Hey, Tucker: Christianity and Islam Have a Long and Very Bitter History

Josh Hammer | Apr 17, 2026 | Townhall

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Recently, Carlson has repeatedly taken to praising sharia law and suggesting Islam and its totalitarian legal code offer an inspiring moral clarity in contrast with today’s Western decadence. He has visited virtually every country in the Arab world, produced propaganda films for a few of them, and even announced his intention to buy a house in Qatar. He has called Hamas not a jihadist but a political organization, said he’d apologize to the family of Osama bin Laden, and has severely downplayed the Americans who have been killed in recent decades by Islamism. And earlier this week, the eponymous Tucker Carlson Network, in a seemingly earnest post better suited for a satirical Babylon Bee headline, offered this cherry on top: “Muslims love Jesus.”

In short, Carlson is now leading a conscientious effort to aggressively promote Islam on the American Right.

Regardless: This is a flaming pile of dung. And it must be rejected as such. Fundamentally, Islam and sharia are wildly incompatible with Western civilization, which is the offshoot of the ecumenical biblical inheritance. The history of Christian-Islamic relations tells a long and often bitter record of conflict, competition and occasional outright persecution. From the early centuries of Islamic expansionism all the way through modern times, the relationship between Christendom and the Islamic world has rarely been tranquil.

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Read all about Islam – the religion of war and subjugation here.

Islam destroyed centuries of Christian habitation and churches in its jihadist march to conquer the western world. This goal is still seen today with Iran and its attempt at attaining nuclear weapons to use on Israel and ultimately America and Europe.

Let’s start with the Islamic attempt to take over all of western Europe in the 8th century. Islam had conquered North Africa and Spain and was moving into France. That is where is was defeated and turned back at the Battle of Tours.

Charles Martel (c. 688–741) was the grandfather of Charlemagne (742–814). Charlemagne was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day, 800 AD, by Pope Leo III. While he was king of the Franks and Lombards, this coronation solidified his rule over a vast Carolingian Empire, which was seen as a revival of the Western Roman Empire.

AI Overview

Charles Martel, the Frankish Mayor of the Palace, stopped the northward Islamic advance into France by defeating the Umayyad Caliphate at the Battle of Tours (or Poitiers) in 732 AD. Known as “The Hammer,” Martel led Frankish infantry to victory over Emir Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi’s forces, a pivotal, often cited moment that halted the expansion of the Umayyad Caliphate from Iberia into Western Europe. 

Key details:

• The Leader: Charles Martel (“The Hammer”) was the de facto ruler of the Franks, a Germanic people controlling much of modern-day France.
• The Battle: The Battle of Tours took place in October 732, between Tours and Poitiers in western-central France.
• Significance: Martel’s heavily armed infantry withstood the Umayyad cavalry, resulting in the death of Emir Abdul Rahman and the retreat of the Muslim army.
• Long-term Impact: This victory is viewed as a defining moment that secured Western Europe for Christianity, allowing Martel to solidify his power and lay the foundation for the Carolingian dynasty.
• Continued Struggle: While 732 is considered the high-water mark, conflicts continued in southern France for several more years, with Martel subsequently taking the offensive against remaining Umayyad forces in Septimania.

This victory for Christianity remains a cornerstone event in Medieval European history. Christian armies would go on to drive Muslims out of Spain. However recapturing the Holy Land would prove more difficult and far less successful even after centuries of conflict with Islam.

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We can go at least as far back as the Crusades. The Crusades are frequently caricatured as unprovoked Christian aggression. In reality, they were a complex response to conquests that, in the first centuries of Islam, had already overtaken large swaths of historically Christian (and, in the case of the Holy Land, Jewish) territory. These campaigns were at least as much about reclaiming conquered territory as they were about imperialist religious zeal.

Fast-forward a few centuries to the 17th-century Battle of Vienna, when the expansionist ambitions of the Ottoman Empire brought Islamic armies to the very gates of Central Europe. The successful defense of Vienna marked a turning point, halting further Ottoman advance into the heart of European Christendom. This was not merely a geopolitical victory but a civilizational one too — a triumph for the Bible over sharia.

This pattern persisted into the early modern era. The First and Second Barbary Wars — often relegated to footnotes in American history classrooms — were confrontations with North African Muslim pirates who enslaved, pillaged and extracted unjust tributes from Western nations. To this day, the well-known U.S. Marines’ Hymn references these conflicts in its early reference to the “shores of Tripoli.” These early-republic standoffs between Americans and Muslim African pirates are part of our national lore.

Nor is this just ancient history. The atrocities of 9/11 were carried out in the name of an Islamist ideology that draws explicitly on Islamic holy texts and traditions. The same is true of the 2009 Fort Hood Massacre, the 2015 San Bernardino mass shooting, the Bourbon Street Massacre of Jan. 1, 2025, and countless other jihadist attacks in the homeland just since 9/11. To dismiss such acts as somehow wholly unrelated to Islam, as Carlson and his fellow propagandists do, is to lie and deceive — to engage in their very own form of taqiyya.

And today, in places like Nigeria, the violence continues. Islamist groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province have targeted Christian communities with horrifying brutality — church burnings, kidnappings, rapes and mass killings. Overall, 93 percent of the estimated 4,849 Christians murdered worldwide for their faith in 2025 were killed by Islamist fanatics.

Carlson’s insidious project reflects a broader confusion on the Right about where Christianity’s natural religious alliance lies. The answer is not Islam but Judaism — the original monotheistic faith from which Christianity itself first emerged. The Hebrew Scriptures are the overwhelming core of Christianity’s Old Testament. The moral, ethical, legal and political continuity between the two religions is profound.

The historical record between Christianity and Islam is contentious and often tragic. And that makes sense: The biblical worldview and the Sharia supremacist worldview are incompatible with one another. To gaslight to the contrary and pretend otherwise, regardless of the motive, is an act of profound intellectual dishonesty — and cowardice to boot.