For Lust of Knowing

by Robert Irwin

  THE MUSLIM IN MEDIEVAL WESTERN LITERATURE

  A similar lack of curiosity about Islam and the Arab way of life is also characteristic of more serious literature in the medieval period. For example, the first thing to be said about Dante’s attitude to Islam is that he was almost totally uninterested in it, one way or the other. He was very interested in the struggle between Papacy and Empire and between their Guelf and Ghibelline partisans. He was even more interested in the fate of his adored Beatrice in the afterlife and, above all, he meditated upon the divine ‘love that moves the stars’. But he seems scarcely aware of the world that existed beyond the frontiers of Christendom. In his Divine Comedy (which he probably began to compose in 1307), five Muslims are mentioned, all briefly. Muhammad and his cousin ‘Ali were not treated as founders of a new and false religion, but rather as sowers of dissension.50 Since Dante seems to have erroneously believed that Muhammad had started out as a Christian, he therefore did not regard him as some totally alien ‘Other’. However, since Muhammad and his followers had given the true Christian Church a lot of trouble, it was inevitable that he should have been damned in Dante’s eyes. But then Dante put quite a lot of Christian Italians, including one of his own relatives, in yet lower circles of Hell. In so far as Dante was interested in anything Arabic, it was primarily the Averroist philosophy taught by the scholastic Siger of Brabant that engaged his favourable interest. The only other Muslims to feature in the Divine Comedy – ‘great Saladin, aloof and alone’, Avicenna and Averroes – are in Limbo with other heroic and virtuous pagans.51 They are there because, despite their virtues, they did not and could not choose Christ. (Virgil, who acted as Dante’s guide through Hell, was similarly a denizen of Limbo.) However, at the risk of repetition, Dante’s lack of interest in Islam is conspicuous.52

  Muslims feature in some of the stories of the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (c. 1313–75). The third story in the first day of storytelling presents a favourable portrait of Saladin as a generous and courageous ruler. This is the story of the three rings. In it Saladin asks a wise Jew which is the best religion. The Jew tells the story of a man close to death who had three sons. The sons were led to believe that whoever received the father’s ring would be his true heir. However, they did not realize that the father had had two more rings made that were identical in every way, so that it was impossible to tell who had the exclusive claim to his inheritance. From this tale, the Jew drew a moral: ‘My lord, I say it is the same with the three Laws given by God our Father to three peoples, concerning which you have questioned me. Each of them thinks it has the inheritance, the true Law, and carries out His Commandments; but which does have it is a question as far from being settled as that of the rings.’ (Boccaccio also presented a highly favourable portrait of Saladin in the ninth story of the tenth day.)

  Boccaccio seems to have been familiar with some of the stories that appeared in The Thousand and One Nights and he presented reworkings of several famous Oriental stories, such as the tale of the generosity of Hatim Tai in his Decameron.53 Ramon Lull, the Catalan polymath, was similarly familiar with Arabic story lore. Lull (c. 1232 – 1315) was born to a wealthy Catalan family in Majorca and spent his life as a young rip. Then he experienced a religious crisis. According to one story, he was pursuing someone else’s beautiful young wife. She was virtuous and resisted his suit, but he was persistent. ‘After asking permission of her husband to employ a drastic remedy, she summoned her admirer to attend her in some secluded place – perhaps her own chamber – when, instead of yielding, as no doubt he expected, to his demands, she uncovered her bosom, and displayed a breast that was being slowly consumed by a loathly cancer. “See Ramon,” she cried, “the foulness of this body that has won thy affection! How much better hadst thou done to have set thy love on Jesus Christ, of whom thou mayest have a prize that is eternal!”’

  Lull’s decision to abandon the pursuit of worldly things and leave his family for the service of Christ took place in 1263. Before his conversion, he had composed troubadour love poetry, but afterwards he wrote laments about his past enslavement to lust for women. He particularly dedicated himself to working for the conversion of Muslims and Jews: ‘to give up his life and soul for the sake of His love and honour; and to accomplish this by carrying out the task of converting to His worship and service the Saracens who in such numbers surrounded the Christians on all sides.’ It was obvious to Lull that anyone who proposed to do missionary work amongst the Muslims would need to master Arabic, but studying that language was not a straightforward matter in the Middle Ages, for there were no university courses on the language, nor any Arabic grammars. Lull therefore purchased a Moorish slave, intending that the slave should teach him Arabic. One day Lull received a report that the Moor had been blaspheming against Christ and he therefore struck the Moor several times. The Moor, accustomed as he was in his role as a teacher of Arabic to be treated as a master, became very angry. After biding his time for a few days, he went for Lull with a knife, crying, ‘Now you shall die!’ He succeeded in wounding Lull, before Lull wrested the knife from him. The Moor committed suicide in prison.

