Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  BYZANTINE WRITERS FROM THE SEVENTH CENTURY ONWARD PRESENTED Islam as a mortal danger facing the Christians, greater than Persia had ever been. At the end of his history, after recounting the first assault on Constantinople, Sebeos catalogued the threat that Islam posed: “For just as arrows fly from the well-curved bow of a strong man toward the target, so are the Arabs who come from the Sinai desert to destroy the entire world with hunger, the sword, and great terror.”39

  Muslims were characterized in the same negative terms in the Western Catholic polemics as they had been in the East.40 There too they were the quintessence of evil, even the Antichrist himself, but also a necessary instrument of divine wrath and judgment upon God’s sinful people. Over time new forms of condemnation proliferated, but they were all raised upon a framework initially elaborated within a few decades of first contact. From this point, “Islam” was assimilated to existing examples of evil and ruin in the Old and New Testaments. These primordial ascriptions were repeated in later scholarly discourse and went unchallenged for centuries. They also leaked out beyond the community of scholars into the minds—or mouths—of ordinary people. Thereafter the words of the scholars acquired new meanings, but this process was resisted. Alcuin, the most renowned Anglo-Saxon scholar of the eighth century and founder of the academy in Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen, wrote: “Those people should not be listened to who say that the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotous tumult of the crowd is always very close to madness.”41 How ideas embodied in a few scholarly works were implanted within a much larger (and illiterate) population is still under debate.

  Communicating ideas of the Muslim infidel depended on the way that language functions.42 There are many theories of how language works, but in the 1950s the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan provided a useful explanation of how language bears the traces of its use. He took the model first articulated by the father of linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, and refined it to fit what he saw as the reality of human relationships. Saussure had defined communication as a pure and comprehensive system of signs, with each sign consisting of two elements.43 The first was what was described, or “signified,” from the French signifié. The second element was the “signifier,” the means by which its meaning was communicated, by spoken sound or by visible marks, such as writing.

  Communication would be impossible if there were no common understanding about how signifier and signified were linked. The same object has to be named in the same way. But as a psychologist, Lacan saw among his patients that in practice no one-to-one relationship existed between the two elements. They were already part of a chain of mental connections, and carried internally the residue of those connections. Applied to curses and imprecations, Lacan’s theory of linguistic practice means that any insult has to be contextualized, because it carries inside it imperceptible traces of similar insults that have gone before. In the case of Christianity and Islam that context would encompass a history extending back over many centuries. If we accept this notion, then very few statements within that history can safely be taken at face value. Their meaning derives in part from the extended skein of fear and hatred. We lack the information in the patchy early records to see the full implications of this idea. But, stepping outside the chronological flow for a moment, there is an instance from the second half of the nineteenth century that suggests how hostility can fabricate and sustain such a tissue of meaning.

  THIS EXAMPLE APPEARS IN THE BRITISH CONSULAR RECORDS FOR June 1860, at a time when there were savage attacks on Christians in the Levant, which will figure again later in this book. The British government asked its consuls in the Ottoman Empire to write a short overall impression of how Christians were living under a Muslim government. The various officials interpreted their open-ended instructions in different ways. Consul Blunt at Pristina in the Balkans remarked that Christians were “decidedly” better off than they had been ten years before. In those days “one can judge the measure of Turkish toleration practised at that time by having had to creep under doors scarcely four feet high.”44 The inference here was unambiguous. The Turks compelled Christians to make their church doors so low that worshipers had to bend to enter, and hence humiliate themselves. But as I read this, I wondered whether this seasoned consular official was interpreting the situation correctly. There was another explanation for these low doors that I had picked up elsewhere. This suggested that it was the Christians themselves who deliberately made their church doors low, so that Muslims would be prevented from riding mules into their churches and the animals fouling the floors. Both versions of the story certainly demonstrate oppression—but the tales follow different paths.

  However, I also questioned how reliable either interpretation was as evidence of general oppression. Mary Eliza Rogers lived in Palestine during the 1850s. She described many Christian churches in great detail, but never referred to these architectural symbols of oppression, nor once alluded to Christians bending double to enter their places of worship. Were there other interpretations that did not signify oppression? In Christian Europe, church doors came in all shapes and sizes. Large and heavy doors often contain a smaller portal that is used daily, while the great doors are thrown open only on holy days and festivals. Many European churches also have small and narrow secondary entrances. So which interpretation is correct? Was it official tyranny, designed to humiliate Christians? Was it a Christian response to a distasteful problem? Or could it have been only a rhetorical device, a metaphor presented in the guise of fact, a graphic means to express the quality of “Turkish toleration”? We cannot know. Perhaps the consul just wanted a convenient emblem of oppression for the “bad old days” of the 1840s.

  However, there is one specific door that might have been the archetype for these stories. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, built by Justinian in 529, originally had three great doors in its western façade. But the history of the building reveals how it changed over the centuries:

  The main access to the Basilica is by the very small Door of Humility (78 cm in width and 130 cm in height, 2.3 by 4.3 feet). Visitors must enter bending over, as if to a real cave. Originally the church had three entrances, two of which have been bricked up. They are hidden respectively by a buttress built later (after the 16th century) and by the Armenian buildings. The central and highest portal of Justinian’s church door was reshaped by the Crusaders. This resulted in a pointed arch which is still visible today with the cornice of the Justinian entrance which can be seen above. The present small entrance was made during the Ottoman era to prevent mounted horsemen from entering the Basilica.45

  All the modern accounts repeat this story, with the Ottomans stabling their horses on the holy ground.46 But there the trail peters out. There is no agreement as to precisely when or why this sacrilege happened. Moreover, there is no sense that other sites of equal importance, such as the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, were subjected to the same treatment. So which story is right: horses, or humiliation? Or was the door in Bethlehem reduced in size for structural reasons, which might account for the changes made in the era of the Crusaders? Certainly, the low portal made no symbolic impression on Mary Rogers when she visited the Church of the Nativity. “We passed under a deep arched way” was the matter-of-fact way she described her entry through the Door of Humility.47

  These tales, and others like them, should always, I suggest, be interpreted with care. Undoubtedly, over the centuries, linking “Islam’s rule” with the image of a low and narrow church portal generated ideas of Christian humiliation. This, Westerners were expected to infer, was how Muslims always behaved toward Christians. Yet changing the context alters the meaning. The same narrow door, in a Christian land, would have a quite different significance. Then it might become a metaphor for the path to salvation, recalling the words of Christ “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”48

  This paradox reminded me of Lacan’s graphic ex
ample of how meaning was created, conveyed, and perceived. He first drew two identical doors side by side. Neither had any special significance until he wrote the word “Men” above one and “Women” above the other. Then the reader understood. Each portal now suggested what happened behind them, unleashing a whole cascade of connections. Lacan’s point was that there was nothing in the words “Men” and “Women” alone, nor in the image of the doors by themselves. But their juxtaposition, and the words inscribed, immediately made a clear cultural connection with sexual differentiation, with urination, and with defecation.49 So, he suggested, the particular meaning of these doors was determined by context. Many of the European stories concerning “Islam” were constructed in this way, like Consul Blunt’s interpretation of the low threshold in Pristina. The dominant Western paradigms of “Islam”—oppression, savagery, and threat—determined how events, structures, and images were to be understood.50

  Part Two

  CHAPTER THREE

  Al-Andalus

  THE PASSAGE INTO SPAIN WAS EASY FROM THE MOROCCAN SHORE. A narrow body of water, then open beaches gave way to sand and scrub, then to low hills. To the west, the sluggish river Guadalquivir (from the Arabic Wad el-Kebir, the big valley) flowed into the sea at the little port of Sanlucar de Barrameda, where Christopher Columbus would gather his ships in 1498. Upstream lay Seville and Cordoba, the greatest cities of the south. Beyond these were fertile rolling fields until the wooded slopes of the Sierra Morena rose to cut off the lands of the south, which Spaniards still call the frying pan of Spain, from the high cold plateau of central Spain. Only to the east, on the road to Granada and the Sierra Nevada, were there mountains to compare with the Atlas and the Anti-Atlas ranges of North Africa. Even in Granada, the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada rose behind the level fields of the Vega, which was like a verdant carpet rolled out before the city. The pioneering nineteenth-century traveler Richard Ford would catch its character, describing “the eternal rampart of the lovely Vega … The clear mother of pearl outline cuts the blue sky.”1

  For North Africans, accustomed to Morocco and Algeria, and the deserts beyond, this was an easy land. Give it water and it flourishes, abundantly. Contrast this home of plenty with the approach into Spain from the north across the Pyrenees. There were few passes through the mountains and none was easy, except where the high peaks diminished toward the Atlantic. Spain below the Pyrenean barrier was rugged and mountainous, and the great rivers, crossing the terrain from east to west, provided a further set of obstacles. The sixteenth-century English traveler James Howell observed that “about a third part of the continent of Spain is made up of huge craggy hills and mountains, amongst which one can feel in some places more difference in point of temper of heat and cold in the air than twixt winter and summer under other Climes.”2

  From a northern European perspective, Spain was simply a distant southern extremity, separated from the rest of the continent by the Pyrenean massif. For Spaniards, the mountains have traditionally been their salvation. A folk legend of unknown origin held that when the devil proclaimed his dominion over all the earth to Jesus Christ, Spain was forgotten, concealed from his evil view by the great peaks. Spain possessed four borders: the land frontier with Europe, a coastline on the Atlantic, a long Mediterranean shoreline, and, across a narrow strip of water, Africa. The Muslim conquest of Spain was perhaps inevitable from the day in 681 that an Arab general, Uqba bin Nafi, stood on the shores of the Atlantic, close to the modern town of Agadir. The traditional account of this expedition had the Muslim commander riding into the water up to his horse’s withers, gesturing with his sword toward the empty ocean, and crying, “God is great. If my course were not stopped by this sea, I would still ride on to the unknown kingdoms of the west, preaching the unity of God, and putting to the sword the rebellious nations who worship any other god but Him.”3 While the western ocean posed a barrier to the advance of Islam, the narrow strait between Africa and Europe was inconsequential. Ships constantly crisscrossed between the harbors of North Africa and the ports of southern Spain. The richness and abundance of Spain proved an irresistible lure.4 Thus in the same decade, 710–20, that the Muslim armies encamped before Constantinople for the second time and were defeated, in the West their coreligionists were victorious beyond their wildest imagining. We know the outcome—the seizure of almost all the land from the southern Spanish shore to the Pyrenees (and beyond)—but the process of conquest remains shrouded in mystery. As in the East, the first contact of Muslims and Christians did not attract a chronicler until decades after the event.5

