May 4, 2003

ONE of the ways the world changed forever on September 11, 2001, was that the western people suddenly acquired an interest in Islam. Hitherto they had tended either to regard the Muslim world as irredeemably religious and therefore barbarous and dangerous, or to dismiss Islam as an archaic irrelevance. After the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Americans descended on the bookstores and swept everything that they could find on Islam off the shelves. For some weeks it was impossible to find a copy of the Quran in the US. Everybody had a theory about Muslim religion and history, and aired their often eccentric views tirelessly.

Richard Fletcher’s fine, concise history of early Muslim-Christian relations will bring sanity and balance to the discussion. He calmly disposes of the myth that Islam is an inherently violent and intolerant faith, while showing that Christians could not be expected to see it in any other way. He shows that far from forcing their subjects to accept their religion at sword-point, Muslim rulers did not initially encourage conversion. There seems to have been much “good mannered discussion” between Christians and Muslims in the Middle East, where after centuries of Byzantine oppression many of the churches flourished as never before.

But in other parts of Christendom Islam was experienced as a military threat. Constantinople was constantly under attack until, in 762, the Abbasids moved their capital from Damascus to Baghdad, and ceased to harass Byzantium. In North Africa, west of Egypt, the Islamic conquest was more disruptive: Christian leaders seem to have migrated to Italy or France, and churches in the Muslim west gradually died away.

Most Christians inevitably regarded Muslims as conquerors, and could only explain Islam as an aberrant form of Christianity. From Baghdad in 900 the Christian world would have appeared a “jumble of confused sects and petty monarchies squirming about in an unappealing environment”. This was especially the case in western Europe, where after the collapse of the Roman empire Christianity was backward, illiterate and conservative, and could not begin to rival the sophistication, culture and learning of the Muslim empire.

Fletcher is at his best when describing the cultural and commercial contacts between Muslims and Christians. There is a marvellous section on the great translation project in Spain during the 12th and 13th centuries when Christian scholars translated Arabic texts into Latin, thus restoring to the west much of the culture that had been lost during the so-called Dark Ages. As always, Fletcher is able to provide his readers with a wealth of fascinating detail without overwhelming them.

However, Fletcher is less successful in his discussion of theology. His book begins by claiming that Islam, a “one-text” faith, has less opportunity for divergence than multi-text Christianity. He cites the theological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries about the nature And status of Jesus as evidence of the variety of opinion possible in Christianity, but not, he implies, in Islam. Fletcher does not develop this argument fully, but seems to suggest that this monolithic tendency in Islam might account for its failure to consider Christianity seriously.

But in the seventh and eighth centuries, when Fletcher asserts that Muslims showed little interest in the non-Muslim world, they were involved in a vigorous religious renaissance. Where Christianity discovered itself by discussing Jesus, Islam came of age as a result of discussions about the political disasters of these early years.

In the course of this anguished contemplation of history, Islamic mysticism, rationalism, historiography, jurisprudence, asceticism and theology came into being. Later Sufism, Falsafah and Shiism developed the religion of the Quran in ways that would have seemed astonishing to the first Muslim community in Medina. By neglecting these interior currents, and concentrating on external events, Fletcher underestimates the ability of Islam to adapt to external challenge.

But it is true that Muslims remained uninterested in the west. The great 14th-century traveller Ibn Battuta journeyed all over the known world but never visited Europe. His contemporary, Ibn Khaldun, a historian and faylasuf (philosopher), dismisses the rumour that philosophy and science were developing in Christendom: “God knows best what goes on in those parts.”

Why this indifference? It springs, I believe, not from an inherent flaw in “one-text” Islam, but from the superiority that, until recently, caused the west to dismiss Islam with such patrician disdain. In the early 16th century, when Fletcher ends his account, the Ottoman empire was probably the most advanced state in the world, but had no way of knowing that Europe, for so long a backward region, was about to develop a civilization that was without precedent, and that would have a catastrophic effect on the Muslim world.— Dawn/ Guardian News Service

 

The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to the Reformation

By Richard Fletcher

Allen Lane

ISBN 0713996862

208pp. £14.99

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