The Impact of Islam

by Emmet Scott

  The reality however was that if some of the Catholics of medieval Spain were brutal, they had very good teachers in the Muslims of medieval Spain: For with the Muslim conquest of North Africa and Spain a reign of violence and terror was to commence that was to last for centuries. The myth of an idyllic and tolerant Caliphate of Cordoba, is just that – a myth, a myth popularized during the Enlightenment and propagated wholesale ever since.

  Islamic Al-Andalus was reduced to little more than Granada by the middle of the thirteenth century and Islam looked to be a spent force. In the same century the Mongols came near to wiping Islam off the face of the earth. No doubt the princes and potentates of Europe became complacent; in any case they had their own internal quarrels and disputes to contend with. But by the late thirteenth century some of the Mongol princes in central Asia had converted to Islam, a development which would have long term consequences. At around the same time a group of Turks, nominally under the Ilkhanate of Persia, began expanding their power base into the Byzantine regions of Asia Minor. By the early fourteenth century these Ottoman Turks had extended their reach into south-east Europe, from which point they absorbed the nations of the region, Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, Greeks, and Wallachians, one by one.

  The Ottomans were now to pose a threat to Europe’s very existence more urgent than anything seen since the seventh century. In 1480 the Sultan Mehmed II launched an attempted invasion of Italy, and although this failed, the danger remained active and ever-present for the next two hundred years. Europe could not again breathe freely until the Turks were beaten at the gates of Vienna in 1683. In the interim, the pope was ready to flee from Rome on several occasions, as Ottoman fleets scoured the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, it seemed that the whole of central Europe, including Hungary and Austria, was about to be overwhelmed; and though the imminent danger was averted by the victory of John Hunyadi at Belgrade (1456), it was renewed again in the sixteenth century, when an enormous Turkish invasion force was stopped by the Holy League at the naval battle of Lepanto (1571). And it is worth noting here that the Turkish losses at Lepanto, comprising 30,000 men and 200 out of 230 warships, did not prevent them returning the following year with another enormous fleet, which speaks volumes for their persistence and the perennial nature of the threat they posed. A short time before this, in the 1530s, the Turks had extended their rule westwards along the North African coast as far as Algeria, where they encouraged an intensification of slaving raids against Christian communities in southern Europe. Fleets of Muslim pirates brought devastation to the coastal regions of Italy, Spain, southern France, and Greece, repeating the depredations of the Arabs in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The Christians of the islands, in particular, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and the Balearics, had to get used to perennial and persistent surprise attack. There can be no doubt that these experiences left an indelible impression on the peoples of the region. The paranoid culture of feuding, assassination, and the stiletto, for which Sicily and Corsica in particular were to became famous, has to be viewed in the light of the persistent violence inflicted upon these lands by Muslim corsairs. Had the Viking raids in northern Europe lasted as long, we would no doubt have seen similar things there.

  The coming of the Ottomans also prompted a vast renewal of the slave trade in central and eastern Europe. On an annual basis Turkish raiders penetrated the borders of Hungary, pillaging and enslaving. It is impossible to tell how many Europeans were taken into bondage in this way, but the figure was undoubtedly in the millions.

  The Ottoman slave empire, it should be noted, appeared long before any European powers had commenced shipping captive Africans across the Atlantic; and it is scarcely to be doubted that the Turks provided an example to the Christian slavers of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. It is furthermore an absolute certainty that the Spaniards, the first European slavers, got the idea of taking captives from black Africa from the Muslims of Morocco and Algeria, who had been doing the same for centuries.[2] Again, it was unquestionably their intercourse with the Muslims of southern Spain which inured the Spanish Christians to the whole idea of slavery in the first place. As Louis Bertrand noted, slavery continued to exist in Christian Spain long after it had disappeared elsewhere in Europe. And this question leads us onto the wider issue: To what extent did Islamic ideas about war, religious tolerance (or intolerance) and the Jews influence European society during the Middle Ages and the early Modern period?

  It is of course impossible to give a definite answer to such a question. Whatever opinion we might provide can only be advanced in terms of probability rather than provability. Nonetheless, there is clear evidence that Islamic cultural ideas had a profound influence upon Europeans, especially southern Europeans, throughout the medieval age. We noted above, for example, that slavery flourished as an institution in Christian Spain when it had ceased to exist further north. We should note too that Christian kings and princes in Spain copied their Muslim neighbors in other ways: It was not uncommon for a Spanish king to reign over a thoroughly Arabized court complete with a harem guarded by eunuchs. And the same tradition was found in another interface region, Sicily. The Emperor Frederick II, for example, was famous (or infamous) for this practice, in virtue of which he was popularly known as the “baptized Sultan of Sicily.”[3]

  The Spaniards of course became notorious for their behavior in the New World after 1500. Again, it is not beyond reason to suppose that their attitudes may have been influenced by their Muslim neighbors. That certainly was the opinion of Louis Bertrand:

  “The worst characteristic which the Spaniards acquired was the parasitism of the Arabs and the nomad Africans: the custom of living off one’s neighbour’s territory, the raid raised to the level of an institution, marauding and brigandage recognized as the sole means of existence for the man-at-arms. In the same way they went to win their bread in Moorish territory, so the Spaniards later went to win gold and territory in Mexico and Peru.

  “They were to introduce there, too, the barbarous, summary practices of the Arabs: putting everything to fire and sword, cutting down fruit-trees, razing crops, devastating whole districts to starve out the enemy and bring them to terms; making slaves everywhere, condemning the population of the conquered countries to forced labour. All these detestable ways the conquistadores learnt from the Arabs.

  “For several centuries slavery maintained itself in Christian Spain, as in the Islamic lands. Very certainly, also, it was to the Arabs that the Spaniards owed the intransigence of their fanaticism, the pretension to be, if not the chosen of God, at least the most Catholic nation of Christendom. Philip II, like Abd er Rahman or Al-Mansour, was Defender of the Faith.

  “Finally, it was not without contagion that the Spaniards lived for centuries in contact with a race of men who crucified their enemies and gloried in piling up thousands of severed heads by way of trophies. The cruelty of the Arabs and the Berbers also founded a school in the Peninsula. The ferocity of the emirs and the caliphs who killed their brothers or their sons with their own hands was to be handed on to Pedro the Cruel and Henry of Trastamare, those stranglers under canvas, no better than common assassins.”[4]

  Whilst I do not necessarily endorse Bertrand’s opinion (I feel he has slightly overstated the case), it is nonetheless true to say that their long contact with Islam most certainly did not foster the development of humanitarianism in the Spanish character.

  What then of “holy war,” execution of religious dissidents, and violent anti-Semitism? As we have seen, all of these were found in Islam before they were found in Christianity – a fact almost never mentioned in mainstream textbooks. Bernard Lewis, for one, has certainly come round to believing that the Christian concept of holy war was derived from the Islamic one. Again, this is not a provable proposition; but then again it is safe to say that the Christians did not derive any pacifist tendencies from the Muslims. As regards re
ligious intolerance, Christianity was never itself very tolerant, but it was almost invariably less violently intolerant than Islam. There was never any real persecution (and certainly no torture) of religious dissenters and heretics in the West before Innocent III launched his Inquisition in the final years of the twelfth century. Yet the Almohads had already established their own “inquisitions” in southern Spain fifty years earlier, and we cannot doubt that Innocent III was well aware of these tribunals. Did he copy them? Again, it is impossible to say; but he most certainly did not learn tolerance from the Spanish Muslims. And what about persecution of the Jews? Once more, it was Islam which led the way and Christendom which followed. The Jews were ultimately caught in the civilizational struggle between Islam and Christianity. They had found favor with the Muslims in an earlier age and had assisted them in some cases – especially in Spain. This seems to have sparked an almost paranoid suspicion in Europe which unscrupulous men periodically exploited in order to lay their hands on the wealth and property of Jewish communities.

  No one denies that Europe copied many technologies and philosophical ideas from Islam; and in the eighth century the Byzantine practise of “iconoclasm,” the destruction of sacred images, was unquestionably influenced by Islamic custom and belief. If the Byzantines could contemplate, under the influence of Islam, the overthrowing of icons – a central tenet of Orthodox Christian belief – it is surely not too difficult to believe that the Western Christians were also copying Islam when they launched their holy wars, inquisitions, and anti-Jewish pogroms.

  Looking at the picture broadly, I feel it is reasonably safe to say that the cause of humanitarianism in Europe was most assuredly not advanced by the continent’s contact with Islam. That Islam was at least partly responsible, as we saw in Chapter 9, for the discovery of the New World (by forcing Europe to focus to the West towards the Atlantic), is true. It is nonetheless fairly certain – given the dynamism of European society – that Europeans would eventually have found their way across the Atlantic whether Islam existed or not; but it seems equally evident that contact with the New World would have been considerably less violent and traumatic for its inhabitants had Europeans not been previously acquainted with Islam.

  One may therefore argue endlessly about the extent to which Islam exercised a malign influence upon European civilization during the Middle Ages, but its devastating impact upon the nations and regions of the continent occupied by Muslim armies and raided by Muslim slavers is not to be doubted. The whole of eastern and central Europe, from the Volga to the outskirts of Vienna, was subject to perennial depredations at the hands of slave-raiders for several centuries, beginning in the fourteenth and continuing – in some areas – to the eighteenth. Interface areas, or regions on the border which the Muslims did not fully control, were reduced to uninhabited wastelands. So for example the Ukraine, as well as parts of southern Russia, was almost completely depopulated by the attentions of slavers operating from the Crimean Khanante between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. The same situation prevailed in Hungary. The great Hungarian Plain, known as the Puszta, was a heavily-settled agricultural region, supporting numerous towns and cities, during the Middle Ages. By the sixteenth century it was a dreary prairie whose only inhabitants were feral horses and cattle; a prairie that was never again to see its former prosperity. The great central plain of Spain, known as La Mancha, is another case in point. During the Roman and Visigothic epochs this region supported an extremely large population inhabiting numerous towns and cities. After the Muslim conquest however it occupied the bloody border between Christendom and the House of Islam for several centuries. It never recovered, and remains to this day a bleak and barren semi-desert.

  Russia, which suffered for centuries from the depredations of the Crimean slaver-raiders, remained a backwater of European civilization as a consequence. Centuries of tyranny and brutality at the hands of the Islamicized Mongols and their Turkish agents rendered Russia a land where despotism came to be seen as normal and where human life was cheap. It is perhaps no coincidence that these things insinuated themselves into the Russian character and that serfdom, for example, was only abolished in Russia in the latter half of the nineteenth century – hundreds of years after it had ceased to exist in most other parts of Europe. It is not to be doubted, I feel, that the particularly savage form of totalitarian tyranny which overwhelmed the Russian people from 1917 onwards, was part of the legacy of tyranny which ingrained itself into the land over the centuries. The main author of that savagery, a Georgian, came from a race of people who endured almost unimaginable brutality at the hands of Muslim masters for many centuries.

