“Over a large part of Spain, over north Africa, Egypt, Syria, Babylonia, Persia, north India, and portions of Central Asia were spread—to the more or less perfect exclusion of native customs, speech, and worship—the manners, the language, and the religion of the Arabian conquerors.”—Myers's “General History,” page 401.
10. What command was given these locusts?
“And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.” Verse 4.
Notes.—When the Arabian tribes were gathered for the conquest of Syria, 633 a.d., the caliph Abu-Bekr, the successor of Mohammed, instructed the chiefs of his army not to allow their victory to be “stained with the blood of women and children;” to “destroy no palm-trees, nor burn any fields of corn;” to “cut down no fruit-trees, nor do any mischief to cattle;” and to spare those religious persons “who live retired in monasteries, and propose to themselves to serve God in that way;” but, he said, “you will find another sort of people that belong to the synagogue of Satan, who have shaven crowns: be sure you cleave their skulls and give them no quarter till they either turn Mohammedan or pay tribute.” In this, Mohammedanism, itself a false religion, is revealed as a scourge to apostate Christianity.
“In a short time they [the Mohammedan Saracens] had taken from the Aryans all the principal old Semitic lands,—Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Assyria, and Babylonia. To these was soon added Egypt.”—Encyclopedia Britannica, article “Mohammedanism.”
11. What were these locusts said to have over them?
“And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon [margin, a destroyer].” Verse 11.
Notes.—For hundreds of years the Mohammedans and invading Tartar tribes, like the locusts (Prov. 30:27), had no general government or king over them, but were divided into bands, or factions, under separate leaders. But in the twelfth century Temuljin, king of the Mongols, or Moguls, who is described as “the most terrible scourge that ever afflicted the human race,” built up an empire “at the cost,” it is estimated, says Myers in his “General History,” page 461, of “fifty thousand cities and towns and five million lives.” This was followed by the more permanent Tartar empire founded by Othman a century later, commonly known as the Ottoman Empire, and ruled by the sultan.
From the first, the great characteristic of the Turkish government has been that of a “destroyer.” Speaking of a war by the Turks upon the Byzantine Empire in 1050, Gibbon (chapter 57) says: “The myriads of Turkish horse overspread a frontier of six hundred miles from Tauris to Erzeroum, and the blood of one hundred and thirty thousand Christians was a grateful sacrifice to the Arabian prophet.”
In 1058 the Turks wrested the Holy Land from the Saracens, desecrated the holy places, and treated the pilgrims to Jerusalem with cruelty. This brought on the nine unsuccessful crusades of the next two centuries for the recovery of the Holy Land.