Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  From reading Mikhail Bakhtin, I began to get an insight into this world without fixed meaning or solid structures. Perhaps Bakhtin’s harsh experience of life was reflected in what and how he wrote. He was born in 1895, the second son of a prosperous provincial banker. A golden early career ended when he fell foul of Stalin in 1929. For the whole of his adult life, revolution and the social transformation of Russia distorted Bakhtin’s fate. Instead of falling victim to a bullet in the neck or a one-way trip to the gulag, Bakhtin was sent into internal exile in Kazakhstan. There he taught bookkeeping by day and studied by night. By remaining silent and inconspicuous he escaped a new purge in 1937.

  The war with Germany created a need for foreign-language speakers and meant that he was allowed to teach German (in which he was virtually bilingual) to high school students. But even after the war ended he was still regarded as “unreliable.” In part this was because he refused to denounce his Orthodox roots and upbringing. With his “cosmopolitan” interests and connections he was lucky to survive a third purge of intellectuals in the 1950s. It was only in the 1960s that Bakhtin was rescued from obscurity, by a group of scholars who had read his work and were amazed to find him still alive. By then he had lost a leg through osteomyelitis, and walked on crutches or unsteadily with a stick. Cheap cigarettes, smoked incessantly, gave him a permanent cough and the emphysema that eventually killed him. (In the depths of World War II, lacking paper, he had torn up the only copy of one of his manuscripts to roll his own cigarettes.)

  All the work that he wrote, unobtrusively, in exile or in self-imposed isolation, was shot through with a theme of impermanence. Insecurity and change were the constants of his life and mutability was the essence of his scholarly message. It was present in his studies of Dostoyevsky, in his essays published in English as The Dialogic Imagination, and in his greatest work, on Rabelais. He saw almost every word in a language as being in a state of flux, as it interacted or was colored by the use of other words. This “intertextuality” was natural. For Bakhtin the normal, healthy state of life involved interaction with others. Whatever they did or said affected you and influenced your response. Yet this mutual relationship could never be congruent. Bakhtin told a story of two people looking at each other. Consider them as an observer looking at another observer. You are one, someone else is the other.

  You can see things behind my back that I cannot see and I can see things behind your back that are denied to your vision. We are both doing essentially the same thing, but from different places: although we are in the same event, that event is different for each of us. Our places are different not only because our bodies occupy different positions in exterior, physical space, but also because we regard each other from different centres.5

  Bakhtin’s work has helped me to understand the opposing poles—“Christian infidel” and “Muslim infidel”—as being conjoined, as “enemies in the mirror.”6 But over many centuries, while each might have been aware of the other, even observed the other, neither could, as Bakhtin suggests, see what the other sees. The relationship between “one” and “another” would also be constrained by their relative social, political, or military power. Ultimately they were incommensurable.7 Words of hate and images inviting disgust were a direct product of differences in position. Bakhtin described what happens when such words are uttered: “The utterance is related not only to preceding but to subsequent links in the chain … From the very beginning the speaker expects a response from them, an active responsive understanding. The entire utterance is constructed, as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response.”8 In this dialogue language is both a “weapon” and a “shield.”9 The deliberate intensity of insults, spoken or written, makes their effect unpredictable. Maledicta are the most volatile and dangerous elements in any language.

  Following Bakhtin’s idea of dialogue, there are two parties to every malediction. It might seem logical that the person affected most directly is the one insulted. But I believe the reverse may be true. If you are the object of an insult, you may not know that it has happened, or understand exactly what has been said, like Ivo Andrić’s character Consul Danville. Today the most foul and gratuitous insults lurk on the Internet, but are never read by their intended victims. But those who curse certainly hear the words, resonating in their own mind. Even if you are the intended target of a curse (and both hear and understand the insult), you still have the power to deny it. Crude maledictions like “cockroaches” or “sons of monkeys and pigs” no doubt make those who say them feel good. But they rarely hit their target, for who will believe such an insult directed against them?10

  This kind of abuse has a different purpose, to define communal differences, between “them” and “us.” They are portrayed as subhuman or not even human at all. We are human, with our roots in higher values. Demonized enemies—whether those of “impure blood” or “sons of monkeys and pigs”—have no part in human society: words or images are used to cut out from the codes and taboos that govern relationships between human equals. No longer human, they are not entitled to humane treatment. These ultimate words of hatred have now become enormously more effective with modern mass communication.11

  A HISTORY THAT ENDS IN THE PRESENT IS NEVER COMPLETE. I rewrote this last chapter in the months after the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, and it bears the mark of those perfervid days. The lead-up to this book’s publication in May 2003 spanned the war in Iraq; now I am rewriting it again, this time in that war’s aftermath. In a sense, the question “What went wrong,” the headline to Professor Bernard Lewis’s article in the Atlantic Monthly in January 2002, and the title of his best-selling book, has now come to epitomize an era of the immediate past. I say past because the military conquest of spring 2003 has moved us beyond Lewis’s diagnosis, and into unknown territory. Rather as the West’s involvement in the Balkans has produced a plethora of books, articles, television, and movies, so too long-term intervention in Iraq is replicating that process. The reason is obvious. Bismarck once said that Germany’s interests in the Balkans were not worth “the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.”12 The daily sacrifice of Western soldiers transforms the nature of any distant conflict, generates a new need to understand.

  Lewis’s great strength is his limpid prose and skill in simplifying complexity.13 But it works best on a topic with which a reader is unfamiliar. The more we see and know of the East, the less persuasive it becomes. What seemed clear and unambiguous when viewed from a distance, before 2003, now appears more complex and intricate close up. I have argued in this book that the Western view of the Mediterranean Muslim world was rooted in a distant past, and the consequences of that imprinting still affect Western attitudes today. But I have, correctly, been reminded that this process too alters over time. As John Adamson put it:

  Since the Enlightenment … the West has challenged Islam not merely with a different theology but with a wholly different conception of the state: with the principles that the religious and the secular can (and ought to be) wholly separate spheres; that political power ascends upwards from the people rather than some potentate appointed by God; and that even Christian teaching can be countermanded by legislation when they are at variance with the popular will.

  Western modernity’s intellectual challenge is therefore qualitatively different from what has gone before.14

  Adamson is absolutely right. The challenge of Western modernity produced a remarkable ferment of speculation in the Islamic East, but not in a form that the West has found easy to understand. So “What went wrong” needs to be set in context. For many centuries political and philosophical thought had languished in the East, not least because the Ottoman rulers did not encourage it. As a consequence, the fruits of the European Enlightenment reached the East rather late.15 Thereafter, Easterners sought (and seek), in the eyes of many modern commentators, to acquire the superficial trappings of Western economic and material progress, without recognizing that these develo
p from a commitment to education, freedom of thought and enterprise, and an open, essentially secular society. Those commentators put the East’s failure to become enlightened down to stubborn obscurantism, and simple bad faith. But they expected too much. Any encounter between the revolutionary ideals of the Enlightenment and a traditional society structured around religious faith would inevitably be difficult.16

  Nor has progress always had an easy passage even in Europe or the United States.17 Resistance to a godless and secular society existed in rural areas everywhere. Throughout the nineteenth century many conservative Europeans, completely unreconciled to the alien ideals of progress, abhorred every aspect of modernity.18 For the vast rural majority, especially in eastern and southeastern Europe, in France, Spain, and the mezzogiorno of Italy, these new political and social ideas had no meaning: the faithful usually believed what their priests told them.19 The resistance to change was not very different in the regions under Islamic rule.

  But the challenge of new political and social ideas, new technologies, also produced a particularly ardent response among many Easterners, from rural as well as from educated urban backgrounds.20 This challenge from Western modernity stimulated an intellectual revival unparalleled for centuries. In the towns and cities of Mediterranean Islam, there was the same range of attitudes toward change and modernity as in the cities of western Europe. Some educated Muslims, local Christians, and Jews opted for a secular style of life, living with Western rather than traditional furnishings, reading books in French and English, debating and discussing ideas with all the verve of Parisians or Viennese.21 Others remained believers but engaged with the issues thrown up by contact with the West. Marshall Hodgson’s brief pen portrait of the Egyptian savant Mohammad Abduh could stand for a whole class of similar Muslim thinkers:

  [He] liked to visit Europe to restore his faith in mankind. But he accepted nothing from the West unless it passed his own rigorous standards. When he rejected taqlid (adherence to established interpretation) and tradition, he rejected them not in favour of Westernisation ad libitum but of Muslim ijtijad (freedom to question and interpret ideas)… He was influenced by many modern European thinkers and by none more than Comte, whose positivism had exalted scientific objectivism … yet who called for a new religious system to meet a persisting human need, provided it could be consistent with science. But Abduh was convinced that it was Islam which could provide that religious system.22

  The Islamic thinkers of the late nineteenth century were very much aware of Western modernity in its physical and political manifestations.23 Some, like Abduh, knew the European intellectual revolution from which it emerged; but their thinking developed in opposition to what they saw as the negative character of the West. This grew out of a long tradition. At Al-Azhar in Cairo, the oldest university in the world, scholars had debated the shape and structures of the faith since the late tenth century. This tradition of criticism and scholarship in Cairo outlasted its competitors in Damascus and Baghdad, and from the early nineteenth century the city became a pioneer in the printing and publication of secular, nationalist, and also religious material. In the years after World War I, as Egypt remained in thrall to Britain, much of the political debate in Cairo began to focus anew on the Holy Qur’an and the hadith for guidance. This had to be done carefully. Islam was opposed to the idea of innovation (bid’ah), which would undermine the concept of a perfect revelation of the ideal society.24 Change had to be presented, rhetorically, as “no change,” or better, as a reversion to an earlier and purer state of society. A new practice had to be embedded within an unchanging paradigm. Nevertheless there was a tradition of speculation, for unobtrusive reexamination and reinterpretation of questions that had been closed centuries before.25

  In the early history of Islam there had been a tradition of ideas passed on by pupils, each of whom listened to the words of his master, and then transmitted them to his own successors. It was a chain binding each scholar irrevocably to his predecessors and to those who in turn had learned the truth from his own lips. A similar chain of connection linked the theorists and activists of the Islamic revival, each of whom added his own contribution. An intellectual movement centered upon fighting the power of the West began with a complex figure called Jamal al-Din, often known as Al-Afghani, who taught in Egypt, was exiled to Paris, and eventually died in Constantinople in 1897. He called on Muslims to resist the West, to turn the West’s own weapons and techniques against it.26

  One of his most devoted supporters was Muhammad Abduh. When Al-Afghani was expelled from Egypt, Abduh followed him to Paris. There they published a short-lived journal called the Indissoluble Bond, which preached Muslim unity in the face of Western power. Abduh’s work was continued by his pupil, a Syrian called Rashid Rida. He in turn became a powerful influence on Hasan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, and on its most notable theorist, Sayyid Qutb.27

  Banna created a new kind of political and religious organization that began “as a youth club with its main stress on moral and social reform through communication, information and propaganda.”28 Banna began a tradition where Islamist politics were allied to providing assistance for the poor and dispossessed. By 1940 there were more than 500 branches in Egypt, which had risen to 5,000 by 1946. Banna’s Ikhwan al-Muslimim found many adherents throughout the Middle East, where they were often ruthlessly repressed by secular authorities. King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia said he had his own ikhwan, and politely declined their offer to establish a branch in his domains.

  Sayyid Qutb was both a scholar and a prolific author, who wrote his last (and arguably) his greatest work in prison in the 1960s. He became one of the leading figures of the Muslim Brotherhood. When he was hanged on the orders of the Egyptian government, he turned into a martyr in the eyes of his supporters. A younger Egyptian, Abd al-Salem Faraj, suffered the same fate as Qutb; in 1979 he had founded a group called the Society for the Holy War (Jamaat al-Jihad), usually known simply as Al-Jihad. On October 6, 1981, Al-Jihad succeeded in killing the president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, whom they had proscribed as an evil prince. As one of the assassins publicly declared, “I am [Lieutenant] Khalid Islambuli. I have killed Pharaoh and I do not fear death.”29 For Faraj, Islambuli, and their group, Sadat merited death. “We have to make the Rule of God’s Religion in our own country first, and to make the Word of God supreme … there is no doubt that the first battlefield for jihad is the extermination of these infidel leaders [“corrupt” Muslims like Sadat] and to replace them by a complete Islamic Order. From there we should start.”30

  Al-Jihad believed in the near-magic potency of a dramatic revolutionary act. In their eyes, “killing Pharaoh” would ultimately usher in the restoration of a true Islamic state.31 Unlike Qutb’s profuse and articulate writings, Faraj wrote only one single work, an eighty-page pamphlet called The Neglected Duty (Al-Faridah al-Gha’iba), but its influence was out of all proportion to the number of copies printed.32 Faraj, like his predecessor, had joined the chain. He advanced the idea that in the desperate situation of his own time, the (lesser) jihad, or armed struggle, had became the individual duty of each and every true Muslim. If not exactly an innovation, this represented a complete reversal of many centuries of Muslim practice. This was in Faraj’s eyes the duty which had been “neglected.” His concept of struggle waged through a symbolic chiliastic act had a long-forgotten parallel within Western thought in the nihilism of the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Nechaev. Political murder created a “propaganda of the deed” against the czarist autocracy. But in Russia this had proved a rootless, aberrant idea, and when it spread West, these nihilistic killings had little of the impact that Nechaev had confidently expected.

  In the Islamic world, symbolic violence had a different history. Faraj linked his jihad back to the earliest days of the faith, which gave these murders a solid context and ideology that had eluded the rootless anarchist Nechaev. By stages the Islamic revivalists also abandoned any hope that virtue
would ever come from the secular Muslim states. Only a godly society “rightly guided” by the Holy Qur’an would do. They refused to make any compromise or accommodation with the powers of the earth, whether these were governed by Muslim rulers or were Western mass-democratic states. They were driven by the conviction that through endless sacrifice and implacable determination their jihad would eventually triumph. For the revolutionaries, the blood and sacrifice of the martyrs would eventually restore the purity of the faith. Moreover, the destruction of every one of those who were “corrupt upon earth” would hasten that salvation. How such enemies were designated was tied only very loosely to tradition and long-established custom.33 Ancient maledictions were easily adapted to meet the needs of contemporary polities.

  In the modern era a new meaning and practice of jihad has been evolving.34 This transformation has two distinct facets: its meaning within the world of Islam and its impact outside. But the two, of necessity, intersected. In 1978, the revolutionary Iranian government violated all the rules of diplomacy and seized the staff of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Some years later, on NBC television, the spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, explained himself.35 He talked of America as “the great Satan, the wounded snake.” The U.S. reaction was continuing outrage at the treatment of its citizens and contempt at being described as the devil. It was supporting Iraq in her long war with Iran.