The Impact of Islam

by Emmet Scott

  The Almohads, also from North Africa, arrived in Spain in several waves, beginning in 1146. By 1173 they had taken control of all Muslim territories in Spain and gained several victories over the Christian powers. From the very start of their operations in Iberia they began an intense persecution of the Christians still under Muslim rule. There were indeed far fewer of these than there had been, owing to the mass deportations carried out by the Almoravids, but there still existed a rather numerous population of infidels in the region whom they could target: the Jews. Reports from the period tell how, after an initial seven-month period of grace, the Almohads killed or forcefully converted entire Jewish communities in each new city they conquered until “there was no Jew left from Silves to Mahdia.”[20] Cases of mass martyrdom of Jews who refused to convert to Islam are also reported. Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1164), who himself fled the persecutions of the Almohads, composed an elegy mourning the destruction of many Jewish communities throughout Spain and the Maghreb under the Almohads.[21] Many Jews fled from territories ruled by the Almohads to Christian lands, and others, like the family of Maimonides, fled east to more tolerant Muslim lands It was during this epoch, as Ibn Warraq notes, that the Jews of Spain seem to have invented the myth of a golden age of tolerance during the earlier Caliphate. “The Golden Age,” he says, “also turns out to be a myth, invented, ironically, by the Jews themselves. The myth may well have originated as early as the twelfth century, when Abraham Ibn Daud in his Sefer ha-Qabbalah contrasted an idealised period of tolerance of the salons of Toledo in contrast to the contemporary barbarism of the Berber [Almohad] dynasty. But the myth took a firm grip on the imagination of the Jews in the nineteenth century thanks to the bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider and historian Heinrich Graetz, and perhaps the influence of Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Coningsby, published in 1844. Here is a passage from the latter novel giving a romantic picture of Muslim Spain, ‘...that fair and unrivaled civilization in which the children of Ishmael [the Arabs] rewarded the children of Israel with equal rights and privileges with themselves. During these halcyon centuries, it is difficult to distinguish the followers of Moses from the votary of Mohammed. Both alike built palaces, gardens and fountains; filled equally the highest offices of state, competed in an extensive and enlightened commerce, rivaled each other in renowned universities.’ Against a background of a rise in the pseudo-scientific racism of the nineteenth century, Jane Gerber has observed that Jewish historians looked to Islam ‘... for support, seeking real or imagined allies and models of tolerance in the East. The cult of a powerful, dazzling and brilliant Andalusia in the midst of an ignorant and intolerant Europe formed an important component in these contemporary intellectual currents.’ But Gerber concludes her sober assessment of the Golden Age Myth with these reflections, ‘The aristocratic bearing of a select class of courtiers and poets, however, should not blind us to the reality that this tightly knit circle of leaders and aspirants to power was neither the whole of Spanish Jewish history nor of Spanish Jewish society. Their gilded moments of the tenth and eleventh century are but a brief chapter in a longer saga. No doubt, Ibn Daud’s polemic provided consolation and inspiration to a crisis-ridden twelfth century elite, just as the golden age imagery could comfort dejected exiles after 1492. It suited the needs of nineteenth century advocates of Jewish emancipation in Europe or the twentieth century contestants in the ongoing debate over Palestine....The history of the Jews in Muslim lands, especially Muslim Spain, needs to be studied on its own terms, without myth or countermyth.’”[22]

  [1] H. St. L. B. Moss, The Birth of the Middle Ages; 395-814 (Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 172.

  [2] The estimates provided for Islamic Cordoba’s population have gone down bit by bit as archaeological investigation has progressed. Thus for example in the 1970s Angus MacKay could still claim that the tenth century city held 100,000 inhabitants, down 400,000 from Moss’s 1930s estimate of half a million, but still about 60,000 more than recent estimates. See Angus MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000-1500 (Macmillan Books, 1977).

  [3] Hodges and Whitehouse, op cit., p. 71.

  [4] Stephen Runciman, The History of the Crusades Vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 89.

  [5] Bertrand, op cit., p. 57.

  [6] Briffault, op cit,. p. 198.

  [7]Ibid., p. 199.

  [8]Ibid., p. 204.

  [9]Ibid., p. 210.

  [10]Ibid.

  [11] See for example David Levering Lewis, God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (W. W. Norton and Company, New York, 2008); Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (originally published by Princeton University in 1979); and John Freely, Light from the East: How the Science of Medieval Islam helped shape the Western World (2010).

  [12] Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1992), p. 173.

  [13] Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom, loc. cit.

  [14]Ibid.

  [15] Bernard Lewis, The Jews and Islam (Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 54.

  [16]Ibid.

  [17] Fletcher, op cit., p. 108.

  [18]Ibid., p. 112.

  [19] Bertrand, op cit., pp. 126-7.

  [20] See Amira K. Bennison and Maria Angeles Gallego, “Jewish Trading in Fez on the Eve of the Almohad Conquest,” (2008) at http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/39129/1/Almohad.MEAH.pdf

  [21] Ross Brann, Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain (Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 121-2.

