The Impact of Islam

by Emmet Scott

  However, even this understates the transformative power of Christian civilization. By 1100 many of the above developments had already taken place. In the short space of time between around 950 and 1050 Christian civilization advanced from the borders of the Rhine and the Elbe to the Urals, raising towns, cathedrals, universities, schools and hospitals in every region. Indeed, the continent of Europe was civilized and transformed in this century even more quickly than the continent of North America was transformed in the years after 1700. It took two centuries for literate and urban civilization to spread in America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The vast space between Rhine and Urals was civilized in little more than a century.

  Islam, by contrast, began the tenth century as possibly the most splendid civilization on the earth. It possessed great cities like Baghdad, Samarra, Damascus and Alexandria, some of which had about 500,000 souls.[33] Its civilization at the time was suffused with the spirit of Sassanid Persia and Byzantine Syria and Egypt, whose wealth, learning and population it had inherited. Yet five centuries later the whole region was a declining relic, in some places a wasteland. What a contrast with Europe in the same five centuries, and what a rebuke to those who argue that Islam was free and progressive during the Middle Ages.

  [1] Trevor-Roper, op cit., p. 137.

  [2] Muhammad said, “If anyone changes his religion, kill him.” (Bukhari, Vol. 9, book 84, no. 57).

  [3] Bat Ye’or, op cit., pp. 60-1.

  [4]Ibid., p. 61.

  [5] Trevor-Roper, op cit., p. 159.

  [6] Lactantius, “The Divine Institutes,” in “Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries,” in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 156-7.

  [7] John Chrysostom, Homily XLVI, in George Prevost, trans. “The Homilies of St. John Chrysostom” in Philip Schaff, ed. A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Vol. X (Eedermans, Grand Rapids, MI, 1986) p. 288.

  [8] St Augustine, Letter C, in “Letters of St. Augustine,” in J. G. Cunningham, trans. in A Select Library of the Nicene (etc as above).

  [9] John of Nikiu, Chronicle, 84.87-103, http://cosmopolis.com/alexandria/hypatia-bio-john.html

  [10] Colin Wilson and Christopher Evans, eds. Strange but True (Parragon Books, 1995), p. 285.

  [11] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press, 2010).

  [12] Painter, op cit., p. 433.

  [13]Ibid., p. 431.

  [14]Ibid., p. 433.

  [15]Ibid., p. 434.

  [16]Ibid., p. 435.

  [17]Ibid.

  [18] See Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Praeger Publication, 1991).

  [19] Painter, op cit., pp. 435-6.

  [20] Briffault writes, “Of the poets and historians of Greece, beyond satisfying their curiosity by a few samples, they [the Arabs] took little account.” op. cit., p. 192.

  [21] Beattie, op cit., p. 50.

  [22]Ibid.

  [23] Bertrand, op cit., p. 22.

  [24]Ibid.

  [25]Ibid., p. 75.

  [26]Ibid., p. 76.

  [27]Ibid., p. 157.

  [28] Jaki, op cit., p. 242.

  [29]Ibid., p. 43.

  [30] Robert Spencer, Religion of Peace? p. 154, citing Rodney Stark, op cit., pp. 20-1.

  [31] Lewis, What Went Wrong? pp. 79-80.

  [32]Ibid., p. 80.

  [33] It should be noted however that this is precisely the same situation as that which had existed before the appearance of Islam: In the early seventh century the cities of the Byzantine Empire and Sassanid Persia were enormous compared to the small towns of contemporary Europe. Islam therefore inherited the population, as well as the wealth, of these regions. It actually created neither.

