The Impact of Islam

by Emmet Scott

  How to explain this in a society which was later to become a byword for backwardness and obscurantism? In the words of Sidney Painter: “When the Arabs occupied the Asiatic and African provinces of the [Byzantine] empire, they found many works of classical and Hellenistic times. The Arabs copied these works, studied them, and commented on them. The Arab philosophers Avicenna and Averroes, translated Aristotle and wrote commentaries designed to adjust his ideas to Muslim culture. The geometry of Euclid, the astronomy of Ptolemy, and the medicine of Galen were all translated and used by Arab scholars. But the Arabs did more than simply absorb the Hellenistic knowledge they found in the Byzantine storehouse. In several fields they made important additions. The numbers that we call Arabic were apparently first used in India and adopted from there by the Arabs, who added the zero. Algebra was invented by a Moslem scholar. The Arabs also built observatories, studied astronomy, and created astronomical tables. In medicine the Arabs not only studied the established works but supplemented them by careful observation of diseases.”[1]

  The latter is a very restrained evaluation of the Arab achievement: other writers, both before and after Painter, have been far more effusive. But how accurate is it? Were the Arabs really such enthusiastic students of the philosophers and scientists of Greece? Closer investigation reveals flaws in such claims. Painter partly gives the game away when he notes that the great majority of “Arab” learning was actually derived from the Greeks, through Byzantium, and that other parts, such as the “Arab” numeral system, came from the East. In fact, research has shown that almost all the genuinely new ideas arriving in Europe through the Arab world originated much further to the east. Thus paper-making, the compass, etc., came from China, whilst the “Arab” numerals were an Indian innovation. It is true that these arrived in Europe via the Arabs, but they were not Arab or Muslim inventions. They would surely have arrived in Europe whether Islam had existed or not. Indeed, the process of importing new technologies into the West had begun in the sixth century, before the appearance of Islam, with the appearance there of such Oriental technologies as the stirrup and silk-making. The spread of these eastern ideas seems to have been disrupted for three centuries by the arrival of the Arabs, and then resumed in the latter tenth century. And we should note than even those things which did originate in the Middle East, such as alcohol distillation, algebra, the windmill, etc., were rarely, if ever, the work of Arabs or even Muslims. Almost invariably they were ideas deriving from the work of Persians, Syrians, or Egyptians, who were permitted to continue their work for a short time after the Arab conquests. Once again, it is safe to say that these things would have arrived in the West irrespective of whether Islam existed or not.

  What Islam did bring to Europe was war and slavery, on a massive scale. The House of Islam in the tenth century had little use for any of the produce and natural resources of Europe, except one; the bodies of the Europeans themselves. Young women and boys were preferred, but during the tenth century Europeans of almost any age or class, and in almost any part of the continent, could find themselves in chains and on a ship bound for North Africa or the Middle East. During this epoch the Arabs dominated the seas and fleets of Saracen pirates regularly scoured the coastal districts of southern France, Italy, Dalmatia and Greece. Larger raiding parties ventured farther inland in search of booty and captives, and there are reports of Saracen attacks as far north as Switzerland. In Spain, Moorish raiders attacked Christian settlements in the north of the Peninsula on an annual or bi-annual basis in search of captives.

  All during this time another “theater” of this vast slaving enterprise had its center in the north of Europe, in Scandinavia, in the British Isles, in northern France, in Germany and, above all, in the land we now call Russia. For the whole Viking phenomenon, which saw Scandinavian pirates wreak havoc throughout the north of Europe for several centuries, was a direct result of the Muslim demand for European slaves. The majority of slaves sold by the Scandinavians to the caliphate were Slavs from east of the Elbe, and indeed the word “slav” implies “slave” in most European languages to this day. Michael McCormick speaks of a “vast arc” of slave supply at this time which brought hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Europeans into bondage in the House of Islam. Whilst the majority of this trade was conducted between the Vikings directly with the Arabs, some Christian Europeans did become involved; particularly the cities of Marseilles and Venice – the latter supplying the Arabs with Slavs captured on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. In an earlier age the Christian religion had virtually abolished slavery in Europe, along with the other barbarous practices of ancient Rome, such as gladiatorial contests, crucifixion, and torture of prisoners. The treatment of captives bound for the caliphate can only have been a source of moral corruption to all who participated: Boys and youths were usually castrated, in an operation of the utmost barbarity which left most of its victims dead. Men who were too old to be sold simply had their throats slit or were thrown into the sea. Women were usually destined for the sexual slavery of the harem. These things need to be said, for a number of modern writers, disdaining any moral judgment, have waxed lyrical about the economic “benefits” that the trade in human misery brought to Europe in the tenth century. Yet even these are illusory: The Scandinavians it is true got their hands on fairly large amounts of Arab gold and silver, as well as various luxuries and trinkets from the East; but these things had little impact on the level of civilization in the North. The real engine of civilization was Christianity, which encouraged peaceful husbandry as opposed to war and piracy, which brought literacy, education, and new farming techniques, and which effected a dramatic increase in the population through its prohibition of infanticide – an absolutely normal practice in pagan societies.

  Investigation reveals that it was the spread of Christianity and not contact with Islam which brought about the dramatic revival of Europe from the late tenth century onwards. But Islam did communicate certain ideas to the Christians of the West – most of which were anything but humane or civilized.

  The majority of Islamic cultural influences reaching Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries came by way of Spain. Almost all of the country had been captured by Islamic armies during the eighth century, and Muslims remained in control of parts of the Peninsula for many centuries. A local caliphate, which grew steadily in wealth and prosperity (or so we are told), was established at Cordoba in the middle of the eighth century. There is no question that by the second half of the tenth century, under Abd' er Rahman III, Islamic Spain was opulent and powerful. It was also, to a great degree, technically advanced; and indeed the prosperity and learning of the Spanish Muslims was proverbial throughout Europe in the final years of the tenth century. In more recent times the Caliphate of Cordoba has been extolled by Western Islamophiles as a sort of Muslim utopia; a land of fabulous riches, fine manners and civilized values. The problem with these descriptions is that they are complete nonsense. Even at its most prosperous and civilized the Spanish Caliphate was never a tolerant or humane society. The polity established by Abd' er Rahman III was the center of a vast slave-raiding and trading enterprise. Every year and sometimes twice yearly Christian communities in the north and even in France would be attacked and plundered; their inhabitants marched southward in chains and subjected to indescribable ill-treatment. Vast numbers of slaves, many of them eunuchs, oiled the wheels of the Spanish Caliphate. Yet there was wealth and some prosperity, for a privileged few. Jews were, to begin with, reasonably well-treated, perhaps in acknowledgment of the assistance they had provided the Muslims in the initial conquest of the Peninsula. But such beneficence was soon forgotten and by 1011 Muslim mobs in Cordoba had launched the first ever violent pogroms against the Jews on European soil. In years to come things only became worse: With the arrival of the fanatical Almoravids and Almohads from North Africa in the latter eleventh and twelfth centuries the persecution of Jews and Christians was racheted up to a
new intensity. The Almoravids deported virtually all the remaining Christians to North Africa in the early twelfth century, where they were forcibly converted to Islam; whilst in the early years of the thirteenth century the remaining Jews under Islam were forcibly converted by the Almohads.

  In order to be sure of the sincerity of the Jewish conversos, the Almohads established the first ever religious inquisitions on European soil.

  The war of reconquest which the Christians waged against the Muslims of Spain during the eleventh century was to become a cause célèbre throughout Christendom and rallied soldiers from France, Germany and Britain to the Peninsula. These campaigns, waged throughout the early and middle years of the eleventh century were to form the vanguard of Europe's fightback against Islam, a fightback which we now call the Crusades.

  The Crusades, as it happens, occupy a prominent position in the propaganda battle associated with the present “clash of civilizations” debate. No other part of European history, it could be argued, has been so distorted by ideology and preconceived prejudice. Ever since the Enlightenment, when European liberals first turned their faces against the continent's Christian past, the Crusades have been viewed, to some degree or other in most academic circles, as an act of folly or aggression by a barbarous and uncouth Europe against a civilized and enlightened Muslim world. In popular literature and in countless television documentaries and recent Hollywood movies, the Crusaders are invariably the aggressors and their Muslim foes the innocent victims. According to historian Steven Runciman, it was the Crusades which created the ill-feeling between the House of Islam and Christendom where previously none existed. Prior to that, he claimed, Islam had been tolerant and broad-minded. It has even been claimed that it was the Crusaders who destroyed the learning of the Arab world, rendering it backward and impoverished.

  The problem with this scenario of course is that it is utterly untrue. Far from being quiescent and peaceful, the House of Islam was aggressive and expansionist in the years prior to the First Crusade in 1096. In the three decades preceding that date Turkish armies had conquered the whole of Asia Minor and now stood at the very gates of Constantinople, whose capture seemed imminent. It was then that the emperor Alexius Comnenus made his famous appeal to Pope Urban II for assistance. This appeal, together with the brutal treatment of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land by the same Turks, was what finally roused Europe to action. As even Bernard Lewis has now acknowledged, the Crusades were a late, limited and rather ineffective imitation by the Europeans of the Islamic “holy war” idea.

  Barbarous acts were on occasion committed by the Crusaders, but, once again, the Muslims got there first, and they merely copied what they witnessed their Islamic foes already doing.

  Before setting out on their disastrous “People's Crusade” led by Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless, groups of soldiers and civilian volunteers carried out atrocious massacres of Jews in the Rhineland and elsewhere in central Europe – notwithstanding the attempts of bishops and other church officials to stop them. These were the first ever anti-Jewish pogroms in Christian Europe; and they have, like the crusades themselves, given rise to a whole body of mythology about medieval Europe which has only distorted the picture and promoted radical untruth. Almost without exception, modern studies of the period take it for granted that medieval Europe was anti-Semitic whilst medieval Islam was not. The truth, however, is that Islam was violently anti-Semitic before Christendom, and the first pogroms against the Jews launched on European soil were launched by Muslims, not Christians. The nexus of anti-Semitism in Europe in the eleventh century, just before the launch of the First Crusade and the pogroms against the Jews associated with it, was Spain. Some of those who attacked the Jews in central Europe had earlier campaigned in Spain, where they learned, no doubt, of the mass murder of Jews which had occurred in Granada in 1066. They cannot have been uninfluenced by these events.

  Close examination of the phenomenon of medieval anti-Semitism reveals it to be intimately connected with the struggle between Christianity and Islam. The mobs who murdered the Jews of the Rhineland and Bohemia claimed that their victims were secret allies of the Muslims. By then they had no reason or excuse to do so: yet in an earlier age individual Jewish groups and communities had indeed assisted the Muslims. This was the case, for example, in Spain, where both Christian and Muslim – as well as Jewish – sources speak of co-operation between the Islamic invaders and native Jews during the eighth century. It is true, of course, that by the time of the First Crusade such friendly relations had long ceased, and the Jews of Spain were persecuted by the country's Islamic rulers every bit as much as Christians. But the suspicion of Jewish intentions and loyalties had by this time spread throughout Europe, with tragic consequences for the continent's Jewish populations.

  Incidentally, the co-operation reported in the early eighth century between Spain's Jews and the Islamic invaders is a clear proof that the accepted narrative of Islam's origins and early spread cannot possibly be true: Had the massacres of Jews which Muhammad is said to have carried out in the Arabian Peninsula during the early seventh century actually occurred, Jewish co-operation with Spain's Islamic conquerors would certainly not have occurred. This whole question of Islam's mysterious origins is briefly examined in the Appendix to the present volume.

  The perpetrators of the anti-Jewish massacres during the Middle Ages were under the influence of a despotic and obscurantist Catholic Church which imposed a tyrannical control over men’s minds and held Europe in medieval ignorance and backwardness for many centuries. That at least is the opinion encountered routinely in the modern media and even in academic publications; and it is an opinion which has been around for a long time, first appearing, in fact, during the Enlightenment. Indeed, the supposed backwardness of Europe during the Middle Ages is often contrasted with the “progressiveness” of Islam during the same epoch – as we saw in the passages quoted from Bernard Lewis above. But how true are these ideas? Was medieval Europe under the thralldom of an oppressive church, and was the House of Islam at the same time really so “progressive”? Examination of the facts reveals the above statement to be almost the precise opposite of the truth.

  It is of course true that, from the time of Pope Innocent III (1198 – 1216), the Catholic Church was involved in the violent suppression of religious dissent. Yet the surprising fact is that until that time religious freedom was more or less the order of the day. In the two centuries prior to Innocent's reign the Cathar (or Albigensian) faith had spread freely and quite openly throughout Western Europe. Such a situation could never of course have existed in the House of Islam, at any time in its history. Christianity, it is true, had never been a particularly tolerant faith: the Church Fathers roundly condemned the pagan cults of the Romans and other peoples of the Empire. They also had extremely strong words of abuse for the early “heresies” such as the Gnostics, Montanists and Arians. In addition, they issued ferocious condemnations of other mainstream Christian churches who may have differed from each other on theological points which most moderns would consider of little or no consequence. So, Christianity was never particularly tolerant; but it rarely resorted to bloodshed to enforce its point of view. This was particularly the case in Western Europe, where the religious tumults of the fifth and sixth centuries, which so disturbed the East, never reached.

  Yet violence was eventually applied in the West, when Innocent III declared his crusade against the Cathars and launched the Inquisition.

  The strange thing, however, and this is a point rarely if ever made, is that this was not the first religious inquisition in Western Europe: As we saw above, another had been founded in Islamic Spain by the Almohads, fifty years earlier. After forcibly converting the remaining Jews of Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) to Islam, the Almohads tried to ensure the sincerity of the recent converts by subjecting them to trial and torture and by taking their children from them to be raised as Mu
slims. That the Muslims had priority in this – as in the mass murder of Jews – does not of course exonerate the Christian Church; nor does it prove that the Muslims influenced the Christians by their example. Yet we surely cannot deny that influence was a possibility and we most certainly cannot continue to extol the supposed “tolerance” of Islam whilst condemning the intolerance of Christianity.

  The other accusation leveled against the medieval church is that it was inimical to science and the free exploration of nature and her laws. Yet once again this is almost the precise opposite of the truth. Far from inhibiting science and learning the Christian Church encouraged it in almost every way. The rapid spread of literacy for example in the centuries after the tenth was due entirely to the efforts of the church, which established schools, monasteries and universities throughout the continent of Europe, including in the formerly barbarian regions of Scandinavia, eastern Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary and the Balkans. A very important function performed by monks was the copying of books – many of them scientific and philosophical texts of the Greeks and Romans. From the late tenth century onwards monasteries throughout Western Europe could boast extensive libraries of the classical Roman and occasionally also Greek authors. Dramatic new discoveries were made by the monks in very many fields. Agriculture, for example, was revolutionized by them. They adopted and developed new systems of crop management as well as technologies such as the water wheel, windmill, moldboard plow and horse collar. They made extremely important contributions to our knowledge of botany, from which flowed new and important developments in medicine and the treatment of diseases. Monks such as Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus speculated on the nature of the physical universe and helped establish the empirical method – as did William of Ockham. The sheer dynamism of European society during the Middle Ages is however best illustrated by the fact that, from an under-populated and relatively impoverished (and largely barbarian and illiterate) beginning in the mid-tenth century, by the mid-twelfth century the continent was covered with bustling towns and urban centers which supported rapidly increasing populations. Literacy was now common and Europeans had begun the construction of the great monuments of European civilization, the Gothic cathedrals and castles, which elicit the wonder and admiration of visitors to this day. In another two centuries, just before the voyage of Columbus, Europe stood on the verge of world domination.