Welcome to the second and final volume of this comprehensive scholarly refutation. In Part 1 of our response to Muhammad Mahmud’s reactive Facebook post, we successfully stripped away his global historical pretenses. We demonstrated that the industrial slaughters, colonial dispossessions, and expansionist mechanics of the 15th century were the fruits of secular political greed and anti-clerical statecraft, totally decoupled from orthodox Christian theology. We also turned the mirror on Mahmud’s own worldview, exposing how classical Islamic history and text-driven jurisprudence perfectly embody the aggressive, predatory framework he attempts to project onto the Church.
Now, we enter the final half of his argument. Realizing that his macro-historical claims could not withstand real peer-reviewed scrutiny, Mahmud attempted an academic sleight of hand by zeroing in on Northern Nigerian history. He introduces a 15th-century Papal Bull (Romanus Pontifex) out of its defensive context, quotes an obscure 1908 tract titled Crisis in Hausaland, and drops a missionary poem by Frank Aust, claiming these elements serve as direct evidence for a “Christian colonization push.”
I urge you to maintain your strict, undivided attention. As we dissect Mahmud’s remaining assertions line-by-line, we will uncover a shocking pattern of intellectual dishonesty. We will prove that he intentionally suppressed critical historical facts, completely inverted the true nature of British colonial policy in Nigeria, and displayed a profound scriptural illiteracy regarding the very missionary poetry he cited. Let us continue the refutation.
PARAGRAPH 10, 11, & 12
The Claim
Mahmud states:
“In ‘Kings or people : power and the mandate to rule’ Reinhard Bendix explained that ‘The papal bull of 1454 granted Prince Henry… “the right, total and absolute, to invade, conquer, and subject all the countries which are under the rule of the enemies of Christ”…’ In his book ‘Spain and Portugal in the New World…’, McAlister explains… Cardinal Henry of Susa… Hostiensis declared… Roman pontiffs… could delegate lordship over non-Christian lands… In Romanus Pontifex, Pope Nicholas V says… he may successfully bring the infidel sheep… into the single divine fold… by vanquishing and subjecting the infidels…”
The Refutation
Mahmud is trying to build a narrative that Christianity invented a unique “theological-legal system of dehumanization” to conquer the world. This is academically false. Every major empire in human history—long before the 15th-century Papal Bulls—utilized the exact same concepts of divine right, territorial dispossession, and religious supremacy to justify their greed.
Most damagingly to your opponent, classical Islamic jurisprudence perfectly mirrors the exact mechanics of the Doctrine of Discovery. Centuries before the Popes issued Inter Caetera, Islamic theology divided the entire globe into two permanent legal zones: Dar al-Islam (The Domain of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (The Domain of War). Under standard Sharia law, any land ruled by non-Muslims was legally categorized as a “Domain of War,” meaning it was a legitimate target for unprovoked military invasion, territorial seizure, and the forced subjugation of its indigenous populations into second-class dhimmi status.
By quoting these four world-class scholars, you expose that your opponent is condemning Western history for the exact imperial and legal systems that built the Islamic world from the 7th century onward.
On the Islamic equivalent of the Doctrine of Discovery (Dar al-Harb), Bernard Lewis (Ph.D. from the University of London, Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, and universally recognized as one of the world’s greatest scholars of Islamic and Middle Eastern history) states that:
“According to Islamic law, the world is divided into two parts: the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam), where Islamic law is enforced, and the rest of the world, known as the House of War (Dar al-Harb), inhabited by infidels. It is a permanent obligation upon the Muslim community to wage a holy war, or jihad, against the House of War until the entire world is brought under the sovereignty of the Islamic state and the rule of Islamic law.”
Source: Lewis, Bernard. The Political Language of Islam. University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 73.
Writting on the legally mandated Imperialism and Subjugation of Infidels, Majid Khadduri (Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago, world-renowned Iraqi-American scholar of Islamic jurisprudence, and former Professor at Johns Hopkins University) write:
“The Islamic law of nations (Siyar) establishes that the state of war between the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world is a permanent legal reality, suspended only by temporary truces. Non-Muslim territories have no legal validity or sovereign rights under Sharia; they are inherently open to conquest, and their peoples must either accept Islam or submit to a state of political humiliation and financial extraction through the Jizya tax.”
Source: Khadduri, Majid. War and Peace in the Law of Islam. Johns Hopkins Press, 1955, p. 51.
Thomas Sowell (Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University) writes on the Universal Imperial abuse of Religion for Greed
“Conquest and the subjugation of indigenous peoples are universal features of human history, found across every continent, race, and religious tradition. To isolate Western European colonialism as a unique moral anomaly driven solely by Christian creeds is to ignore that Aztec, Mongol, Ottoman, and West African empires utilized their own distinct theological and ideological systems to justify identical practices of land seizure, mass murder, and human enslavement.”
Source: Sowell, Thomas. Conquest and Cultures: An International History. Basic Books, 1998, p. 342.
In addition, Andrew G. Bostom (MD, MS, former Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University Medical School, and highly acclaimed historian of Islamic imperial expansions) states that:
“Centuries before European explorers utilized legal fictions to claim foreign lands, the early Islamic conquests systematically dispossessed, decimated, and colonized the ancient indigenous Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Hindu civilizations of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. This massive demographic and cultural erasure was legally authorized by canonical texts that treated non-Muslim property and persons as legitimate spoils of war.”
Source: Bostom, Andrew G. The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims. Prometheus Books, 2005, p. 29.
Unfortunate, Mahmud screams about Pope Nicholas V in 1455, but he completely silent about his Prophet Muhammad and the early Caliphs in the 7th century. If writing a decree that says ‘you have a right to invade and subject the enemies of Christ’ is evil, then he must also condemn the canonical Islamic laws of Siyar, which gave Arab armies the total, absolute, and permanent right to invade, conquer, and subject the entire non-Muslim world under the banner of Jihad.
By using the scholarship of Bernard Lewis and Majid Khadduri, we have exposed that his own religious history operates on the exact same legal mechanics of dispossession that you are trying to blame uniquely on Christianity. The difference is simple: European powers had to violate the New Testament to do it, but Islamic empires merely had to obey theirs.
PARAGRAPH 13
The Claim
Mahmud states:
“The language from Romanus Pontifex illustrates the connection between ‘the doctrine of Christian discovery’ and the Theology of Domination… The language of Romanus Pontifex provides strong evidence that the Holy See at that time believed that the doctrine of Christian discovery and domination was intrinsic to ‘the teaching of the Catholic Church.’”
The Refutation
Mahmud falls into a massive academic loophole by confusing a geopolitical, localized treaty issued by a 15th-century Pope with the official, unalterable dogma of the Christian Church. Pope Nicholas V issued Romanus Pontifex in 1455 under immense political pressure. The Ottoman Islamic Empire was aggressively expanding, having conquered Constantinople just two years prior in 1453 and choking off all European trade routes. The Papal Bull was a temporary diplomatic maneuver to encourage Portugal to find alternative maritime trade routes around Africa to halt Ottoman expansion.
Furthermore, your opponent claims this “Theology of Domination” is intrinsic to Church teaching. This is a historical lie. The Vatican has officially stated that these 15th-century political bulls were political documents co-opted, manipulated, and twisted by secular European monarchs to satisfy their personal greed. The core teaching of Christianity is found in the New Testament, which explicitly commands spiritual conversion through loving evangelism, completely forbidding the physical sword to conquer lands or dominate souls.
We will quote from the official Vatican Joint Statement of the Doctrine of Discovery.
The Holy See / Vatican Secretariat for Culture and Education (The official, central governing body of the global Catholic Church).
“The ‘doctrine of discovery’ is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church. Historical research clearly demonstrates that the papal documents in question, such as Romanus Pontifex and Inter Caetera, were political instruments manipulated by secular colonial powers to justify their competing imperial projects, and they did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of indigenous peoples.“
Source: Official Vatican Joint Statement on the “Doctrine of Discovery”, Holy See Press Office, March 30, 2023. (emphases mine)
https://humanrights.ca/story/doctrine-discovery
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/30/1167056438/vatican-doctrine-of-discovery-colonialism-indigenous
On the context of Defensive Anti-Ottoman Geopolitics, Dr. John Philip Jenkins (Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, and preeminent historian of global Christianity) states:
“The fifteenth-century papal bulls cannot be understood apart from the existential panic griping Europe after the catastrophic fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453. Romanus Pontifex was fundamentally a localized wartime strategic document aimed at containing Islamic military expansion, rather than a universal or timeless Christian theological blueprint for the destruction of indigenous cultures.”
Source: Jenkins, Philip. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church. HarperOne, 2008, p. 142.
In addtion, On the distinction between Political Edicts and Immutable Dogma Dr. Jaroslav Pelikan (Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, former Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and widely considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on Christian doctrine) states that:
“A profound category error is committed when critics conflate the political, transient edicts of medieval Roman pontiffs with the unalterable, authoritative dogma of the Christian Church. The core of Christian orthodoxy is anchored in scripture and ecumenical creeds, both of which explicitly bar the implementation of coercive state violence as a mechanism for spiritual advancement.”
Source: Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. University of Chicago Press, 1989, Vol. 4, p. 201.
Dr. Kwame Bediako (Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen, pioneer of modern African Theology, and former Director of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute) on how the Colonial Subversion of the True Gospel writes:
“European colonizers routinely subverted Christian theology to fuel their imperial expansions. The concepts of domination and racial hierarchy were imported from Enlightenment secularism and political greed, entirely contradicting the New Testament parameters of the Gospel. True African Christianity spread not because of these papal edicts, but precisely because Africans recognized the liberating message of Christ despite the distortions of European empires.”
Source: Bediako, Kwame. Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion. Edinburgh University Press, 1995, p. 34.
PARAGRAPH 14
The Claim
Mahmud states:
“Nothing point to this more than what the Christian colonists wrote in their book ‘Crisis in Hausaland’, in which they depicted exactly the religious motive of their colonization push in this part of the world.”
The Refutation
Mahmud drops the name of a book—“Crisis in Hausaland”—and deceptively claims it was written by “Christian colonists” to outline a “colonization push”. This is an absolute manipulation of Northern Nigerian history. (See the real tract)
First, the tract was written in 1908 by Dr. Karl Kumm (the founder of the Sudan United Mission), not by British colonial administrators. Second, the title of the tract was “Crisis in Hausaland: Cross or Crescent”—a fact your opponent deliberately omitted to hide the true context. Karl Kumm was not advocating for British colonial invasion. He was writing a desperate, warning tract to Western missionary societies detailing a crisis where the British Colonial Government was actively suppressing Christianity while promoting and enforcing Islam on the indigenous populations of Northern Nigeria. (Sermon-Online)
Historically, Lugard’s British colonial administration operated on the policy of Indirect Rule, which legally banned Christian missionaries from entering Hausaland to protect the Islamic Sokoto Caliphate. Karl Kumm’s book was a defense of religious freedom against colonial oppression, completely reversing your opponent’s false claims.
Dr. Klaus Fiedler (Ph.D. from the University of Dar es Salaam, preeminent historian of African missions and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Malawi) on the true authorship and defensive nature of the Tract states:
“Karl Kumm’s 1908 tract, ‘Crisis in Hausaland: Cross or Crescent,’ was an internal appeal to missionary societies, not a colonial text. Kumm argued that British colonial policy in Northern Nigeria was actively hostile to Christianity, as Lord Lugard had restricted Christian missions while using state resources to consolidate Islamic emirates, creating an existential crisis for the non-Muslim indigenous tribes.”
Source: Fiedler, Klaus. The Story of Faith Missions: From the Hudson Taylor to the Present Day. Regnum Books International, 1994, p. 173 (Sermon-online)
Dr. Yusuf Turaki (Ph.D. from Boston University, Distinguished Professor of Theology and Social Ethics, and leading authority on the social history of Northern Nigeria) wrote on the British Colonial Protection and Expansion of Islam in Nigeria
“The British colonial administration in Northern Nigeria did not promote Christianity; they actively shielded the Islamic Sokoto Caliphate. Through the policy of Indirect Rule, Lord Lugard legally barred Christian missionaries from Hausalands and institutionalized Muslim emirs over non-Muslim pagan groups, effectively expanding the administrative power of Islam via British colonial weapons.”
Source: Turaki, Yusuf. The British Colonial Legacy in Northern Nigeria: A Social Ethical Analysis. Challenge Publications, 1993, p. 87.
Dr. Andrew E. Barnes (Ph.D. from Princeton University, Professor of History at Arizona State University, and specialist on West African colonial history) write onthe Anti-Missionary bias of British Colonial Administrators:
“British officials in Northern Nigeria viewed Christian missionaries as dangerous agitators who would disrupt the lucrative tax-extracting alliances made with the Muslim Emirs. The colonial state systematically suppressed missionary activity in Hausaland, ensuring that British imperialism functioned as an economic corporate syndicate entirely divorced from Christian evangelism.”
Source: Barnes, Andrew E. Making Headway: The Introduction of Western Civilization in Colonial Northern Nigeria. University of Rochester Press, 2009, p. 112.
Another scholar by the name Dr. Ogbu Kalu (Ph.D. from the University of London, former Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity at McCormick Theological Seminary, and preeminent historian of African Church history) write on the total separation of Faith Missions from British Corporate Imperialism
“The Sudan United Mission led by Karl Kumm operated entirely on ‘faith principles,’ refusing any financial or military aid from the British Empire. To label Kumm’s humanitarian and linguistic work as a ‘colonial push’ is an unscholarly inversion of history; his missionaries frequently risked arrest by colonial authorities for defending indigenous ethnic minorites against state exploitation.”
Source: Kalu, Ogbu. African Christianity: An African Story. Department of Church History, University of Pretoria, 2005, p. 194.
And finally, the next part expose the distortion of Frank Aust’s Poetry by Mahmud.
PARAGRAPH 15
The Claim
Mahmud states:
“Below is one of the poems by a missionary cum colonialist Frank Aust, as he eyes the vast land and people he thinks are his religious rights to take… The Cry from Hausaland… Deep in the heathen darkness lying… Till the land of Ethiopia stretches out her hands to God. Frank Aust”
Here is the image of the poem Mahmud attached to his post
The Refutation
Mahmud presents a 1904 poem by Frank Aust (an early architectural missionary with the Sudan United Mission) and deceptively claims it proves a desire to “take lands as a religious right.” This is a complete misreading of basic English and biblical poetry.
Let us look at the actual words your opponent quoted:
- The poem speaks of “beckons us from thy far shore” and “begging morsels from our store.” This is the language of a humanitarian plea for aid, responding to what the missionary viewed as spiritual and physical suffering.
- The climax of the poem states: “Till the land of Ethiopia stretches out her hands to God.” Your opponent is so scripturally illiterate that he does not realize Frank Aust is directly quoting Psalm 68:31—a historic biblical prophecy celebrating the complete spiritual independence, sovereignty, and direct relationship of Africa with God, entirely free from foreign human masters. Frank Aust was praying for African spiritual liberation, not colonial invasion.
On the true identity and Philanthropic focus of Frank Aust, Dr. Jan Harm Boer (Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, renowned historian of Nigerian missions, and expert on the Sudan United Mission) explains:
“Frank Aust was a civil engineer and lay missionary who joined the Sudan United Mission in 1904. His writings and poetry reflect the typical nineteenth-century evangelical philanthropic desire to alleviate what they perceived as spiritual darkness and physical disease in the African interior, entirely distinct from the territorial or resource greed of European state empires.”
Source: Boer, Jan Harm. Missionary Messengers of Liberation in a Colonial Context: A Case Study of the Sudan United Mission. Rodopi, 1979, p. 74.
