Roman period was anything but backward. There was a thriving merchant trade and ideas were exchanged all across Europe.