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September 21, 2003
Review: A conflict that doesn’t end
THE perennial conflict between Islam and Christianity has been compounded by the tragic events of 9/11. Many books have been published in the West elucidating the historical volatile and capricious relationships between the two religions. Infidelity has been written against this backdrop. The author has analyzed this bitter conflict spanning more than a thousand years with meticulous care. Divided into four sections, the book deals with Andalucia, the Middle East, the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire.
The conflict opened in 638 when the Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem denounced the presence of the Muslim Caliph in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as “an abomination”. However, what made the appearance of Islam so frightening for Christendom was the denial of Christ’s divinity in general and the formidable military machine that threatened to propagate its mission and message into the heart of Europe in particular.
In 711, 7000 Muslims (Moors) advanced and conquered the Christian forces in Gibralter and within 20 years they had extended Islamic rule as far as Provence. Then came the battle of Poitiers in 732, when the Arab advance into France was checked. As Gibbon observed, if Charles Martel had not halted the Arab headlong drive, we would have now had the “dreaming minarets of Oxford”.
From this violent beginning, Wheatcroft sees relations between the two sides as a “challenge and a response”. Each side would alternate between the roles of the aggressor and the victim; each bloody encounter adding to the collective memory of grievance and atrocity. In Iberia, Christendom eventually triumphed, eradicating Muslim rule from Spain, and eventually “ethnically cleansing” the land by expelling the Muslims en masse in 1608.
Jerusalem was conquered by the Crusaders in 1099, and the streets of the city ran with the blood of 40,000 slaughtered Muslims and Jews. According to Arab chronicles, the barbarous Crusaders sliced off the buttocks of their victims and feasted on them. The holy city was retaken by the Muslims in 1187, never again to fall in Christian hands till 1948 when the Zionist state was established in the Middle East.
The only subsequent catastrophe for Christendom and triumph for Islam was the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by the Muslim forces. It opened up the Balkans and the Danube Valley, as a route into Central Europe, which fostered Islam ideologically and territorially.
Indeed, it was in the Balkans that the conflict between Christendom and Islam was most vicious and inconclusive till the creation of Bosnia-Herzegovina after the Dayton Accord in the last decade of the 20th century. In 1389, when the Ottoman Sultan defeated the Christian forces at Nicopolis, he over-awed the vanquished. But soon thereafter the Sultan’s actions were more than matched by the massacres of the Muslims in retribution by the Christian forces. Indeed, the horrors have notoriously continued into the 1990s with the “ethnic cleansing” of the Muslims of Kosovo by the Orthodox Serbs.
In the 18th century, as the Ottoman Empire was struggling to regain its power, the West was gradually strengthening its military machine. This was substantiated by the Enlightenment that eroded the dogmatic Christian beliefs. These factors led the Europeans to regard the figure of “the Turk” as something harmlessly exotic and docile. Europe’s newfound sense of military superiority helped it relax its fear of “the Islamic threat” of the Ottoman Empire.
It is a gripping, often blood-curdling, history, which Wheatcroft recounts with tremendous literary flair combined with the narrative tableaux of almost cinematic vividness. His accounts of the Battle of Lepanto and the fall of Granada are models of good writing — with a highly sophisticated analysis of how the language and imagery of hostility transmogrify in response to the polemical needs of the moment.
The current crisis merely represents a recycling of the same persisting prejudices that have stoked Christian-Muslim conflict for the last 1000 years. Rather, it owes far more to historical developments that Wheatcroft barely touches upon the impact of secularism and the widely divergent trajectories that Western and Islamic cultures have taken in their attitudes to the place of religion within their body politics in the three centuries that have elapsed since the European Enlightenment.
The West challenged Islam not merely with a different theology, but with a wholly different concept of the state. The principle it advanced was that the spiritual and the temporal can (and ought to) be wholly separate spheres; that political authority ascends upwards from the people rather than downwards from some potentate appointed by divinity. The West propounded the principle that Christian religious teachings can be countermanded by legislation when they are in disagreement with the popular will.
Western modernity’s intellectual challenge to the Islamic world is therefore qualitatively different from what has gone before. President Bush may let slip the “C” word in his press conferences, but what is at stake in the current conflict and chaos in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, is something far more pervasive in its implications than the religious feuds that fed the binary hatreds of yesteryears.
There is not much solace to be gained from this bloody and hate-filled history. It is possible for the West to ignore the unremitting conflict and instead concentrate on positive aspects of Islam — such as the Islamic view of Christianity and Judaism as “Religions of the Book”, sharing prophets and a background of monotheism, which can ostensibly earn an honourable place in the Western Weltanschauung.
Another positive part of this history is the beauty of Islam’s art and poetry and its role in preserving Europe’s own intellectual treasures, while adding mathematical, medicinal and astronomical advances of its own. These are definite pluses and it would be a truly sad tale if there was nothing that either culture gave to or got from each other.
The author, who is a professor at a Scottish university, concludes that Islam’s current anti-Western hostility, as the aftermath of 9/11, has been more than matched, down the centuries, by the fierce anti-Islamic animosity on the part of Christendom that has been as murderous as anything as has been unleashed by the unscrupulous elements of Islam ‘ la Bin Laden.
Infidels: The Conflict Between Christendom and Islam 638-2002
By Andrew Wheatcroft
Viking. Available at Paramount Books, 152/O, Block 2, PECH Society, Karachi-75400 Tel: 021-4310030
Email: paramount@cyber.net.pk
ISBN: 0670869422
480pp. Rs1,295
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