  [22] Ibn Warraq, “The Mythistory of the Crusades,” New English Review (October, 2013) at www.newenglishreview.org

  5

  The Crusades

  The First Crusade commenced in 1096 when Byzantine Emperor Alexius Comnenus appealed to the Pope and princes of Europe for assistance against the Seljuk Turks who had recently overrun the whole of Asia Minor and now threatened Constantinople itself. The fall of Constantinople must have placed the safety of Europe in jeopardy.

  These are the bare facts, but one would never guess it if guided by much of what currently passes for scholarly comment on the topic: for the Crusades loom large in the current “clash of civilizations” debate, and they are invariably held up as a reproach to Europe and to Christianity. In the view of the greater part of the media and, sadly, much of academia, the Crusades constituted little more than an unprovoked attack by a barbarous Europe against a quiescent and cultured Islamic world. According to one frequently encountered opinion, the campaigns directed against the east were a convenient outlet for the aggressive energies of Europe’s warrior-class, who were now “freed up” from their earlier occupation of fighting Vikings and Magyars. Consider for example the following:

  “At the beginning of the eleventh century the Moslems held the southern two thirds of Spain, the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, the entire coast of North Africa, Palestine, and part of Syria. Religious enthusiasm and political and economic ambition moved the men of Western Europe to attack these Moslem lands. The feudal class, especially its cadets, or younger sons, saw unlimited opportunities to acquire both spiritual and temporal rewards, salvation and rich fiefs, through engaging in their favorite occupation [war]. The papacy may have had more complicated motives. Certainly the popes desired to spread the Christian faith and their own authority, but it is quite possible that they thought it an excellent idea to turn the turbulent belligerency of the feudal class into worthy channels. Finally, the rising Italian towns, especially Genoa and Pisa, were anxious to free themselves from the continuous danger of Moslem naval raids and to conduct their trade peacefully along the shores of the western Mediterranean.”[1]

  The above passage, from an extremely influential twentieth cent
ury historian, refers to conflicts earlier than the (official) First Crusade, which were almost without exception defensive operations to check Muslim aggression; yet the author makes no mention of any such aggression save at the end, where he concedes that the Genoese and Pisans may have wished to navigate around the Mediterranean without being intercepted by slave-raiding pirates. The basic premise, however, is of a somewhat fanatical and without question violent Christendom seeking to extend its boundaries at the expense of its peace-loving Muslim neighbors.

  Whilst agreeing that the Crusaders were barbarous in comparison with their opponents, other historians have tried to present the whole phenomenon of the Crusades as a kind of prototype European colonialism; the first manifestation of a phenomenon which would eventually lead to the colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic slave trade. All of these ideas, routinely encountered these days on television and in newspapers, as well as on occasion in textbooks, are suffused with the spirit of guilt which so characterizes modern western thinking. Even more recent authors who profess to see beyond this tend fall into the same trap – often disguising their blatantly anti-European bias as simple impartiality. Take for example the following comment of Thomas Asbridge, whose 2010 book, The Crusades, is widely regarded as an authoritative and even-handed study:

  “In fact, the crusades were just one expression of a much wider drive to rejuvenate western Christendom, championed by Rome from the mid-eleventh century onwards in the so-called ‘Reform movement’. As far as the papacy was concerned, any failings within the Church were just the symptoms of a deeper malaise: the corrupting influence of the secular world, long enshrined by the links between clergymen and lay rulers. And the only way to break the stranglehold enjoyed by emperors and kings over the Church was for the Pope finally to realise his God-given right to supreme authority. The most vocal and extreme proponent of these views was Pope Gregory VII (1073-85). Gregory ardently believed that he had been set on Earth to transform Christendom by seizing absolute control of Latin ecclesiastical affairs. In pursuit of this ambition, he was willing to embrace almost any available means – even the potential use of violence, enacted by papal servants whom he called ‘soldiers of Christ’. Although Gregory went too far, too fast and ended his pontificate in ignominious exile in southern Italy, his bold strides did much to advance the twinned causes of reform and papal empowerment, establishing a platform from which his successor (and former adviser), Pope Urban II (1088-99), could instigate the First Crusade.”[2]

  So, for Asbridge, the Crusades were a means by which the popes could bolster their own spiritual and temporal authority. It is notable that Asbridge first mentions the request for assistance made by the Byzantine emperor on page 34. An even more egregious and sadly predictable take on the issue is expressed in David Levering Lewis’ God’s Crucible: Islam and the making of Europe, 570-1215 (2006). Lewis’ view of the Crusades and of the Crusaders is predicated upon the belief – still almost universally held – that for centuries Europe was a semi-literate and semi-savage backwater, a cultural graveyard mired in poverty, brutality and illiteracy. For Lewis, as for so many others, the “energies” of Europe’s warrior-class were simply directed by the papacy away from internal destruction onto the convenient targets of the Islamic world. This is the line of reasoning taken too by Marcus Bull in his examination of the origins of the Crusades in The Oxford History of the Crusades. In an article of almost ten thousand words, Bull fails to consider the Muslim threat at all. Indeed he mentions it only to dismiss it:

