Robert Spencer is a Christian American scholar writing on topics including Islam, Orthodoxy, and the Byzantine Empire. The director of Jihad Watch, he is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He has led seminars on Islam and jihad for organizations including the FBI, the United States Central Command, and the U.S. intelligence community.
Grégoire Canlorbe: Please tell us about the different ways of jihad. What is the extent of their work in the U.S and elsewhere ?
Robert Spencer: There are many forms of jihad. Besides armed jihad, there is jihad of the tongue, jihad of the pen, jihad of the pocketbook and many more. The goal of all of them is to destroy the existing order of non-Muslim states and replace that order with the hegemony of Sharia.
Stealth jihad—including the efforts of Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations to gain political power by winning electoral offices at all levels[i] as well as attaining influential positions within various government agencies—is quite advanced in the U.S. The entire American left has been knocking itself out enabling and aiding the expansion of Muslim political power, without realizing or caring that it is supporting a radically intolerant and supremacist ideology. In Europe, this process is already even farther advanced due to the high level of Muslim migration, which could lead to civil war, as well as, demographically, to Islamic states on the continent—and in Great Britain—before the end of this century. Russia is not exempt from this replacement, but currently has fewer Muslims, and is therefore less Islamized.
Canlorbe: How do you assess the future of America, which was founded as a Christian nation?
Spencer: America has, to a much lesser extent than Europe but nevertheless unmistakably, cast off its Christian heritage to a tremendous degree. The popular culture, educational system and mass media are actively anti-Christian, and have managed a large-scale transformation of public attitudes and beliefs over the last half-century. This has created a vacuum which Islam is eager to fill, as it is doing in Europe. We see in particular the proliferation of churches being bought and transformed into mosques, with Muslims boasting of this achievement in the UK and elsewhere. Muslims in general prefer this method to building new buildings: the transformation of a church into a mosque is for them a visible manifestation of Islam’s victory, superiority over Christianity, and coming hegemony. There is also the sharp increase in the desecration of Christian religious art, and the mysterious and as yet unexplained burning of an ever-increasing number of churches all over Europe and North America.
Canlorbe: You write about the Byzantine civilization and how it preserved the legacy of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. What were those values it inherited? How did they contribute to making the Byzantine world so different both from the Islamic civilization, and from Catholic Europe?
Spencer: The Byzantines, who always referred to themselves simply as Romans and believed they were simply Romans living in the Roman Empire, were responsible—not the Muslims, as is commonly claimed—for preserving the classics of ancient pre-Christian Greek literature. These writings were the foundation of the Byzantine curriculum right up until Bizantium fell in 1453. The writings of Plato and Aristotle, as well as of literary figures such as Aeschylus and Euripides, laid the foundations of the Western political, philosophical, scientific and literary traditions. As such, their influence is still felt today even among people who never read their works or even heard of them.
Islamic civilization developed quite differently. We hear a great deal about the Muslim philosophers who influenced Thomas Aquinas and others; we hear less about how, among Muslims, they were considered heretics. Al-Ghazali condemned them in The Incoherence of the Philosophers and effectively killed the Islamic philosophical tradition. It continued, but under a cloud and never with as much influence as it had before. Even worse, al-Ghazali, for all of his own philosophical accomplishment, reinforced an anti-intellectualism in the Islamic world that retarded scientific development and persists to this day. The caliph Umar, the second successor of Muhammad, is said to have ordered the burning of the library of Alexandria, remarking: “If the books disagree with the Qur’an, they are heretical. If they agree with the Qur’an, they are superfluous.” Even if this is just a legend, it encapsulates a persistent tendency.
Catholic Europe, likewise, had little knowledge of Plato and Aristotle until Gemistos Plethon began lecturing on their works in Florence in the mid-fifteenth century, leading to the Renaissance. The debt that the West owes to Byzantium is as immense as it is little noted.
Canlorbe: How do you account for the fall of Constantinople? What lessons should the U.S. draw from that event in the history of the West?
Spencer: Beginning in the late seventh century with the first siege of Constantinople in 675 and continuing for nearly 800 years, jihad attacks weakened and ultimately destroyed the Roman Empire in Constantinople. The failure to get help from the West, stemming from suspicions arising from the Great Schism—the split between the Eastern and Western Churches in 1054 that continues to this day—played a large role in Constantinople’s ultimate fall, as well as disunity among the leaders of the Empire itself. Some were even short-sighted and self-serving enough to seek and obtain help from Muslim forces.
Today, due to the general denial, combined with willful ignorance regarding the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, the U.S. is facing a similar threat from short-sighted and self-serving leaders of our own. The educational system, the “left,” most of the media and social media and now the Democrats are busy encouraging the growth of Muslim political power, while insisting on ignoring the political, supremacist, expansionist and violent aspects of Sharia. Few politicians are aware of the nature and magnitude of the threat, or are resolved to do anything about it. If this continues, we will eventually face our own May 29, 1453, the fall of Constantinople, after a 53-day siege, to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II.
Canlorbe: When it comes to the sin of self-imposed submission to Islam, do you believe that some religions are more affected than others?
Spencer: No, they are all affected, even though there are some notable individuals who have not been afraid to speak out—or not prevented from doing so.
[i] See, for example, the sharp increase in the number of Muslims in the next U.S. Congress, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, possible Michigan Senator Abdul El-Sayed, etc.)
That conversation was originally published on Gatestone Institute, in September 2026