  Lull spent nine years studying Arabic and Islam in Majorca. There was some urgency in his studies, for he feared that the Mongols, who at that time had conquered most of Asia, including Iran and Iraq, would convert to Islam unless Christian missionaries reached them first. His earliest works were all written in Arabic: The Compendium of the Logic of al-Ghazali, The Book of Contemplation and The Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men. He also translated al-Ghazali’s logic into rhymed Catalan verse. Since Lull had encountered the writings of the Sufi mystical thinker al-Ghazali (c. 1033–1111) and examined his logic early on in his studies, Sufism exercised a strong influence on Lull’s subsequent writings. Lull was a staggeringly prolific writer and it has been calculated that he wrote approximately two hundred and fifty books. Only a few of these works will be discussed here. The Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men features a debate between a Christian, a Saracen and a Jew in front of a neutral Gentile. The Saracen’s prayer is accurately described, as are the main points of Islamic doctrine. Lull claimed that he relied for his information on the Qur’an, Hadith (reported sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) and on commentaries on both. Lull’s Christian spokesman stressed the materialistic nature of the Muslim notion of paradise, but the Saracen replied that there is also a spiritual glory in paradise and this consists of the vision and contemplation of God. The Saracen tried and failed with the argument that, since Muhammad is so widely revered, God must have approved this reverence and therefore Muhammad is indeed a Prophet. The Saracen was the last to speak in the disputation, but the Gentile departed without pronouncing a verdict. The three resolved to continue to debate until they should be all of one mind. It is possible that The Book of the Gentile was modelled on an unidentified Arabic source.54

  Besides writing many treatises on theology and philosophy, Lull also wrote a novel. Blanquerna is a missionary romance, in which the eponymous hero decides as a young man to become a hermit. His dismayed parents try to use the daughter of a friend to lure him away from this austere path, but their encounter only results in his converting her to a religious vocation. She becomes a nun, while Blanquerna wanders through many strange lands looking for the right place to build his hermitage. Like Bunyan’s pilgrim, he faces all sorts of trials and has many encounters with allegorical personages. Eventually he elects instead for the monastic life and he rises to become first abbot of his monastery and then a bishop and finally pope. After years of presiding over the Church as a reforming pope, he resigns the Papacy and returns to his original goal and becomes a hermit. In retirement, he writes two books, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved and The Art of Contemplation. The book ends abruptly with the appearance of the emperor who is looking for Blanquerna and is guided to his hermitage.55

  Blanquerna’s rambling narrative is studded with fables and short stories most of which seem to derive
from Arabic originals. The boxing of tales within tales was characteristic of medieval Arabic literature and is found in such well-known story collections as Kalila wa-Dimna and The Thousand and One Nights. The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, which is boxed within Blanquerna, and which deals with the approach of the mystic to God who is the ‘Beloved’, was, according to Lull, made ‘according to the manner of the Sufis’ and, as is the case with The Book of the Gentile, it is possible that it was modelled on a lost Arabic book. Certainly the book is pervaded by Arab themes and in it Lull makes explicit his admiration for Sufism: Blanquerna remembered that ‘a Saracen related to him that the Saracens have certain religious men, and that among others are certain men called Sufis, who are most prized amongst them, and these men have words of love and brief examples which give to men great devotion’. Lull seems to have absorbed the Sufi practice of meditating on the names of God and turned it into a Christian devotional practice. At the time that he wrote Blanquerna, Lull believed that missionary work and disputations were Christendom’s best hope of defeating the Islamic menace and he was hostile to the idea of further Crusades. In The Art of Contemplation Lull argued, among other things, that going on crusade was a bad idea, for if God had approved of the Crusades they would have been more successful in the past. Elsewhere in Blanquerna, the Sultan of Egypt expresses sarcastic surprise that Christian Crusaders should seek to imitate the violent ways of Muhammad, rather than the peaceful preaching of Christ and his Apostles.

  There is no space here to outline the contents of the rest of Lull’s two hundred-odd writings, though many of them shed light on his various opinions about Arabs and his proposals for dealing with the menace of Islam. With the possible exception of Ricoldo da Monte Croce, no medieval European thinker appears to have been more familiar with Arabic literature and thought. Lull found much to admire in it. Apart from his passion for Sufism, he praised the beauty of the Qur’an and he claimed that Muslims lived longer than Christians because their diet and clothing were more sensible. Even so, he was adamant that the Muslim religion was false and its followers damned. Averroism was a particularly reprehensible Muslim doctrine and during his final stay in Paris Lull penned several attacks against Averroism and the Averroist interpretation of Aristotle. He seems to have regarded Averroism as the heart of Islam’s evil and the Averroist idea of the two truths as being particularly damnable. It is likely that Lull’s special hostility owed a lot to his early reading of al-Ghazali, the leading critic of Averroes in the Islamic world.

  Though Lull had first put his faith in missionary endeavour, after the fall of what was left of the Kingdom of Jerusalem to the Muslim Mamluks in 1291, he came round to the view that force was also necessary and a new crusade was indeed desirable. (However, Lull maintained that a knowledge of Arabic would be just as necessary for the Crusader as it was for the missionary.) In a late work, The Disputation with Hamar the Saracen, Lull expressed anxiety that Christendom was facing the double menace of Islam and the Mongols. A third of the Mongols had already converted to Islam. Moreover, the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt was successful in recruiting Christian renegades and a third of his army consisted of such men. This treatise was written in prison in Bougie, Algeria. In 1295 Lull had become a Franciscan tertiary (that is to say, he became attached to the preaching order, while still remaining a layman). Thereafter, he went three times on preaching missions to North Africa, courting martyrdom in doing so, for anyone who sought to convert Muslims from their faith was liable to the death penalty. On his third visit he achieved his ambition and he was stoned to death by a mob in 1315 or 1316.

  The prolific and diversely talented Lull is perhaps best known for his Ars Magna, a treatise that describes a kind of medieval hand-operated computer. It consisted of a revolving wheel with letters on it signifying abstract principles. The rotation of its circles could be made to demonstrate the existence of God and the truths of Christian dogma and Lull seems to have hoped that a Muslim would only have to see it in operation in order to become converted. He was a genius whose writings are full of fantasies, quirks and prejudices – exemplified, for instance, in his tireless campaign against female cosmetics. In the medievalist Richard Southern’s excellent pioneering work, Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962), Southern wrote that, though Lull was ‘one of the most commanding figures in the study of Islam’, he would not say much about him, because he had ‘a streak of madness to which I cannot do justice’. On the other hand, the famous twentieth-century Orientalist Louis Massignon praised Lull for the depth of his sympathy for Islam and for his recognition of how close to Christianity it was.56 However, this may be a case of like calling to like, for, as we shall see, there was a streak of madness in Massignon also.

  The campaigning of Lull and others, including the famous philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon, persuaded the Church Council of Vienne (1311–12) to decree that chairs of Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic should be established at the universities of Avignon, Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca. The proponents of the measure urged that the teaching of Oriental languages should serve the twofold purpose of assisting in the conversion of the infidel and advancing biblical exegesis. The chairs of Greek and Hebrew fluttered in and out of existence at some of the universities, but no chair in Arabic was established anywhere. The teaching of Arabic was supposed to be funded by extra ecclesiastical funding and it never happened. The Council of Basel (1341) attempted to revive the decree, but to no purpose at all. Edward Said has stated that the Council of Vienne marked the beginning of Orientalism’s formal existence.57 In fact, as far as the study and teaching of Arabic was concerned, its decree was a dead letter. Rather, as Southern noted, it was ‘the last salute to a dying ideal’.58 Crusade projects continued to be put together in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but few expeditions were mounted and fewer still actually achieved anything. There was a parallel (though temporary) decline in interest in sending missionaries out to convert the Muslims. As Southern, again, has pointed out, Christendom in the fourteenth century knew less about Islam than it had done in the twelfth century.59 The failure of papal missions sent out to convert the Mongols was particularly demoralizing as grand hopes had been entertained of forming an alliance with Mongols who might be brought over to Christianity and used against the Muslims in the Near East.

  THE WICKEDNESS OF ISLAM AND THE PAPACY

  Those who did wish to study Islam faced considerable difficulties. Outside Spain, it was difficult to find complete copies of the Qur’an anywhere in Europe. When John of Segovia (c. 1400–1458) decided to learn Arabic and translate the Qur’an as an aid to disputations with Muslims, he looked for an Arabor a scholar of Arabic to teach him the language. Having failed in this, he had to teach himself. Having accomplished this and gone on to translate the Qur’an (the translation has since been lost) and written a refutation of it, he was promptly attacked by Jean Germain, Bishop of Nevers and Chalon and Chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece, for having given publicity to the doctrines of an abominable heresy.60 For centuries to come, those who attempted to translate Arabic or to study Islam ran the risk of being accused of being crypto-Muslim sympathizers.

  It was also the case that for centuries to come those who wrote about Islam tended to do so not because they were interested in Islam per se, but because they wished to use discussion of its rituals and practices as a stick with which to beat the Papacy, or alternatively, as a stick with which to beat those who urged reform of the Catholic Church. The English scholastic, John Wyclif (c. 1324–84), campaigned for reform of the Papacy and for the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. As Wyclif made plain in various of his writings, though the Muslims were misguided, they were no more so than most Catholics. Islam, as he understood it, was just like the Catholic Church he knew – violent, corrupt and greedy. The rise of Islam had been caused by the pride and greed of the Church. Power and wealth were the inappropriate characteristics of both the Papacy and Islam. Indeed, in Wyclif’
s eyes, the Catholic Church was, in a sense, a Muslim institution.61 This kind of accusation, a tarring by association, was to become a familiar motif and, as we shall see, Martin Luther was to make similar polemical points about the resemblances between the Papacy and Islam.

  The poet William Langland (c. 1332– c. 1400) also used a distorted version of Islam in order to make polemical points against the established Church. In his great poem, Piers Plowman, he argued against the priesthood’s monopoly of the keys of salvation and he suggested that Muslims and Jews might also be saved independently of the sacraments of the Church. He went on to present a familiar polemical portrait of the origins of Islam in which Muhammad, a renegade priest, thwarted in his ambition to become Pope, set up a new religion. The Prophet cunningly trained a dove to sit on his shoulder and peck grains of corn from his ear, so that the people he preached to would believe that the dove was a messenger from heaven whispering into his ear. Although Langland’s story is both fanciful and hostile, it is important to note that he was not really interested in the origins of Islam as such, for he immediately went on to reproach the Christian priesthood of his own time for feeding a dove called Avarice and of behaving as dishonestly as Muhammad.62

  THE ROMANCE OF THE ORIENT

  Romancers and geographers liked to linger on the territory of Islam and the lands of the East more generally as a place of wonders, where treasures, marvels and strange tribes and beasts abounded. As Robert Bartlett has noted, ‘Asia had the reputation of being vast, rich, and full of marvels. The wealth and fertility of India was fabulous. William of Newburgh, discussing the situation of the Holy Land, mentioned that the Bible asserts the special place of Palestine, but considers that this cannot mean that it is the richest and most fertile part of the world “unless what is recorded about India be false”… The East was also where nature was most playful, producing wonders and oddities of all kinds.’63 The marvels of the East included the coffin of the Prophet Muhammad, which allegedly floated in the air sustained by concealed magnets; the Ka‘ba at Mecca, which was reported to be a shrine full of idols that killed any birds which alighted upon them; the vegetable lamb of Tartary, which grew up as a plant and only became detached when mature; the Valley of Diamonds, whose precious stones were collected by prospectors using giant birds; and the empire of the fabulously wealthy and ancient Christian king, Prester John. Modern science fiction locates its wonders in distant galaxies; medieval marvel-mongers set their wonders in remote parts of the East. Apart from being the home of wondrous monsters and great treasures, the East was also a place of wisdom – most notably the wisdom of the Indian gymnosophists and the Chinese sages.