Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  Shariah law provided a principled alternative to the aristocratic rule of agrarian society, since it refused to accept a hereditary class system. It therefore had revolutionary potential; indeed, two of the maddhab founders—Malik ibn Anas (d. 795) and Muhammad Idris al-Shafii (d. 820)—had taken part in Shii uprisings against the early Abbasids. The Shariah insisted that every single Muslim was directly responsible to God; a Muslim needed no caliph or priest to mediate divine law, and everybody—not just the ruling class—was responsible for the ummah’s well-being. Where the aristocratic adab took a pragmatic view of what was politically feasible, the Shariah was an idealistic countercultural challenge, which tacitly condemned the structural violence of the imperial state and boldly insisted that no institution—not even the caliphate—had the right to interfere with an individual’s personal decisions. There was no way that an agrarian state could be run on these lines, however, and although the caliphs always acknowledged the Shariah as the law of God, they could not rule by it. Consequently, Shariah law never governed the whole of society, and the caliph’s court, where justice was summary, absolute, and arbitrary, remained the supreme court of appeal; in theory, any Muslim, however lowly, could appeal to the caliph for justice against members of the lower aristocracy.79 Nevertheless, the Shariah was a constant witness to the Islamic ideal of equality that is so deeply embedded in our humanity that despite the apparent impossibility of incorporating it in political life, we remain stubbornly convinced that it is the natural way for human beings to live together.

  Al-Shafii formulated what would become the classical doctrine of jihad, which, despite Shariah aversion to autocracy, drew on standard imperial ideology: it had a dualistic worldview, claimed that the ummah had a divine mission and that Islamic rule would benefit humanity. God had decreed warfare because it was essential for the ummah’s survival, Al-Shafii argued. The human race was divided into the dar al-Islam (“The Abode of Islam”) and the non-Muslim world, the dar al-harb (“The Abode of War”). There could be no final peace between the two, though a temporary truce was permissible. But since all ethical faiths came from God, the ummah was only one of many divinely guided communities, and the goal of jihad was not to convert the subject population. What distinguished Islam from other revelations, however, was that it had a God-given mandate to extend its rule to the rest of humanity. Its mission was to establish the social justice and equity prescribed by God in the Quran, so that all men and women could be liberated from the tyranny of a state run on worldly principles.80 The reality, however, was that the Abbasid caliphate was an autocracy that depended on the forcible subjugation of the majority of the population; like any agrarian state, it was constitutionally unable to implement Quranic norms fully. Yet without such idealism, which reminds us of the imperfection of our institutions, their inherent violence and injustice would go without critique. Perhaps the role of religious vision is to fill us with a divine discomfort that will not allow us wholly to accept the unacceptable.

  Al-Shafii also ruled against the conviction of “fighting scholars” that militant jihad was incumbent upon every Muslim. In Shariah law, the daily prayer was binding on all Muslims without exception, so it was fard ayn, an obligation for each individual. But even though all Muslims were responsible for the well-being of the ummah, some tasks, such as cleaning the mosque, could be left to the appointed official and was fard kifaya, a duty delegated to an individual by the community. Should this job be neglected, however, others were obliged to take the initiative and step in.81 Al-Shafii decreed that jihad against the non-Muslim world was fard kifaya and the ultimate responsibility of the caliph. Therefore, as long as there were enough soldiers to defend the frontier, civilians were exempt from military service. In the event of an enemy invasion, though, Muslims in the border regions might be obliged to help. Al-Shafii was writing at a time when the Abbasids had renounced territorial expansion, so he was legislating not for offensive jihad but only for defensive warfare. Muslims still debate the legitimacy of jihad in these terms today.

  Sunni Muslims had accepted the imperfections of the agrarian system in order to keep the peace.82 The Shii still condemned its systemic violence but found a practical way of dealing with the Abbasid regime. Jafar al-Sadiq (d. 765), the sixth in the line of Imams (“leaders”) descended from Ali, formally abandoned armed struggle, because rebellions were always savagely put down and resulted only in unacceptable loss of life. Henceforth the Shiah would hold aloof from the mainstream, their disengagement a silent rebuke to Abbasid tyranny and a witness to true Islamic values. As the Prophet’s descendant, Jafar enshrined his charisma and remained the rightful leader of the ummah, but henceforth he would function only as a spiritual guide. Jafar had, in effect, separated religion and politics. This sacred secularism would remain the dominant ideal of Shiism until the late twentieth century.

  Yet the Imams remained an unbearable irritant to the caliphs. The Imam, a living link with the Prophet, revered by the faithful, quietly dedicated to the contemplation of scripture and charitable works, offered a striking contrast to the caliph, whose ever-present executioner was a grim reminder of the violence of empire. Which was the truly Muslim leader? The Imams embodied a sacred presence that could not exist safely or openly in a world dominated by cruelty and injustice, since they were nearly all murdered by the caliphs. When toward the end of the ninth century, the Twelfth Imam mysteriously vanished from prison, it was said that God had miraculously removed him and that he would one day return to inaugurate an era of justice. In this concealment he remained the true leader of the ummah, so all earthly government was illegitimate. Paradoxically, liberated from the confines of time and space, the Hidden Imam became a more vivid presence in the lives of Shiis. The myth reflected the tragic impossibility of implementing a truly equitable policy in a flawed and violent world. On the anniversary of Imam Husain’s death on the tenth (ashura) of the month of Muharram, Shiis would publicly mourn his murder, processing through the streets, weeping and beating their breasts to demonstrate their undying opposition to the corruption of mainstream Muslim life. But not all Shiis subscribed to Jafar’s sacred secularism. The Ismailis, who believed that Ali’s line had ended with Ismail, the Seventh Imam, remained convinced that piety must be backed up by military jihad for a just society. In the tenth century, when the Abbasid regime was in serious decline, an Ismaili leader established a rival caliphate in North Africa, and this Fatimid dynasty later spread to Egypt, Syria, and Palestine.83

  In the tenth century, the Muslim empire was beginning to fragment. Taking advantage of Fatimid weakness, the Byzantines conquered Antioch and important areas of Cilicia, while within the Dar al-Islam, Turkish generals established virtually independent states, although they continued to acknowledge the caliph as the supreme leader. In 945 the Turkish Buyid dynasty actually occupied Baghdad, and even though the caliph retained his court, the region became a province of the Buyid kingdom. Yet Islam was by no means a spent force. There had always been tension between the Quran and autocratic monarchy, and the new arrangement of independent rulers symbolically linked by their loyalty to the caliph was religiously more congenial if not politically effective. Muslim religious thought subsequently became less driven by current events and would become politically oriented again only in the modern period, when the ummah faced a new imperial threat.

  The Seljuk Turks from Central Asia gave fullest expression to the new order. They acknowledged the sovereignty of the caliph, but under their brilliant Persian vizier Nizam al-Mulk (r. 1063–92), they created an empire extending to Yemen in the south, the Oxus River in the east, and Syria in the west. The Seljuks were not universally popular. Some of the more radical Ismailis withdrew to mountain strongholds in what is now Lebanon, where they prepared for a jihad to replace the Seljuks with a Shii regime, occasionally undertaking suicidal missions to murder prominent members of the Seljuk establishment. Their enemies called them hashashin because they were said to use hashish to induce mystical ec
stasy, and this gave us our English word assassin. 84 But most Muslims accommodated easily to Seljuk rule. Theirs was not a centralized empire; the emirs who commanded the districts were virtually autonomous and worked closely with the ulema, who gave these disparate military regimes ideological unity. To raise educational standards, they created the first madrassas, and Nizam al-Mulk established these schools throughout the empire, giving the ulema a power base and drawing the scattered provinces together. Emirs came and went, but the Shariah courts became a stable authority in each region. Moreover, Sufi mystics and the more charismatic ulema traveled the length and breadth of the Seljuk Empire, giving ordinary Muslims a strong sense of belonging to an international community.