  “The perspective of a Mediterranean-wide struggle [between Islam and Christianity] was visible only to those institutions, in particular the papacy, which had the intelligence networks, grasp of geography, and sense of long historical tradition to take a broad overview of Christendom and its threatened predicament, real or supposed. This is a point which needs to be emphasized because the terminology of the crusades is often applied inaccurately to all the occasions in the decades before 1095 when Christians and Muslims found themselves coming to blows. An idea which underpins the imprecise usage is that the First Crusade was the last in, and the culmination of, a series of wars in the eleventh century which had been crusading in character, effectively ‘trial runs’ which had introduced Europeans to the essential features of the crusade. This is an untenable view.”[3]

  With what justification, we might ask, does Bull dissociate the earlier Christian-Muslim conflicts of the eleventh century in Spain, Sicily, and Anatolia from the First Crusade? The answer can hardly be described as convincing. “There is plenty of evidence,” he says, “to suggest that people regarded Pope Urban II’s crusade appeal of 1095-6 as something of a shock to the communal system: it was felt to be effective precisely because it was different from anything attempted before.”[4] Of course it was different: the Pope had called a meeting of all the potentates and prelates of Europe to urge the assembly of a mighty force to march to the relief of Constantinople and perhaps eventually to retake the Holy Land. It was new because of its scale and its ambition. But to thus dismiss the connection with what went before in Spain and Sicily – and Anatolia – is ridiculous. Such a statement can only derive from a mindset which somehow has to see the crusaders as the aggressors and to thereby detach them from the legitimate defensive wars which Christians had been fighting in Spain and throughout the Mediterranean in the decades immediately preceding 1095.

  As Ibn Warraq shows in his recently-published Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades and other Fantasies, whilst it is possible to discern several strands of thought which ultimately arrived at this anti-crusader consensus, all of these are predicated upon a generally negative view of Christianity, particularly Catholic Christianity, which first appeared during the Enlightenment. Modern scholars, such as those quoted above, who may often be unaware of the “Christianophobic” origin of their own ideas, nonetheless usually concede that the idea of “holy war” was essentially alien to the Christian faith, and that a great deal of philosophical soul-searching was necessary to justify spilling blood in the name of Christ. Nonetheless, they tend to argue that primitive Christianity’s pacifism was only apparent, and that well before the appearance of Islam the Christians had already become inured to the idea of religious war. They cite, for example, Saint Augustine’s defense of the “just war” concept, and they point to the wars waged by Christian kings against pagan Vikings and Magyars as examples of Christian “Holy War” preceding the Crusades.

  Yet these arguments are strained: There is plenty of evidence to suggest that prior to the clash with Islam Christians had no concept of divinely-sanctioned violence. There can be no doubt, however, that the centuries of warfare against barbarians to the north and east which followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 had produced a more “muscular” Christianity than that which prevailed in the early Christian centuries. We know that the arrival in Western Europe of the Germanic peoples in the fifth and sixth centuries had seen the appearance of a new ruling class thoroughly steeped in warrior culture. This had, over the next two or three centuries, been modified by the Christian ethos, though somewhat more than a trace of the Germanic warrior ideal survived in the medieval institution of the knight. The knight represented a mildly Christianized version of the Teutonic warrior-hero. It is true too that the martial ethos of Europe’s ruling Germanic elite can only have been further reinforced by the desperate struggle which raged throughout the tenth century against Vikings in the north, Hungarians in the east and Muslims in the south. This unsettled period saw the beginning of castle-building: by the middle years of the tenth century fortified hilltop strongholds, built initially of wood and later of stone, began to spring up all over the continent.[5] It was an age of uncertainty and violence, and such conditions naturally give rise to a more warlike mindset. Huge numbers of men were at any given time in arms. The end of hostilities against Vikings and Magyars in the eleventh century would certainly not have immediately produced universal paci
fism. Huge numbers of men remained in arms, and the energies of these warriors, it is claimed, were often misplaced fighting one another and terrorizing the local population. The Church tried to stem this violence with the so-called Peace and Truce of God movements. These were partially successful, but trained soldiers always sought an outlet for their skills, which were, with the end of the Magyar and Viking threats, becoming scarcer in northern Europe. Spain and southern Italy provided important exceptions, where the wars against the Muslims continued unabated and with increasing ferocity. All the major battles between Christians and Muslims in Spain during the eleventh century involved large numbers of knights and foot-soldiers from all over western Europe, but especially from France and Germany. At the taking of Toledo, for example, the Burgundians played a pivotal role.[6]

  It cannot be emphasized too strongly however that, unlike the wars against the Vikings and Magyars, these battles against Muslims were specifically about religion. They had been thus defined by the Muslims themselves. Their conquests all over North Africa and Asia had been motivated specifically to spread the faith. It is perfectly understandable that in such circumstances Christians would begin to think in similar terms; and it is becoming increasingly widely accepted amongst professional historians that the Christians of this time actually derived the concept of “Holy War” from Islam. Thus for example in 2007 Bernard Lewis made the following unusually frank comment: