Is Stealth Jihad an innovation in Islam...?

To what extent, if any, did Muslims in the past need the modern kind of dhimmitude which we offer them on a silver platter (i.e., the prevailing worldview of PC MC, which has the effect of a sort of an anticipatory dhimmitude -- kowtowing to Muslims even before they have conquered you, thus enabling their intended conquest), when in their illustrious history they successfully conquered more territory than Alexander the Great or the Romans? Were there key non-Muslims in Persia, India, central Asia, SE Europe, the Roman Christian Middle East, Roman Christian North Africa, and Roman Christian Iberia (Spain) who were in those former eras this kind of modern dhimmi, helping pave the way for the eventual conquest of Muslims?

My instinct (absent enough historical information) is to answer no. It seems that historically, the stupendous expansion of Islam was due mainly to frontal assault using fanatically supercharged and rabid ultra-violence. There does seem to be evidence that after they conquered certain regions by violence, they maintained an institutional infrastructure, and perhaps also a measure of social control over the dhimmi population, through a few key dhimmis who were essentially brown-nosing toadies more concerned with their own safety and relative advantages conferred, than with the plight of their own people under the cruel regime of the Muslims they were helping.

But the conceit bandied about now in the anti-Islam movement (a conceit that comes to the fore usually when "Stealth Jihad" is discussed) is that

1) the normal modus operandi of Muslims is to conquer by first infiltrating with the enablement of proto-dhimmis in the lands which they (the Muslims) are intending to conquer

and

2) that Muslims could actually be successful in this "stealth conquest" of the modern West without ever firing a shot (or only firing a few shots here and there -- but nowhere near the vicinity of the violence necessary for an actual military invasion and conquest of the West).

Problem with 1:

From everything we know about Muslim history right up to the fairly recent present but also importantly firmly attested in the holy texts they slavishly follow, this kind of stealthy infiltration on a mass scale is not their normal modus operandi. So if they are doing it now, as many of the Counterjihadists maintain, it is an unprecedented shift in military strategy for Muslims. It's possible they have made this shift, but I see no evidence for it. What seems to be going on, rather, is that Muslims simply want to pursue their normative modus operandi -- mass and multifarious violence in order to subdue -- but they moderate it when they are forced to, and the superiority of the modern West is so staggeringly disproportionate to Muslim weakness, they have no choice but to infiltrate and try to do what seems to be a concerted plan of stealth jihad by itself. Really, I argue, what is going on is that the Stealth Jihad Theory as bandied about by Counterjihadists has it backwards: what is really going on is that the various methods of what we perceive to be stealth jihad are all expedient temporarily necessary activities calculated to make it easier for Muslims to plot and plan the violence they know will be necessary for having a chance to pierce the armor of the West and bring it down. (See my brief note, A Clausewitzian twist on jihad.)

Of course, just because this is their plan, and they believe it will be successful, doesn't mean it will actually be successful -- but it would be reasonable to suppose that it does mean that even if they fail in their ultimate goal of actual conquest, they will succeed in wreaking untold mayhem and misery through the terror attacks that will be part of this new Jihad.

Problems with 2:

It requires the existence of a sufficient critical mass in the West of dhimmis (both the evil knowing kind, and the stupid clueless kind) to enable Muslims to take over -- which aside from tending to require a conspiracy theory by which to posit a sufficient number of the first kind -- is absurd, since a Muslim takeover of a previously non-Muslim land (particularly a spectacularly, astonishingly superior non-Muslim land, as the modern West is) entails a massive transformation of a thousand things on societal, cultural and legal levels, most of them blatantly and obviously illegal and repellant to 98% of Westerners including PC MCs and Leftists (leaving out the 2% of Leftists so far gone they would actually become Adam Gadahns). And this transformation cannot occur overnight with an instantaneous leap from being invisibly stealthy to being visibly dominant.

As I wrote in my essay It's the Violence, Stupid --

The only reason that "creeping Sharia" is encroaching at all in incipient and tentative toeholds, in varying degrees, in various locations and contexts in the West, is because the Muslims promoting it are putting a false face on Sharia.  Their claim is that Sharia is so wonderfully diverse one cannot reduce it to the crude subtypes practiced by the Taliban, Al-Shabaab, or Boko Haram.  They have never proven this claim, probably because they can't.  Then they add luster to this by reminding the Guilty White West that Sharia is "multicultural" and surely you Westerners wouldn't want to be "intolerant" of other cultures, would you now...?   So whatever Sharia has been creeping its tendrils into the West has not been Sharia Straight -- it has been Diet Sharia, decaffeinated, no sugar, no fat, no headchopping, no handchopping, no stoning, no public flogging for sexual immorality, etc.
 
I.e., the rubber has not met the road yet, not by a long shot. With the exception of a tiny handful of psychotic Leftists in the West, the vast majority of "liberals" and even of Leftists in the West would not accept for one minute full-blooded (i.e., normative and mainstream) Sharia. The main reason they are being so stupid about it is because they don't have to accept it concretely -- they can continue to have their cake of "tolerance of diversity" while eating too the surrounding dominance of Western laws which continue to protect their liberties and, ipso facto, keep at bay Sharia in any massively intrusive -- let alone dominating (i.e., normative) -- sense.  And meanwhile, the obfuscation of the issue through the false distinction between normative Sharia and some fantasy Sharia Lite gives PC MCs plenty of room to indulge their stupidity on the matter while earnestly believing they are on the side of the angels, doing the right thing, rather than being "haters".

This is why so many in the PC MC mainstream cannot grasp, and often find ludicrously alarmist, the notion of "creep sharia" -- since they can see that there is no way Westerners would allow headchopping and adultery-stoning, and no way could such anti-modern, Draconian punishments be "crept" into the fabric of our laws and culture.  But this is how the Counter-Jihad tends to frame the concern.  The real problem here is the deception which Muslims promote, fostering the impression that Islamic sharia is too vaguely complex & diverse to be pinned down, and that it includes a multitude of benign precepts, and that it would be "bigoted" to tar all of sharia with an extremist brush.  Meanwhile, the confusion which this deception fosters helps pave the way for more and more Muslims to be accepted into our societies.  This is the precise point that should be addressed by the Counter-Jihad.

For Muslims to get from A to Z in the West -- from their current pretense of harmless diversity, where they pretend to only want Sharia Lite, to the implementation of the actual full-blooded Sharia they really desire -- would take a long time and a transformation of the host societies.  It would perforce involve thousands of events, incidents and activities of propaganda -- including unintended revelations of the true Islam behind the mask, along with increasing terror attacks & plots -- all of which would slowly, but inexorably, have the effect of rousing even the PC MCs and most Leftists.