  By the end of the eleventh century, however, the Seljuk Empire had also started to decline. It had succumbed to the usual problem of a military oligarchy, since the emirs began to fight one another for territory. They were so intent on these internal feuds that they neglected the frontier and were incapable of stopping the influx of pastoralists from the steppes who had begun to bring their herds into the fertile settled lands now ruled by their own people. Large groups of Turkish herdsmen moved steadily westward, taking over the choicest pasturage and driving out the local population. Eventually they arrived at the Byzantine frontier in the Armenian highlands. In 1071 the Seljuk chieftain Alp Arslan defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert in Armenia, and as the Byzantines retreated, the nomadic Turks broke through the unguarded frontier and began to infiltrate Byzantine Anatolia. The beleaguered Byzantine emperor now appealed to the Christians of the West for help.

  8

  Crusade and Jihad

  Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) was deeply disturbed to hear that hordes of Turkish tribesmen had invaded Byzantine territory, and in 1074 he dispatched a series of letters summoning the faithful to join him in “liberating” their brothers in Anatolia. He proposed personally to lead an army to the east, which would rid Greek Christians of the Turkish menace and then liberate the holy city of Jerusalem from the infidel.1 Libertas and liberatio were the buzzwords of eleventh-century Europe; its knights had recently “liberated” land from the Muslim occupiers of Calabria, Sardinia, Tunisia, Sicily, and Apulia and had begun the Reconquista of Spain.2 In the future, Western imperial aggression would often be couched in the rhetoric of liberty. But libertas had different connotations in medieval Europe. When Roman power collapsed in the western provinces, the bishops had taken the place of the Roman senatorial aristocracy, stepping into the political vacuum left by the departing imperial officials.3 The Roman clergy thus adopted the old aristocracy’s ideal of libertas, which had little to do with freedom; rather, it referred to the maintenance of the privileged position of the ruling class, lest society lapse into barbarism.4 As the successor of Saint Peter, Gregory believed that he had a divine mandate to rule the Christian world. His “crusade” was designed in part to reassert papal libertas in the Eastern Empire, which did not accept the supremacy of the bishop of Rome.

  Throughout his pontificate, Gregory struggled but ultimately failed to assert the libertas, the supremacy and integrity, of the Church against the rising power of the lay rulers. Hence his proposed crusade came to nothing, and in his determined effort to free the clergy from lay control, he was ignominiously defeated by Henry IV, Holy Roman emperor of the West. For eight years the pontiff and the emperor had been locked in a power struggle, each trying to depose the other. In 1084, when Gregory threatened him with excommunication once again, Henry simply invaded Italy and installed an antipope in the Lateran Palace. But the popes had only themselves to blame, for the Western Empire was their creation. For centuries the Byzantines had maintained an outpost in Ravenna, Italy, to protect the Church of Rome against the barbarians. By the eighth century, however, the Lombards had become so aggressive in northern Italy that the pope needed a stronger lay protector, so in 753 Pope Stephen II made an heroic journey over the Alps in the middle of winter to the old Roman province of Gaul to seek an alliance with Pippin, son of the Frankish king Charles Martel, thus giving papal legitimacy to the Carolingian dynasty. Pippin at once began preparations for a military expedition to Italy, while his ten-year-old son, Charles—later known as Charlemagne—escorted the exhausted and bedraggled pope to his lodgings.

  The Germanic tribes who established kingdoms in the old Roman provinces had embraced Christianity and revered the warrior kings of the Hebrew Bible, but their military ethos was still permeated with ancient Aryan ideals of heroism and desire for fame, glory, and loot. All these elements blended inextricably in their conduct of war. The Carolingians’ wars were presented as holy wars, sanctioned by God, and they called their dynasty the New Israel.5 Their military campaigns certainly had a religious dimension, but material profit was every bit as important. In 732 Charles Martel (d. 741) had defeated a Muslim army on its way to pillage Tours, but after his victory Charles immediately proceeded to loot the Christian communities in southern Francia as thoroughly as the Muslims would have done.6 During his Italian wars to defend the pope, his son Pippin forced the Lombards to relinquish a third of their treasure; this massive wealth enabled his clergy to build a truly Catholic and Roman enclave north of the Alps.