  Perhaps the worst and most enduring damage was done to the regions of Europe which remained under Turkish control until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Greece, for example, was exploited ruthlessly by the Ottomans for a period of five centuries: Once fertile and populous regions of the Hellenic Peninsula were systematically denuded by the Turks of their wealth and inhabitants. Whole regions of the Balkans were dragged back to a state of semi-barbarism, where there prevailed a primitive tribalism – a situation which persists, even to this day, in parts of Albania and Macedonia. Slavery, too, persisted in these regions long after it had disappeared in the rest of Europe. Thus for example, under the influence of Ottoman practice, Roma gypsies continued to be held as slaves in Wallachia until the middle of the nineteenth century.[5] And indeed slavery persisted as an institution in European Turkey even after its supposed suppression at the end of the nineteenth century. The last recorded slave auction took place in Constantinople in 1908, and it was not until 1930 that the (by now secular) Turkish state formally abolished the institution.[6]

  Nor can we neglect to mention the atrocious massacres, often amounting to genocide – as in the case of the Armenians and Anatolian Greeks – which the Turks launched against the Christian peoples of the Balkans and Asia Minor throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries.[7] These horrors, which claimed the lives of several millions, would disgrace the record of any nation; though they also stand as a rebuke to the governments of Western Europe (but most especially of Great Britain), who not only failed to prevent the Turkish attacks but actually defended the perpetrators against the repeated efforts of the Russians to put a stop to them.

  But it was the territories which came under Islam during the seventh and eighth centuries which fared worst of all. Many once-thriving Roman and Byzantine cities of North Africa and the Middle East were reduced, within a short time of the Arab Conquests, to ghost towns – abandoned settlements whose skeletal remains still dot the landscape of those regions and have now become important tourist attractions. The coming of Islam into these regions saw a massive reduction in population. Exact figures are impossible to obtain, but it seems likely that by the eleventh century it had been reduced by around two-thirds of the figure under the Byzantines in the early seventh century. And what a burden, as Winston Churchill said, the Muslim faith placed on the shoulders of its own devotees. Women, who had formerly enjoyed great freedoms in the ancient Near East, were instantly reduced to chattels, every one of them the absolute property of some man, either father, brother, or husband: A chattel who must ask permission to leave the home and who could even then only do so draped in a shroud. The beating of these chattels is provided for in Islamic law, and the killing of them in Islamic tradition. How many women in the Muslim world have been mutilated and put to death by members of their own families over the centuries? It is impossible even to guess; but, given contemporary experience of such things the figure must surely run into the hundreds of thousands or even millions.

  And Islam is scarcely less cruel to men. In a society where women are basically invisible and where in any case the rich and powerful fill their harems with those that are available, men's thoughts turn to what is available and visible: young boys. The House of Islam has been a house of rampant pederasty for ce
nturies; a phenomenon so well accepted that it is scarcely remarked upon. Incredibly enough, Muslims have never regarded this as a moral issue and have at the same time ruthlessly executed adult men who indulged in such behavior with each other.[8]

  The decline of the Islamic world, the subject of Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong? is perhaps no better illustrated than in the wonder expressed by the fourteenth century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, sitting amid the desolation and barbarism of Algeria, as he beheld the apparent wealth and prosperity displayed by visiting delegations of Italian merchants.[9] And indeed European travelers to the Middle East and North Africa throughout the centuries (from about the mid-twelfth onwards at least) consistently describe a region gripped in poverty, squalor and backwardness.[10] Lewis came very close to answering his own question about the decline of the Muslim world when he noted the curious fact that wheeled vehicles were virtually unknown, up until modern times, throughout the Islamic territories. This situation, so striking that it was remarked upon by visiting Europeans over the centuries, was all the more strange given the fact that the wheel was invented in the Middle East (in Babylonia) and had been commonly used in earlier ages. The conclusion Lewis comes to is startling: “A cart is large and, for a peasant, relatively costly. It is difficult to conceal and easy for requisition. At a time and place where neither law nor custom restricted the powers of even local authorities, visible and mobile assets were a poor investment. The same fear of predatory authority – or neighbors – may be seen in the structure of traditional houses and quarters: the high, windowless walls, the almost hidden entrances in narrow alleyways, the careful avoidance of any visible sign of wealth.”[11] In the kleptocracy that was the caliphate, it seems, not even Muslims – far less Christians and Jews – were free to prosper. A society which cannot or will not guarantee the right to private property cannot thrive.