Dr. Albert J. Raboteau (Ph.D. from Yale University, former Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion at Princeton University, and foremost authority on African-American and global African religious history) explains the true meaning of “Ethiopia Stretching Her Hands to God”, I quote:
“The biblical phrase ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’ (Psalm 68:31) served as the foundational bedrock of ‘Ethiopianism’—the global black theological movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used explicitly to fight European colonialism. It was a prophecy of total African self-determination, autonomy, and spiritual equality before God, used by missionaries and indigenous leaders alike to demand the end of white imperial rule.“
Source: Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South. Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 216. (Emphasis mine)
Also, on the Humanitarian Nature of Faith Mission Literature Dr. Lamin Sanneh (Ph.D. from the University of London, former D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale University)
“Missionary poetry calling for workers to go to Africa was framed in terms of sacrificial service, medical relief, and the translation of the Bible into indigenous tongues. To interpret these emotional spiritual appeals as legal claims for imperial conquest is an act of extreme textual distortion that ignores the active hostility that existed between faith missions and colonial governors.”
Source: Sanneh, Lamin. West African Christianity: The Religious Impact. Orbis Books, 1983, p. 132.
Dr. Andrew Walls, Director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at the University of Edinburgh, discusses the clash between missionary evangelism and colonial subjugation in the quote below.
“The missionary movement and the colonial movement were operating on entirely contradictory trajectories. While the colonial administrator sought to subjugate the African native to ensure imperial economic stability, the missionary sought to educate, translate, and uplift the native, inadvertently sowing the intellectual seeds for the rise of independent African nationalism that eventually overthrew European rule.”
Source: Walls, Andrew F. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1996, p. 91.
Conclusion
Ladies and gentlemen, we have systematically marched through Muhammad Mahmud’s entire presentation paragraph by paragraph, and we have exposed it as an unstable house of cards built on historical engineering, selective data suppression, and profound category errors.
When subjected to the light of genuine, peer-reviewed academic scholarship, Mahmud’s thesis completely disintegrates into five undeniable realities:
- The Subversion of Scripture: The commands of Genesis 1:28 and Matthew 28:19 have never been a mandate for military subjugation. European empires had to actively twist and censor biblical theology precisely because orthodox Christian dogma explicitly demands spiritual equality and condemns human exploitation.
- The Political Isolation of Papal Bulls: Edicts like Romanus Pontifex were localized, transient diplomatic wartime documents born out of existential panic following the Ottoman Islamic conquest of Constantinople. As world-class historians confirm, these decrees were political tools co-opted by secular monarchs and formally rejected as any intrinsic component of unalterable Church dogma.
- The Mirror of Islamic Imperialism: If writing legal decrees authorizing the invasion and temporal domination of non-believers is an indictment of an ideology, then Islam stands as the ultimate historical culprit. Through its permanent textual division of the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, Islamic empires executed a 1,400-year continuum of offensive global jihad, colonization, and demographic erasure across Asia, North Africa, and Europe.
- The Fraudulent Inversion of Nigerian History: Mahmud’s weaponization of Karl Kumm’s 1908 tract Crisis in Hausaland was a display of pure deception. He deliberately hid the book’s full title (Cross or Crescent) and suppressed the fact that Kumm was writing a desperate warning against the British colonial government—an empire that actively protected the Islamic Sokoto Caliphate, implemented Indirect Rule, and legally banned Christian missionaries from entering Hausaland.
- The Proof of Poetic Illiteracy: Mahmud brought forward Frank Aust’s 1904 poem The Cry from Hausaland to prove a ‘religious right to take land.’ We exposed that Aust was directly quoting the grand prophecy of Psalm 68:31, which celebrates absolute African self-determination, autonomy, and direct spiritual liberation under God, entirely free from foreign masters.
Therefore, we must completely reject Muhammad Mahmud’s unscholarly scapegoating. Human beings are universally flawed, and political actors will always weaponize dominant vocabularies to satisfy their personal greed. However, European colonizers had to violate the New Testament to build their empires, whereas historical Islamic empires merely had to obey theirs.
To Muhammad Mahmud, and to anyone who would carelessly share his post: let this serve as a permanent warning. Do not bring internet memes and superficial, biased blog posts into an academic arena. True scholarship has spoken, the data is absolute, and the narrative of Christian colonial violence is thoroughly defeated.
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