  8

  The Ottomans and Europe

  The immediate cause of the First Crusade was the threat posed to Constantinople by the Seljuk Turks. The danger from the Seljuks having been removed, another Turkish clan, named Ottoman after its founder Osman, or Othman, renewed the attack on Byzantium in the late thirteenth century. Portion by portion the whole of Anatolia was overrun. Devastation followed in the wake of the Turkish warriors. From the moment the forces of Orhan, son of Osman, crossed into Europe in 1345, the history of the Balkans was a long litany of war, massacre, enslavement and deportation. As good Muslims the Turks religiously adhered to the principle of permanent war against the infidel; for them any permanent peace with Christians was unacceptable, and they renewed the conflict with their Christian neighbours on an annual basis. As the sphere of Turkish control moved inexorably westwards and northwards, so did the attendant devastation and destruction on the frontier.

  Yet even those Christians living under the direct rule of the sultan were never again to know peace and security. The intolerable burdens placed on them – including, as we shall see, a human tax of one male child per family – elicited frequent rebellions amongst the subdued Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbians, and Albanians; and these uprisings were quelled with the utmost ferocity.

  It is impossible in these pages to catalogue in detail the endless oppressions endured by the peoples of south-eastern Europe during the centuries which they lived under the heel of the Turks, though a few of the more atrocious examples shall be highlighted as we proceed. This is necessary, for the full horror of Turkish rule is not widely known outside the Balkan lands affected by it, even though the conquests of the Ottomans brought the scimitar of Islam as far as the borders of Poland and the gates of Vienna – the latter on two memorable occasions. Nor was their ambition confined to the conquest and exploitation of eastern and central Europe. The whole continent was within their sights, and they made several determined efforts to add Italy to their acquisitions. Spain too, with its own native Muslim population in the south, felt the effects of Ottoman ambitions, and the desire on the part of the Spaniards and Portuguese to find a way to China and the Indies which bypassed the Turkish domains was to have far-reaching consequences.

  Fig. 8. The Fall of Constantinople, 1453

  The arrival of the first Turkish forces in Europe in 1345 was not viewed with undue alarm by the Christian rulers of the continent. That they were actually invited in by a disgruntled Byzantine prince who sought to use them to bolster his own claim to the throne, should not surprise us. Invasions throughout history have commenced in precisely the same way. But the kings and potentates of Europe did not foresee a major threat. Almost three centuries had passed since the Seljuk Turks had first stood at the gates of Constantinople and thereby provoked the First Crusade. Since then Christendom had taken the fight into the heart of the House of Islam. It is true that by 1291 the last of the Christian kingdoms established by the Crusaders had fallen, and any Christians left in the region lived under the heel of Islam. Yet in the same thirteenth century the Dar al-Islam had suffered what must have seemed like a mortal blow at the hands of the Mongols, who smashed the power of the caliphs and shahs in central Asia and reduced to hills of ashes dozens of the great cities of the region, including Bukhara, Samarkand and Baghdad. That the Mongols did not completely destroy Islam was due entirely to the timely death of the Great Khan Möngke (or Mangu), whose demise ensured the withdrawal of his main forces, under the command of Hulagu, to Mongolia. The depleted army left in Palestine unwisely attempted the invasion of Egypt – the last independent Islamic power – and was defeated at the Battle of Ain Jalut (“Goliath’s Well”) in northern Palestine.

  Yet Ain Jalut must have seemed like a temporary reprieve: the Mongols, it was felt, would surely return with a mighty force to wreak vengeance upon Egypt and her Mameluke rulers. The vengeance never came: The new Great Khan, Kublai
, was less inimical to Islam than Möngke, and he concerned himself primarily with Chinese affairs. In the time of Kublai’s successor Timur, the Mongol Empire was divided into several semi-independent kingdoms, which eventually became fully independent. The rulers of these states, reigning over predominantly Muslim populations, in time became Muslims themselves. Such was the case with the Persian-based Ilkhanate, whose ruler Ghazan embraced Islam in 1295, as well as with the Khanate of the Golden Horde (or Kipchak Khanate), which took in the whole of Central Asia and the Ukraine. It adopted Islam during the reign of Uzbag (1312-41).

  For all that, the damage done to Islam by the earlier Mongol rulers was vast, and there remained a sense among Europeans that it was no longer a great threat. In addition, the Mongol conquests had brought stability to the heart of Asia, and peaceful intercourse was established for the first time between the West and the great civilizations of the Orient. Across the Silk Road, which wound its way from China through Central Asia to the Middle East, there flowed great quantities of goods and ideas in both directions. In the words of Trevor-Roper, “The great, orderly, tolerant Mongol Empire, crossed and re-crossed by continual caravans, provided one of the most effective means for the diffusion of culture and technology. It was in those years that some of the great Chinese inventions came to Europe. Gunpowder was first mentioned in Europe by Roger Bacon, the friend of Guillaume de Rubrouck who had visited Karakorum [the Mongol capital]. It was first used in the West, by both Christians and Moslems, in the early fourteenth century. Printing also reached Europe from China during the period of the Mongol peace. The first printed document in Europe is perhaps the stamped signature of the reply of Kayuk Khan to the pope, written in Uighur script, which Giovanni da Piano Carpini brought from Karakorum and which, long unknown, was discovered in the Vatican archives in 1920.”[1]

  The feeling among Europeans during the Mongol epoch that Islam was no longer a threat was probably encouraged too by the steady progress of the Reconquista in Spain: By the early fourteenth century Muslim Spain had been reduced to little more than the Kingdom of Granada in the far south.

  Taken all together then it must have seemed a matter of no great concern when a new Turkish dynasty began the conquest of Anatolia in the early years of the fourteenth century. The capture of Bursa in 1324 saw the Ottomans control almost all of Asia Minor and Turkish forces at the gates of Constantinople. A similar series of events in the latter eleventh century spurred the European powers to action; this time however there was to be no mobilization in the West. When Orhan brought his forces across the Dardanelles in 1345 in support of the Byzantine regent John VI Kantakouzenos, who was at war with the dowager queen, it was generally viewed as little more than an internal domestic struggle among the Greeks. A more incorrect assessment could hardly be imagined. The arrival of the Turks on European soil was to prove by far the greatest threat to Christendom’s survival ever launched by Islam. With the arrival of the Ottomans in Thrace there appeared in Europe a power which was implacably opposed to Christian civilization in its entirety. Orhan quickly annexed the territories adjacent to Constantinople and spread his authority throughout the region. By the time of his successor, Murad I, the Turks were already clashing with other Christian states such as the Bulgarians and Serbians.

  Fig. 9. Janissaries

  Janissaries were the elite fighting force of the Ottoman Empire. All of them were forcibly conscripted from the Christian communities of the Balkans and Anatolia.

  The subjugation of the Balkans was facilitated by an elite body of troops known as the Janissaries. These men, whose name derives from the Turkish yeniçeri (“new soldiers”), were forcibly recruited from the Christian populations of Anatolia and south-east Europe. Tradition says that it was Orhan himself who established the practice, though more recent research indicates that its origin should be attributed to Murad I, in 1383. Every five years or so the brightest and ablest Christian boys, normally between the ages of 10 to 12, were “gathered” as a human tax by the sultan’s troops, from the towns and villages of the Greeks (of Anatolia as well as Europe), Serbs and Bulgarians, and later also from the Wallachians (Romanians), Croatians and Hungarians. The children would then be taken to Asia Minor, where they would be placed with Turkish families and instructed in the Muslim faith. They were subject to severe discipline, and abuse of all kinds was normal. They were trained as soldiers and forbidden to learn any other trade or to marry. In time, they would officially join the sultan’s elite Janissary bodyguard. These boys would never see their families again and were entirely lost to them. This system of abduction, known as the devshirme, operated throughout the Ottoman Empire until the eighteenth century.

  As with so much else when it comes to Islamic history, the devshirme system has been effectively sanitized in much current historical writing. The Wikipedia page on “Janissary” for example, which may be regarded as fairly accurately representing the opinion of current establishment “gatekeeper” thought, notes the following: “Greek Historian Dimitri Kitsikis in his book Türk Yunan İmparatorluğu (‘Turco-Greek Empire’) states that many Christian families were willing to comply with the devşirme because it offered a possibility of social advancement. Conscripts could one day become Janissary colonels, statesmen who might one day return to their home region as governors, or as Grand Viziers or Beylerbays (governor generals).”[2]

  But this is a travesty: There is little or no evidence for such co-operation. (Note also the Turkish title and Turkish publisher of Wikipedia’s supposed “Greek” author). Devshirme was nothing other than the kidnapping by a brutally oppressive state of children who were then forcibly converted to an alien and hostile faith. Rarely, if ever, did they return to their homelands; and if they did so it was as oppressors. The truth is that during the centuries of Turkish rule the Christian peoples of the Balkans suffered, what to modern Westerners, would seem an almost unimaginable oppression. Even before their entry into Europe the Turks wrought terrible destruction upon the Christians of Asia Minor. This, like so much of Ottoman history, is a tale almost unknown and rarely told in modern publications. Consider for example the following by Greek author Apostolos Vacaloupolis:

  “… evidence as we have proves that the Hellenic population of Asia Minor, whose very vigor had so long sustained the Empire and might indeed be said to have constituted its greatest strength, succumbed so rapidly to Turkish pressure that by the fourteenth century, it was confined to a few limited areas. By that time, Asia Minor was already being called Turkey ... one after another, bishoprics and metropolitan sees which once throbbed with Christian vitality became vacant and ecclesiastical buildings fell into ruins. The metropolitan see of Chalcedon, for example, disappeared in the fourteenth century, and the sees of Laodicea, Kotyaeon (now Kutahya) and Synada in the fifteenth ... With the extermination of local populations or their precipitate flight, entire villages, cities, and sometimes whole provinces fell into decay. There were some fertile districts like the valley of the Maeander River, once stocked with thousands of sheep and cattle, which were laid waste and thereafter ceased to be in any way productive. Other districts were literally transformed into wildernesses. Impenetrable thickets sprang up in places where once there had been luxuriant fields and pastures. This is what happened to the district of Sangarius, for example, which Michael VIII Palaeologus had known formerly as a prosperous, cultivated land, but whose utter desolation he afterwards surveyed in utmost despair ... The mountainous region between Nicaea and Nicomedia, opposite Constantinople, once clustered with castles, cities, and villages, was depopulated. A few towns escaped total destruction — Laodicea, Iconium, Bursa (then Prusa), and Sinope, for example — but the extent of devastation elsewhere was such as to make a profound impression on visitors for many years to come. The fate of Antioch provides a graphic illustration of the kind of havoc wrought by the Turkish invaders: in 1432, only three hundred dwellings could be counted inside its walls, and its predominantly Tu
rkish or Arab inhabitants subsisted by raising camels, goats, cattle, and sheep. Other cities in the southeastern part of Asia Minor fell into similar decay.”[3]

  The passage of the Turks into Europe brought more of the same to the latter region. The above-quoted writer continues;

  “From the very beginning of the Turkish onslaught [in Thrace] under Suleiman [son of Orhan], the Turks tried to consolidate their position by the forcible imposition of Islam. If [the Ottoman historian] Sukrullah is to be believed, those who refused to accept the Moslem faith were slaughtered and their families enslaved. ‘Where there were bells’, writes the same author, ‘Suleiman broke them up and cast them into fires. Where there were churches he destroyed them or converted them into mosques. Thus, in place of bells there were now muezzins. Wherever Christian infidels were still found, vassalage was imposed on their rulers. At least in public they could no longer say ‘kyrie eleison’ but rather ‘There is no God but Allah’; and where once their prayers had been addressed to Christ, they were now to ‘Muhammad, the prophet of Allah’.”[4]