  Some facts are undisputed. In 710, an advance party of Berber soldiers was ferried in four small ships across the ten miles of water to an island called Las Palomas, just off the Spanish coast, close to modern Tarifa.6 The commander, Tarif bin Malik, had only 400 infantrymen and 100 horsemen. They were lightly armed, carried only a minimum of food and water, and no heavy equipment. Nonetheless, meeting with virtually no resistance, they soon filled their ships with a huge amount of plunder. Tarif’s sortie indicated that a raid in strength on the Spanish mainland would yield rich pickings. In the following year, his superior commander in Tangier, Tariq bin Zayid, mounted a larger expedition. He sailed from the African shore early in April, and landed his 7,000 men under cover of darkness beneath the mountain that now bears his name, Gibraltar (Jebel Tariq, the mountain of Tariq). In the morning, they marched over the sandy strip separating the rocky peak from the mainland and occupied a wide circle of land beyond the small town now called Algeciras.

  This was little different from any of the other speculative expeditions that had characterized the Arab conquest. In the early eighth century, Spain was ruled by a Visigothic dynasty, and although the sources are scanty, we know that the king of Spain, Roderick, quickly came south with a large army to repel the invaders. He was killed in battle not far from the point where the Muslims had landed, close to the old Roman town of Asida Caesarina. The Visigothic army melted away. After the battle there was almost no organized resistance, and Tariq, who commanded little more than 7,000 men, sent a small detachment under a trusted tribesman called Mugith al-Rumi to take Cordoba. When the band arrived on the bank of the river Guadalquivir opposite the city, they learned from a shepherd that the Visigoths had abandoned Cordoba, except for a few hundred men. Al-Rumi also discovered that there was a gap in the defenses. By night he smuggled in a handful of men, who opened the gate to the old Roman bridge. In the early morning his few soldiers took the city.

  Meanwhile Tariq pressed north with all speed toward the Visigothic capital at Toledo. He was joined by his senior commander Musa ibn Nasir with much-needed reinforcements. When they reached the walls, they found the gates open and the city virtually empty. The occupation of Spain north of Toledo that followed in subsequent years met with very little more opposition than this first advance. One or two towns resisted and were sacked, but as in the Levant, the Muslim conquest seemed completely irresistible. However, at the time the loss of Spain seemed even less explicable than the loss of the East. The earliest Christian account of the fall of Spain, written about 754, put the loss into a biblical framework, much as the patriarch had done in Jerusalem a century before.7 The Christian chronicler also declared Tariq’s overlord, Musa, to be “altogether pitiless,” for he “burned fair cities, sentenced noble and leading men of the time to be tortured, and had children and nursing mothers beaten to death.” But once he had “filled everyone with such terror, some cities which remained soon sued for peace, and he, with blandishments and mockery and guile, granted these wishes.” For the most part, such agreements were fulfilled. Christian overlordship was quickly and easily replaced by Muslim power.

  Over time both Christian and Muslim accounts of this event became tales replete with prophetic utterance, spiced with suggestions of lust and betrayal. The myths provided an explanation of how it was that Tariq, with no more than a few thousand men at his disposal, could have defeated “all the Christian fighting
men of Spain,” numbered by some at 100,0. Why had God turned against his people?8 The answer was found in moral depravity that had occasioned divine wrath. The easy victory of the Berbers and their Arab commanders was partly put down by Christian writers to malign fate. But God had abandoned his people because the Visigothic rulers’ moral failures had brought them low. The theme of mordant lust leading to betrayal permeated the account. “In the royal court in Seville, they began to talk, among other things, about the beauty of women. One of those present intervened to say that no woman in the whole world was more lovely than the daughter of Count Julian,” a shadowy character, supposedly the commander of Ceuta, a Byzantine enclave in North Africa. On hearing this, the king asked his chief adviser how he “might secretly send a messenger to her so he might see her.” This man advised, “Send for Julian to come here and spend some days with him eating and drinking.” While Julian was being entertained, the king wrote a letter in Count Julian’s name, accompanied by the count’s personal seal ring, commanding the countess to come to court with her daughter Oliva. When they arrived the king seduced Oliva and “illicitly had intercourse with the girl over several days.”9