The Impact of Islam

by Emmet Scott

  What a contrast with the House of Islam, where the above process is viewed in reverse. The mid-tenth century saw the Islamic world covered with great cities and crisscrossed with caravans carrying the wealth of the East and the West into the palaces of the caliphs. By the mid-twelfth century however the population had crashed and everywhere there were signs of decline. No great monuments were constructed from then onwards. And by the late fifteenth century, the time of Columbus, the Islamic world was a barbarous backwater, whose only wealth lay in the plunder it seized from other regions. Not a single scientific or philosophical idea of any merit came out of the Islamic world from the middle of the eleventh century, and the House of Islam has been gripped for almost a thousand years by an obscurantist theocracy which positively discourages all scientific inquiry.

  Although the last of the Crusader Kingdoms in the Middle East had fallen to the Muslims during the thirteenth century, Europeans at that time did not regard Islam as constituting any serious threat. It looked a spent force. This was made all the more apparent by the destruction wrought early in the same century by the Mongols, who seemed for a while to be actively targeting Islam. Both Genghis Khan and his immediate successors had wrought immense destruction amongst the Islamic states of Central Asia and they had, at one point, come very close to eliminating the last of the Muslim powers, Mameluke Egypt. This did not happen, yet the House of Islam had been dealt some terrible blows. Few could have predicted that during that very century there would arise, in the east of Anatolia, an Islamic dynasty which would in time constitute the greatest threat to Christian Europe’s survival since the days of Charles Martel in the eighth century. This was the Ottomans.

  The coming of the Ottomans brought five centuries of exploitation, enslavement and massacre to large areas of eastern and south-eastern Europe. For some considerable time the whole continent was in danger, as vast Turkish hosts returned to the offensive year after year, inexorably pushing their dominion deeper and deeper into the center of Christendom. Twice they reached Vienna, capital of the Empire. The last occasion was near the end of the seventeenth century, and it was not until this attack was beaten off – thanks largely to the efforts of Jan Sobieski – that Europeans could begin to believe they would survive. Some of the regions through which the Turkish hosts passed were depopulated for centuries, and some have never really recovered. Those areas which came under direct Turkish rule were exploited so ruthlessly that they remained economic backwaters till the start of the twentieth century – when they finally freed themselves. But those areas on the borders of Turkish territory suffered almost as much. The slave trade was revived and Muslim raiders and pirates devastated southern Russia, all of Hungary as well as the Balkans, and large areas of the Mediterranean coasts of Italy, France and Spain, in their search for white captives to sell in Constantinople, which in 1453 became the new capital of the Sultans.

  The rise of the Ottoman threat – after Islam's apparent decline in the later Middle Ages – merely reinforces an observation made by Winston Churchill over a century ago. “Far from being moribund,” he said, “Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith,” one whose power to raise up fanatical followers appears to endure from generation to generation.

  The evidence, then, leaving aside politically correct wishful thinking, shows that Islam's impact upon Europe has been overwhelmingly destructive. The few benefits which “the Arabs” brought in the tenth and early eleventh centuries turn out, on closer inspection, to be not Arab at all, but pre-Arab Persian or Byzantine; or else from China and India. What Islam did bring that was truly Islamic was war and banditry: For one thing, it breathed new life into the slave trade in Europe both in the tenth century and later between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. With Islam came the revival of such inhuman practices as crucifixion and torture – practices which Christianity had succeeded in abolishing between the fourth and sixth centuries. And some of the more noxious habits of the Muslims were picked up by Europeans, especially by those who inhabited territories bordering the House of Islam. Slave-owning, for example, was common amongst Spanish Christians long after it had disappeared elsewhere in Europe.

  Finally, the re-emergence in the fourteenth century of a major Islamic power, the Ottoman Empire, closed off once again easy communication between Europe and the Far East, a communication which had briefly flourished during the period of the Mongol Empire. Europeans now turned west, to the Atlantic, in search of a way to China and the Indies which bypassed hostile Muslim territories. Their efforts were first directed towards circumnavigating Africa and crossing the Indian Ocean. During the 1480s however an Italian navigator named Christopher Columbus had the bright idea that the Indies and China could be reached by sailing directly west. The Spanish king and queen, hoping to find allies against Islam in the latter regions, finally agreed in 1492 to finance a small expedition.

  When the conquest and colonization of the Americas began in the decades which followed, it was the example of Islam which all too often guided Spanish policy. The idea of taking slaves from equatorial Africa, for example, was taken directly from the Muslims of Algeria, Morocco and southern Spain, who had been doing the same thing for centuries. The campaigns of the conquistadors, too, were seen as “crusades” - a continuation and extension of the wars against the unbelievers of Islam which had raged in the Iberian Peninsula for centuries and which had brutalized all those involved.

  It goes without saying that a study such as this cannot pretend to be exhaustive, or ground-breaking in any way. None of the facts outlined the pages to follow are disputed or even controversial, though they tend to be discreetly ignored in modern politically correct publications. These seek to present a sanitized view of Islam and its history by a selective presentation of evidence: uncomfortable features are not denied, they are simply sidestepped. Real academic controversy does however arise in the question of Islam’s origins, a topic mentioned briefly in Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited. The latest research, for example, has thrown a question mark over the very existence of an Arab prophet named Muhammad, as well as the supposed conquests of his immediate successors, the “Rightly Guided” caliphs of the seventh century. Since these questions have relevance for our understanding of Islam as an ideology and its impact upon the world stage, I have thought it advisable to present a brief overview of them in an Appendix.

  [1] Painter, A History of the Middle Ages: 284-1500 (Macmillan, 1953), pp. 57-8.

  1

  A Wave of Islamic Influence

  By the middle of the tenth century Europe began to awake out of the long sleep – or apparent sleep – of the Dark Ages. Everywhere there are signs of renewal and expansion. Towns, which had shriveled and shrank from the third century onwards, began to grow. New urban centers were established and older ones, established under the Romans, began to revive. London, the Roman Londinium, was alive and bustling under the Anglo-Saxons, as was Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Cologne, and a host of others. But the new towns looked different to the older Roman ones. Things had now a distinctly “medieval” air. The fashionable villas of the Romans, with their marble columns and bright mosaic floors, were a thing of the past. Only churches and royal residences retained some of the color and opulence of the classical age; these structures frequently employed stones and columns cannibalized from older Roman buildings. Indeed, the churches of the period still looked distinctly Roman; so much so that they are now termed “Romanesque.” And the afterglow of classical civilization still to some degree illuminated this somewhat dim and shadowy epoch. Latin, though corrupted in the everyday speech of France, Spain, and even Italy, nonetheless remained, in its pure form, the language of learning and the Church; and the monasteries often retained substantial libraries stocked with the works of the pagan Romans – and even occasionally the pagan Greeks.

  In spite of this, the mid-tenth century was a deeply troubled time. The whole western part of Europe was t
hreatened by the inroads of the Hungarians, the latest wave of barbarian nomads from the steppes of Asia. Established in the central Hungarian Plain, Magyar armies wrought havoc throughout Germany and France, and threatened to complete the destruction of Christendom which had earlier seemed likely in the time of Attila’s Huns – whom the Magyars proudly claimed as their ancestors.

  Whilst the Hungarian threat was effectively neutralized by the victory of Otto I (the Great) at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, this did not mark the end of Europe’s woes. Scandinavian pirates, in search of booty and slaves, scoured the shores of France, Britain, Ireland, and northern Germany. Nor were their inroads confined to the coasts: fleets of the raiders, navigating the great rivers, penetrated to the heart of England, France and Germany, bringing terror and slaughter in their wake. Huge armies of Vikings now appeared in England, and for a while the whole country was threatened with conquest.

  Yet in spite of all the destruction and uncertainty, the final decades of the tenth century were a period of remarkable growth in Christian Europe, a fact confirmed both by the written sources and more recently by archaeology. Excavation reports from throughout Europe confirm that towns and settlements began to expand at this time – the first urban expansion since the second century! And the written histories agree; not only was there a renewed prosperity, the boundaries of Christendom began to expand. One by one the pagan princes and monarchs of the east and north began to accept Christianity. Harald Bluetooth the King of Denmark was baptized, along with his court and many of his subjects, in 965, whilst King Mieszeko of Poland was baptized a Christian in 966. The Kingdom of Rus, under its ruler Vladimir I of Kiev, adopted the Orthodox version of Christianity in 988, and on Christmas Day 1000 (or New Year’s Day 1001), King Stephen of Hungary brought his nation into the Christian fold.

  As the Christian faith and “Christendom” grew, so too did economic prosperity and learning. It was just in the final years of the tenth century that a whole series of new technologies began to appear in Europe that would transform the continent forever. Some of these innovations were European inventions, but the vast majority came from the East, from the lands of the Muslims. Indeed, the sheer number of new ideas and technologies reaching Europe from the Islamic world at this time has prompted some writers to speak of an Islamic “Renaissance” of the tenth century and to credit Islam with preserving and propagating the learning of the classical world. Among new ideas and techniques we might mention: the decimal numbers system, with the zero; algebra, paper-making, the windmill, alcohol distillation, etc. These were followed, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, by knowledge of the compass and a whole series of new ideas in medicine and knowledge of the natural world.

  Fig. 1 The Islamic world in tenth century

  In the tenth century the Islamic world was vast and took in virtually all the great centers of civilization known to the ancients, with the exception of Italy and Greece.

  So far-reaching was the Islamic influence, or the apparent Islamic influence, on Europe at this time that by the late nineteenth century a number of British and French writers began to credit the Arabs with providing the impulse for modern European science and learning. Consider for example the utterances of Anglo-French social historian Robert Briffault in 1919: “It was under the influence of the Arabian and Moorish revival of culture, and not in the fifteenth century, that the real Renaissance took place. Spain, not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. After steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it [Europe] had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when the cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova, Toledo, were growing centres of civilization and intellectual activity.”[1] Again, “It is highly probable that but for the Arabs modern European civilization would not have arisen at all; it is absolutely certain that but for them, it would not have assumed the character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution.”[2]

  In support of these statements, Briffault points to a series of Arab inventions, discoveries and innovations. He refers to the astronomers Al-Zarkyal and Al-Farani, who postulated that the orbits of the planets was elliptical rather than circular, as Ptolemy believed.[3] He notes how Ibn Sina (Avicenna) is said to have employed an air thermometer, and Ibn Yunis to have used a pendulum for the measurement of time.[4] He points to the work of Al-Byruny, who travelled forty years to collect mineralogical specimens, and to that of Ibn Baitar, who collected botanical specimens from the whole Muslim world, and who compared the floras of India and Persia with those of Greece and Spain.[5] He lauds the Arab achievement of having introduced the zero into mathematics (though he admits this came originally from India), and points to the Arab invention of algebra, which was to revolutionize mathematics.[6] As if all this were not enough, he asserts that the Arabs invented the empirical method itself, which stands at the foundation of all modern science, and points to the achievements of Arab chemists, or alchemists, whose “organized passion for research … led them to the invention of distillation, sublimation, filtration, to the discovery of alcohol, or nitric acid and sulphuric acids (the only acid known to the ancients was vinegar), of the alkalis, of the salts of mercury, of antimony and bismuth, and laid the basis of all subsequent chemistry and physical research.”[7]

  Although the above viewpoint may seem somewhat overstated to the average reader, it is encountered even more widely today than when it was penned. Indeed, it has now become part of received wisdom. Thus the Wikipedia “Islamic Science” page quotes Rosanna Gorini, who notes: “According to the majority of the historians, Al-Haytham was the pioneer of the modern scientific method. With his book he changed the meaning of the term optics and established experiments as the norm of proof in the field. His investigations are based not on abstract theories, but on experimental evidences and his experiments were systematic and repeatable.”[8] The same page, which is massive, enumerates the apparently astonishing achievements of the Arab or Muslim scientists. The work of Avicenna (in medicine), Geber (in chemistry), Al-Kindi (Earth sciences), Abu Rayhan al-Biruni or Byruny (in astronomy and medicine), Ibn Zuhr (in surgery), and Ibn al-Haythan, or Alhacen (in optics) are all mentioned. The latter in particular is seen by some as being the inventor of the modern scientific method, whilst the work of the Spaniard Averroes is credited with reviving the entire study of philosophy in the West.

  It is well-known that Muslim scholars, beginning with the Persian Avicenna (Ibn Sina) in the late tenth and early eleventh century, had made extensive commentaries upon the works of Aristotle, which they attempted to integrate, with a very limited degree of success it must be noted, into Islamic thought. In the second half of the twelfth century Avicenna’s work was taken up by the Spanish Muslim Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who made his own commentaries and writings on the Greek philosopher. By that time European scholars were very much aware of Arab learning, and men like John of Salisbury even had agents in Spain procuring Arabic manuscripts, which were then translated into Latin. “Soon the commentaries of Averroes were so well known in Europe that he was called ‘the Commentator,’ as Aristotle was called ‘the Philosopher.’”[9] At a slightly earlier stage, Christian Europeans had found their way into Muslim-controlled regions such as Sicily, often in disguise, in order to avail themselves of the scientific and alchemical knowledge they discovered there. No less a person than Gerbert of Aurillac, the genius of the tenth century, on whom the figure of Faust was based, had journeyed into the Muslim regions to acquire knowledge. The profound influence exerted by Islam upon the philosophical and theological thinking of Europeans at this time cannot be stressed too much. Thus, at one stage, Briffault notes how, “The exact parallelism between Muslim and Christian theological controversy is too close to be accounted for by the similarity of situation, and the coincidences are too fundamental and numerous to be accepted as no more than coincidence. … The same questions, the same issues which occupied the theological schools of Damascu
s, were after an interval of a century repeated in identical terms in those of Paris.”[10] Again, “The whole logomacy [of Arab theological debate] passed bodily into Christendom. The catchwords, disputes, vexed questions, methods, systems, conceptions, heresies, apologetics and irenics, were transferred from the mosques to the Sorbonne”[11]

  Even allowing for a certain degree of exaggeration on the part of the above writers, it is clear that during the latter tenth, eleventh and early twelfth centuries the Islamic world was ahead of Christian Europe in terms of science, technology and learning in general, and that Europe was greatly influenced by Islam in this period. However, granting Islam’s lead in these centuries, the following question is prompted: If the Islamic world was so ahead of Europe, what went wrong afterward? How is it that by the twelfth or thirteenth century at the latest Europe had taken the lead, a lead which she was never again to relinquish? How is it that it was Europe which made the great scientific breakthroughs from the fourteenth century onwards and that it was Europe which went on to explore and map the earth and give birth to the modern world? And above all, how does this early Islamic respect for learning square with the profound disrespect for learning of almost all kinds displayed by Muslims for centuries, and even to this day?