  Charlemagne (r. 772–814) showed what a king could do when supported by such substantial resources.7 By 785 he had conquered northern Italy and the whole of Gaul; in 792 he moved into central Europe and attacked the Avars of western Hungary, bringing home wagonloads of plunder. These campaigns were billed as holy wars against “pagans,” but the Franks remembered them for more mundane reasons. “All the Avar nobility died in the war, all their glory departed. All their wealth and their treasure assembled over so many years were dispersed,” Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, recorded complacently. “The memory of men cannot remember any war of the Franks by which they were so enriched and their material possessions so increased.”8 Far from being inspired solely by religious zeal, these wars of expansion were also informed by the economic imperative of acquiring more arable land. The episcopal sees in the occupied territories became instruments of colonial control,9 and the mass baptisms of the conquered peoples were statements of political rather than spiritual realignment.10

  But the religious element was prominent. On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne “Holy Roman Emperor” in the Basilica of St. Peter. The congregation acclaimed him as “Augustus,” and Leo prostrated himself at Charlemagne’s feet. The popes and bishops of Italy had long believed that the raison d’être of the Roman Empire was to protect the libertas of the Catholic Church.11 After the empire’s fall, they knew that the Church could not survive without the king and his warriors. Between 750 and 1050, therefore, the king was a sacred figure who stood at the apex of the social pyramid. “Our Lord Jesus Christ has set you up as the ruler of the Christian people, in power more excellent than the pope or the emperor of Constantinople,” wrote Alcuin, a British monk and court adviser to Charlemagne. “On you alone depends the whole safety of the churches of Christ.”12 In a letter to Leo, Charlemagne declared that as emperor it was his mission “everywhere to defend the church of Christ.”13

  The instability and chaotic flux of life in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire had created a hunger for tangible contact with the eternal stability of Heaven. Hence the popularity of the saints’ relics, which provided a physical link with a martyr who was now with God. Even the mighty Charlemagne felt vulnerable in this violent and unstable world: his throne in Aachen had cavities stuffed with relics, and the great monasteries of Fulda, St. Gall, and Reichenau, positioned on the borders of his empire as powerhouses of prayer and sanctity, took great pride in their relic collection.14 The monks of Europe were very different from their counterparts in Egypt and Syria. They were not peasants but members of the nobility; they lived not in desert caves but on estates farmed by serfs who were the monastery’s property.15 Most followed the Rule of St. Benedict, written in the sixth century at a time when the bonds of civil society
seemed on the point of collapse. Benedict’s aim had been to create communities of obedience, stability, and religio (“reverence” and “bonding”) in a world of violence and uncertainty. The rule provided disciplina, similar to the military disciplina of the Roman soldier: it prescribed a series of physical rituals carefully designed to restructure emotion and desire and create an attitude of humility very different from the aggressive self-assertion of the knight.16 Monastic disciplina set out to defeat not a physical enemy but the unruly psyche and the unseen powers of evil. The Carolingians knew that they owed their success in battle to highly disciplined troops. Hence they appreciated the Benedictine communities, and during the ninth and tenth centuries support for the rule became a central feature of government in Europe.17

  Monks formed a social order (ordo), separate from the disordered world outside the monastery. Abjuring sex, money, fighting, and mutability, the most corrupting aspects of secular life, they embraced chastity, poverty, nonviolence, and stability. Unlike the restless boskoi, Benedictine monks vowed to remain in the same community for life.18 A monastery, however, was designed not so much to cater to individual spiritual quests but to serve a social function by providing occupation for the younger sons of the nobility, who could never hope to own land and might become a disruptive influence in society. At this point, Western Christendom did not distinguish public and private, natural and supernatural. Thus by combating the demonic powers with their prayers, monks were essential to the security of the realm. There were two ways for an aristocrat to serve God: fighting or praying.19 Monks were the spiritual counterparts of secular soldiers, their battles just as real and far more significant: