Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

  What were western Europeans traders to do?

  This is where the crusading spirit bled into the exploring impulse. Muslims straddled the tangle of the land routes that connected the world’s important ancient markets, but over the centuries, unnoticed by Muslim potentates and peoples, western Europeans had been developing tremendous seafaring prowess. For one thing, Europeans of the post-Crusades era included Vikings, those invading mariners from the north who were so good at seafaring, they had even crossed the North Atlantic to Greenland in their dragon boats. One wave invaded England where the word North-men slurred into Norman. A few of these then moved to the coast of France, where the region they inhabited came to be known as Normandy.

  THE EUROPEAN QUEST FOR A SEA ROUTE TO THE INDIES

  But it wasn’t just the Vikings. Everyone who sailed regularly between Scandinavia and southern Europe had to develop rugged ships and learn how to manage them in the big storms and high seas of the North Atlantic; western Europeans, therefore, ended up very much at home on the water. With such accomplished mariners amongst their subjects, some ambitious monarchs began to dream of finding a way to skirt the whole land mass between Europe and east Asia and with it the whole Muslim problem: in short, they got interested in finding a way to get to India and the islands further east entirely by sea.

  One aristocrat who poured serious support into this enterprise was Prince Henry of Portugal (called “Henry the Navigator” even though he never went on any of the expeditions he sponsored). Prince Henry was closely connected to the king of Portugal, but more important, he was one of the richest men in western Europe. He funded sea captains to sail south along the coast of Africa looking for a way around it. Henry’s letters and proclamations show that he originally saw himself as a crusader, out to prove himself a great Christian monarch by scoring victories against the Moors and finding new souls to save for the one true faith.2

  Many of the new souls his sailors found were living in black-skinned bodies and had commercial value as slaves, it turned out, and Prince Henry the Navigator morphed into Prince Henry the Slave Trader. In addition to slaves, as the Portuguese made their way south, they found all sorts of other marketable commodities such as gold dust, salt, ostrich eggs, fish oil—the list goes on and on. The constant discovery of new trade goods infused the crusader’s dream with an economic motive, and the Crusades gave way to what Europeans call the Age of Discovery. Perhaps the most dramatic discovery occurred in 1492, when Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic, looking for a route to India, and stumbled across the Americas. His voyage was funded by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Christian monarchs who completed the Crusade against the Muslims of Iberia and founded a single, unified, Christian kingdom of Spain.

  When Columbus landed on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, he famously believed he had reached the Indies. After his mistake became known, the islands east of India were called the East Indies, and these islands in the Caribbean the West Indies. Most Muslims were only vaguely aware of this momentous discovery. Ottoman sources mention Columbus’s voyage in passing, although by the 1570s, a few Ottoman cartographers were creating fairly accurate maps of the world showing the two Americas right where they are in fact located. By then, Spain had built the rudiments of a new empire in Mexico and the English, French, and others had planted settlements further north.

  Meanwhile, at the eastern end of the Middle World, Muslims had already discovered what the Europeans were originally seeking: Muslim traders had been sailing to Malaysia and Indonesia for centuries. Many Muslim traders who plied these waters belonged to Sufi orders, and through them Islam had taken root in the (east) Indies long before the first Europeans arrived.

  Even before the Portuguese, Spaniards, English, Dutch, and other northern Europeans caught the exploring fever, southern Europeans were already making their clout known at sea, for their civilization had emerged out of seafaring, and their sailing prowess went back to the Romans, the Greeks, the Mycenaeans before them, and the Cretans and Phoenicians before that.

  By the fourteenth century CE, the Genovese and the Venetians were competing for the Mediterranean trade in some of the biggest, sturdiest fleets around, and on the water, these Italians could fight. Venetians did vigorous business in Constantinople, and after the Ottomans took over they boldly opened commercial offices at Istanbul.

  The Mediterranean trade drew tremendous wealth into Italy and spawned booming city-states, not just Venice and Genoa, but also Florence, Milan, and others. Here in Italy, money supplanted land as the chief marker of wealth and status. Merchants became the new power elite; families like the Medicis of Florence and the Sforzas of Milan supplanted the old military aristocracy of feudal landowners. All the money, all that entrepreneurial energy, all that urban diversity, all those sovereign entities in such close proximity competing for grandeur, eminence, and reputation generated a dynamism unprecedented in history. Any talented artist or craftsman with a skill to sell could have a field day in the Italy of this era because he could get so many patrons bidding against one another for his services. Dukes and cardinals and even the pope competed to lure artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci to their courts because their works were not only beautiful but represented great status symbols. Italy began to overflow with the art, invention, creativity, and achievement that was later labeled “the Italian Renaissance.”

  Books, meanwhile, were coming back into fashion. During the Dark Ages, hardly anyone in Europe knew how to read except clerics, and clerics learned the skill just to read the Bible and conduct services. Among Germanic Christians, in Charlemagne’s time for example, clerics revered Latin, the language in which Christian services were performed, because they thought of it as the language God spoke. They worried that if their Latin deteriorated, God would not understand their prayers, so they preserved and studied a few ancient books written by pagans such as Cicero purely as an aid to mastering the grammar and structure and pronunciation of the old tongue. They wanted to ensure that they would be able to continue sounding out syllables that would reach God. When reading writers such as Cicero, they tried assiduously to ignore what they were saying and focus only on their style so as not to be contaminated by their pagan sensibilities. Their efforts to preserve Latin petrified it into a dead language suitable only for ritual and incantatory purposes, incapable of serving as a vehicle for discussion and thought.3 Nonetheless, their reverence for books as artifacts meant that some churches and monasteries kept books tucked away in basements and back rooms.

  Then, in the twelfth century, Christian scholars visiting Muslim Andalusia stumbled across Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek texts by thinkers such as Aristotle and Plato. Most of these works were generated in Toledo, where a bustling translation industry had developed. From Toledo, the books filtered into western Europe proper, finding their way at last into church and monastery libraries.

  The Arabic works found in Andalusia included a great deal of commentary by Muslim philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna to the Europeans) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Their writings focused on reconciling Greek philosophy with Muslim revelations. Christians took no interest in that achievement, so they stripped away whatever Muslims had added to Aristotle and the others and set to work exploring how Greek philosophy could be reconciled with Christian revelations. Out of this struggle came the epic “scholastic” philosophies of thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and others. The Muslim connection to the ancient Greek works was erased from European cultural memory.

  European scholars began gravitating to monasteries that had libraries because the books were there. Then, would-be students began gravitating to monasteries with libraries because the scholars were there. While pursuing their studies, penniless scholars eked out a living teaching classes. Learning communities formed around the monasteries and these ripened into Europe’s first universities. One of the earliest emerged around Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. Another very early learning community bec
ame the University of Naples. Then a university developed at Oxford, England. When a fight broke out among the scholars there, the dissident group migrated to Cambridge in a huff and started a learning community of its own.

  The scholars in these protouniversities came to realize that most would-be students didn’t know enough to even begin studying, so they developed a set of standard courses designed to get students ready to begin, courses in rhetoric, grammar, logic, and arithmetic, for example, that were designed to teach students merely how to read, write, and think. Students who successfully completed this basic course were called baccalaureates, Latin for “beginners”; now they could begin to learn some actual subject such as theology, philosophy, medicine, or law. Today, of course, the baccalaureate is the degree one gets for graduating from a four-year liberal arts college.

  As wealth accumulated in Europe, a few people were able to spend all their time studying, reading, writing, and making art. With Greek thought back in the mix, a set of new ideas filtered into the imagination of learned Europeans. The Greeks had said, “Man is the measure of all things,” and their pagan pantheon had represented “God” as a collection of deities with human personalities who interacted with one another and with humanity in dramatic ways. The Greeks had taken a penetrating interest in the natural world and the human here-and-now. They had made great strides in discerning patterns among natural events as a first step toward explaining them. People who read and discussed the ancient Greek texts got interested, therefore, in unraveling the mysteries of life on earth, an orientation quite at odds with the attitudes fostered by the church since the fall of Rome, for in the Christendom of the Middle Ages, the prevailing doctrine declared the material world to be evil. The only point of being here was to get out of here, and so the only subject worth studying was the hereafter and the only texts worth consulting were the scriptures and scriptural commentaries. The new humanists did not think of themselves as competing with Christianity; they were hardly godless atheists; but Church officials saw a threat in the new forms of thought. They could feel where all this was going.

  Christianity grew within the framework of a dying Rome. It developed a hierarchy that resembled and shadowed the administrative hierarchy of Rome. As the imperial structure crumbled, the Christian structure took its place by default, becoming the framework that continued to support civilized life. The Byzantine emperor, always the head of the imperial hierarchy, automatically evolved into the head of this Christian hierarchy. The various bishops were subservient to him as the head of the Church, just as the governors had been (and were still) subservient to him as the head of the empire. The doctrines of the Christian religion were formulated by bishops at councils convened by the emperor and updated periodically at similar councils, with the emperor always having the final say.

  So closely did Christianity intertwine with Rome that when the empire split in two, the church divided too. In the east, the emperor remained the head of the church. In the west, the very title of “emperor” dropped out of existence. Politically, the continent fragmented into small realms ruled, essentially, by warlords. In this context, the Church emerged as the single source of cultural coherence and unity in western Europe, the cultural medium through which people who spoke different languages and served different sovereigns could still interact or travel through one another’s realms. To serve this function, the doctrines of the Church had to be uniform, universally understood, and universally accepted, so the Church developed a ferocious propensity for spotting and stamping out heresies.

  By the time of the Crusades, church officials in western Europe were regularly executing heretics—anyone whose publicly stated convictions departed from the prevailing doctrine—by tying them to stakes and lighting bonfires under them.

  As the Church tightened its grip on daily life, the bishop of Rome became the preeminent figure in western Europe. People called him il pape, the pope, because they considered him the “father” of the Christian community. In the east, the patriarch of Constantinople was the leading religious figure, but there were many patriarchs and he was only the first among equals. In the west, the pope acquired an authority transcending that of all other bishops. Around the time of the Crusades, Catholics began to propound the doctrine that the pope was infallible.

  Meanwhile, the church was extending its reach across the continent and down into every cranny. Every rural village, every town, every neighborhood in every city had its parish priest and its local church and every priest was administering exactly the same rites in the same way and in the same language. The hierarchy became fully rationalized and embedded: every priest answered to a higher bishop, every bishop to an archbishop, archbishops to cardinals, and cardinals to the pope.

  But then, as the Crusades died away, this hegemony began to crack. Here and there, reformers began to question the authority of the church. In the late fourteenth century, an Oxford professor named John Wycliffe shocked church officials by translating the Bible into that most vulgar of languages, common English. And why? So that common, ordinary folks could read and understand what the Bible said for themselves. Church officials couldn’t fathom why ordinary folks would need to understand the Bible for themselves when they had priests to do the understanding for them.

  Wycliffe went further. He suggested that clerics should all be poor, like the apostles, and that land should be taken away from churches and monasteries and put to secular uses, which offended the church deeply. Wycliffe had powerful political protectors, so he managed to live out his natural life span, but four decades after his death, a pope had his bones dug up, crushed into powder, and scattered over a river: the rage, it seemed, persisted.

  It persisted in part because Wycliffe’s ideas would not die out. In the generation after his, for example, the Bohemian priest Johann Huss embraced Wycliffe’s idea that all people had a right to a Bible in their own language. He commenced a great translation project. When church officials quoted canon law at him to show that his actions were wrong, he quoted scripture back at them and declared that the Bible trumped church councils. This was too much. The church arrested Huss and burnt him at the stake in a fire fueled with copies of the vulgate Bibles he had been promoting. In short, Christianity did to its first reformers what Islam had done to the proto-Sufi Hallaj.

  Killing reformers, however, could not kill the hunger for reform. Wycliffe, Huss, and others of their ilk had scratched through to something smoldering dangerously among the people: an unrequited desire for real religious experience.

  The bureaucratization of religion had made the church powerful and given Europe cultural unity, but the religious bureaucracy eventually couldn’t deliver the core experience that was its raison d’etre. German theology professor Martin Luther put his finger most precisely on the dysfunction. Luther was a man tormented by guilt. No matter what he did, he felt like a sinner headed for hell. The Christian rites were supposed to alleviate this guilt by washing him clean of sin, but for Luther the rites weren’t working. He tried everything—fasting, self-flagellation, daily communion, endless penances, but at the end of it all, when the priest told him he was pure now, Luther didn’t believe him. He had only to look into his heart to see that he was still impure. He knew because he still felt the guilt.

  Then one day, a great insight hit Luther. He could not have salvation until he believed himself saved. If he lacked this belief, it didn’t matter what the priest said or did. If he had this belief, it didn’t matter what the priest said or did. Which raised a big, big question: of what use was the priest? Why was he even in the mix?

  In fact, the conviction gripped Luther that salvation could not be earned, like a pension. It was a gift, which could only be received, and then only through faith, an inner process, never through “works,” external deeds and doings.

  Armed with this insight, Luther looked around and saw a world full of people pursuing salvation through “works,” and to make it all worse, works prescribed by a vast, wealthy, well-orga
nized bureaucracy, the Church of Rome. It filled him with horror, for if his insight was true, all these “works” were for naught!

  Of all the “works” prescribed by the Church, the one that most alarmed and offended Luther was the granting of indulgences. An indulgence was a remission of punishment for certain sins, which the Church proclaimed itself empowered to give, in exchange for good and valuable considerations. The practice went back to the Crusades, when the pope offered indulgences to those who signed up to fight the heathen Turk. Later, as crusading opportunities faded out, the Church began to grant indulgences in exchange for cash contributions. Given the petty corruption that inevitably infests any far-flung bureaucratic system, some clerics here and there—let’s face it—probably handed out indulgences in exchange for cash contributions to, well, themselves. Any way you look at it, by Martin Luther’s time, the whole practice of granting indulgences had come to mean that people could supposedly buy their way out of purgatory and fast-track their way into heaven.

  Making people pay to get into heaven was bad enough. But to Luther the practice smacked of something worse. If salvation was a direct, personal interaction between each individual and God, then the Church was extorting bribes to let people through a gate they had no actual power to open or keep shut. It wasn’t just corruption. It was thievery and deception of the worst sort!