Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  In both India and the Balkans fact was quickly conflated with myth. But it was sometimes the myths that stuck in the memory. Yet securing a mass response was not an easy matter: it required a rising sense of drama and horror, a quasi-theatrical style of presentation. Sir Edwin Pears recalled the Bulgarian horrors of 1876 in his memoirs:

  They had seen dogs feeding on human remains, heaps of human skulls, skeletons nearly entire, rotting clothing, human hair, and flesh putrid and lying in one foul heap. They saw the town with not a roof left, with women here and there wailing their dead amid the ruins. They examined the heap and found that the skulls and skeletons were all small and that the clothing was that of women and girls. MacGahan counted a hundred skulls immediately around him. The skeletons were headless, showing that these victims had been beheaded.

  Further on they saw the skeletons of two little children lying side by side with frightful sabre cuts on their little skulls. MacGahan remarked that the number of children killed in these massacres was something enormous. They heard on trustworthy authority from eye-witnesses that they were often spiked on bayonets.

  There was not a house beneath the ruins of which he and Mr. Schuyler did not see human remains, and the streets were strewn with them.21 When they drew nigh the church they found the ground covered with skeletons and lots of putrid flesh. In the church itself the sight was so appalling that I do not care to reproduce the terrible description given by Mr. MacGahan.22

  Januarius MacGahan was an experienced war reporter; his first account from the front was published in the Daily News in London on August 7, 1876. On the same day, an official report read out in the House of Commons confirmed MacGahan’s gruesome details. More and more column inches kept Bulgaria in the public mind. A longer and even more horrific dispatch from MacGahan appeared on August 16. Thirteen days later American consul Schuyler’s preliminary report to the U.S. government was printed in full in the Daily News. This added further fuel to the fire. All the earlier warnings, from May 1876 onward, some accurate, others fanciful, were confirmed.23 Gladstone’s pamphlet crystallized an existing popular feeling of horror and revulsion. He began to formulate his own contribution to the campaign against the Ottomans even before he had seen Schuyler’s report. He wrote in a white heat—by September 1, 1876, he had already completed more than half of it.24 Late on September 3 he concluded his text and sent it to the printer. On September 5 all the copies were finished and distributed.

  The impact of Gladstone’s Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East had no parallel. It sold 24,000 copies on the day it came out, 40,000 in less than a week, and 100,000 copies in the longer term.25 Thousands of other publications appeared. Fresh horrors were exposed. But the appearance of Gladstone’s great diatribe against the Turk in September 1876 was the point at which the anti-Ottoman cause became a juggernaut. The Grand Old Man distilled the historic Christian antagonism to Islam into the incomparable evil of the Ottomans: “Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and as far as their dominion reached, civilisation vanished from view.”26

  Gladstone had set foot on Ottoman soil only once, in February 1859. He wrote then in his diary, “The whole impression is most saddening: it is all, all, indolence, decay, stagnation; the image of God seems as it were nowhere.”27 Gladstone annotated the books that he read, and also recorded their contents each day in his diary. From this it is clear that in his reading about the East, over some fifteen years, books hostile to the Ottomans were predominant. Only two Turcophile works found a place on the shelves of his library. A passionate philhellene, a scholar immersed in the glories of ancient Greece, his distaste for the Ottomans had both rational and deeply emotional grounds.28 As the massacres took place, he was at work on a book on Homer, and his mind was occupied with the origins of classical Greece. The contrast he saw between the cultured glory of the ancient Hellenes and the gross barbarity of the contemporary Turks gave wings to his pen. The Bulgarian Horrors showed a change in register: Gladstone adopted the style and remorseless aggression of a philippic, not really typical of his powerful but usually more measured rhetorical style.29

  Few short texts—it was sixty-four pages in total—can have had a more immediate effect. The British response to the Bulgarian atrocities built up steadily thereafter, over five months. The agitation was fed by speeches in Parliament, cartoons, reports in newspapers, and by public meetings. “The Bulgarian Horrors succeeded so completely because it concentrated into a single utterance a profoundly excited public mood struggling for articulation.”30 But when there were no new incidents and no new reports, public interest waned. It became clear that popular fury could not be sustained in the long term. By 1878, the agitation over the massacres of 1876 had faded, and the British streets were echoing with a new popular song of the hour, directed not at the Turks but at the Russians:

  We don’t want to fight,

  But by Jingo if we do,

  We’ve got the ships,

  We’ve got the men,

  And got the money too.

  We’ve fought the Bear before,

  And while we’re Britons true,

  The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

  In 1876, Britain was the principal focus of outrage, taking on the role that France had assumed over Greece in the 1820s. In 1876, the agitation was fueled by the written word and public meetings, while in 1822, it was images and visual symbols that had been the more persuasive. But most remarkable of all was the essential modernity of the response in 1876: this was a powerful and concerted media campaign that helped to create an acute political polarization, between anti-Turk and pro-Turk, at all levels of society. There was no unquestioning Slavophilia, like the near-universal sympathy for the Greeks in the 1820s. Finally, the reaction was framed within a national political framework. In Britain, Victorian high-mindedness, in its Liberal incarnation, found a natural outlet in condemnation of the Turks, who became a metaphor for the sleazy dealings of the British Tories. Their pragmatic Conservatism began to look tainted and immoral.

  If images played a smaller part in 1876 than they had in 1822, perhaps this was a consequence of Gladstone’s dominating presence, both as a public speaker and as a writer of polemics. However, there were some extraordinarily strong visual images that fired the public imagination. On August 5, 1876, two days before MacGahan’s first report appeared, a Punch cartoon entitled “Neutrality Under Difficulties” attacked the prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. The cartoon showed the figure of Britannia pointing to a scene where Turkish soldiers were carrying off women and raising babies to meet their swords, amid a forest of heads spiked on bayonets. The prime minister sat calmly reading his blue book over a caption declaring, “Bulgarian Atrocities! I can’t find them in the ‘Official Reports’!!!” A month later, on September 9, 1876, Punch published another and even angrier image: “The Status Quo.” Britannia looks contemptuously at “the Turk,” a bloody saber hanging from his arm. Behind are burning buildings, heads impaled, and dead babies. Turkey demands Britain’s support. The reply is: “Befriend you? Not with your hands of that Colour.”

  But the tone of the cartoons soon changed. By October Judy, a rival to Punch, had the sturdy figure of John Bull (a more earthy symbol of England than Britannia) separating Turk and Eastern Christian. Both Orientals are armed to the teeth, and heavily caricatured. But they are plainly equally at fault, and it needed British intervention to keep them in check. The caption declared, “What it must come to.” The bloody-handed Turk had become a portly invalid fed distasteful nostrums by the European rulers.31 By the following year Russia and Turkey were both portrayed as barbarians.32

  ANTHROPOLOGISTS USED TO DEFINE A SOCIETY AS A GROUP OF PEOPLE living together at the same time, in the same place, and speaking a common language.33 In the Balkans, making a state from a cluster of microcommunities proved extraordinarily difficult. Drawing up the frontiers for each new nation, on the basis of language or otherwise, was repeatedly frustra
ted by where people actually lived after centuries of Ottoman occupation. For example, more than 40 percent of Albanian speakers lived outside the boundaries of the Albanian state established in 1913. (Many of them had moved to the safer lowlands, away from the rigors and the blood feuds of mountain life.) There were at least five areas whose national character was constantly being defined or redefined. Macedonia was Greek or Bulgarian or even Albanian, depending on your perspective. Even after 1878, Bulgaria contained many Turks. Thrace remained a battleground between Turks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Greeks. Bosnia and Kosovo proved the most problematical of all. For nation builders there were two main options: either they could incorporate divergent elements and hope to subdue them, or they could homogenize the disparate groups.

  Implicit in the concept of the Balkans’ new nations created in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was some kind of transformation. At one level it could be merely freedom from the “Ottoman yoke” and allowing the ancient nation a chance to “breathe free.” This was the naïve enthusiasm that underpinned the notion of a reborn Greece. In Serbia and Croatia, it was rooted in a pick-and-mix attitude to the past.34 The folkloric compilation of ancient songs, patriotic poems, and a carefully edited version of history created what Ivo Banac aptly described as “racial messianism in culture.” It took many forms. Before the First World War, the Croat artist Ivan Meštrović planned a Kosovo Temple, in the form of a Latin cross, with a dome “bigger than St. Peter’s.” A five-tiered “tower of ages” would symbolize “five centuries of slavery”; each tier was to be flanked by figures of the “martyr spirits” and at the very top an eternal torch, a “people’s prayer.”35 His great architectural vision was never built but he later explained the motives behind his design: “What I had in mind was an attempt to create a synthesis of popular national ideals and their development, to express in stone and building how deeply buried in each one of us are the memories of the great and decisive moments of our history.”36

  However, these memories could never be shared by one group in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Like the Montenegrins and Herzegovinans, who were subsumed (as Serbs) within the new state, they were not named. The Muslims of Bosnia (Bosniacs) may have shared a language, lived in the same place, at the same time, but their culture was not that of their neighbors.37

  Ethnic cleansing, either as “transfer” or the more horrific version that emerged in the 1990s, has affected virtually all the Balkan nations.38 It was, however, not an exclusive product of the “Balkan psyche.” Rather, it can be traced back to the way that the nation-states came into being from the 1820s onward. But no historical process explains the extraordinary violence and hatred that sometimes emerged. How is it to be understood? One answer perhaps lies in the work of the two Nobel laureates for literature from the area. Elias Canetti was born in Ruse on the banks of the Danube in 1905. His ancestors were among the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and his first language was Ladino. He was six when he left Bulgaria forever; he ended his life as a naturalized Englishman. Canetti began to write the book that eventually became Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht) in Vienna in 1925. It was finally completed and published in 1960.

  The other laureate, Ivo Andrić, was born in a village near Travnik in 1892, and remained immersed in his memories of Bosnia for the remainder of his life. He grew up in a colony—the only colony—of Austria-Hungary. Bosnia-Herzegovina had been notionally under Ottoman sovereignty until 1908, but then even that illusion was ended when it was formally incorporated in the Habsburg domains. But Bosnia and Herzegovina remained anomalous. The territory was ruled not through the governments of either Austria or Hungary but personally by the joint minister of finance acting for the emperor, Franz Joseph I. Under him a huge swarm of bureaucrats administered the country and its people more comprehensively and intrusively than ever before.39 The forty years of Habsburg rule isolated the Bosnians (in particular the Muslims) from the political experience of the other Balkan nations. “Being Muslim the Bosnian way” was a product of that period of isolation, when Bosnian Muslims became part of a largely secular society that was dominated by neither Serbs nor Croats. Nor, of course, did they as Muslims have the privileged position that they had formerly enjoyed under the Ottomans.40

  Andrić’s experience of Habsburg Bosnia as a child and young man was instrumental in the topic he chose for his doctoral thesis at the University of Graz. In 1923, he completed a study, “The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia Under the Influence of Turkish Rule.”41 From his work he concluded that history had created a deep and unbridgeable gulf in his homeland.42 In Bosnia, he wrote in 1954, “there were two worlds, between which there cannot be any real contact nor the possibility of agreement; two terrible worlds doomed to an eternal war in a thousand various forms.” Yet Andrić, who admired the great cultural heroes of the past, like Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and Petar Petrović Njegoš, did as they had done.43 He was conflating the past and the present. The Bosnia that he had known from his childhood and his early scholarship became the Bosnian present. Life did not just mimic history: it was history. He recognized this: “Our traditional and written literature has made the Turks into the wrath of God, into a kind of scarecrow that could be painted only with dark and bloody colours, something that could not be quietly talked about or coolly thought about.”44

  An unalterable past manufactured an unchangeable present. His diagnosis was painful to him. One of his characters in Bosnian Chronicle, the febrile and introspective Dr. Cologna, expressed Andrić’s own situation. For someone who knew the West,

  to live in Turkey [Bosnia] means to walk along a knife edge and to burn on a low fire. I know this, for we are born on that knife edge, we live and die on it, and we grow up and are burned out on that fire … No one knows what it means to be born and live on the brink, between two worlds, knowing and understanding both of them and to be unable to help explain them to each other and bring them closer. To love and hate both … To have two homelands and yet have none. To be everywhere at home and to remain forever a stranger. In short, to live torn on a rack, but as both victim and torturer at once.45

  THE PAST, LIKE THE PRESENT, WAS PARADOXICAL. IN 1939, ON THE 550th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje, Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović had talked of “our national Golgotha and at the same time our national resurrection.”46 World War II brought an end to the Serb resurrection. The state headed by Josip Broz (Tito) in 1945 proclaimed the “brotherhood and unity of the peoples of Yugoslavia” and persecuted all strands of exclusive nationalism. Instead of the triune state of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, the new Yugoslavia gave political identity and parliamentary institutions to many excluded from the south Slav idea. Macedonians and Bosnians were both recognized as national groups. Tito’s answer to the problems of majorities and minorities was to abolish the very concept. All were equal within a people’s democracy.47 This supranational Yugoslav identity survived Tito’s death in 1980 by little more than ten years. On June 25, 1991, the Republic of Slovenia was the first to break away from the federal state. But two years before, on the 600th anniversary of Kosovo Polje, the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosević, on the same battlefield had spoken for a militantly revivalist Serbia, and expressed the same ambiguity as Bishop Velimirović fifty years before: “It is difficult to say today whether the Battle of Kosovo was a defeat or a victory for the Serbian people, whether thanks to it we fell into slavery or we survived in this slavery.”

  Mobilizing the past to guide the present is scarcely unique to the Balkans. But Balkan myths, whether stories of Kosovo, the tales of Skenderbeg, Njegoš’s Mountain Wreath, or the idea of the unfulfilled nation written by Ljudevit Gaj in 1831—“Long she slept, but she’s not vanquished / We shall wake her and revive”—appear to serve dark and cruel ends.48 A Muslim epic song from Bosnia goes like this:

  The bloody frontier is like this

  With dinner blood, with supper blood,

  Everybody chews bloody mouthfuls,


  Never one white day for repose.49

  Does this mean that the Balkans were haunted by an inescapable history, cursed ceaselessly to repeat the bloody deeds of the past? The problem was not a curse but a deep belief that history was mother and father to the present. Each time memories of a century—or six centuries—ago were deferred to, they were given new life. Robert Kaplan wondered why Mother Tatiana’s eyes appeared “strangely unfocused” as she told of an Albanian castrating a young Serbian boy. They looked, he thought, as if they had been “blotted out by superstition.” There was another explanation: in her mind’s eye, she was really reliving the past. Hers were foul memories, but conjured up by choice and assembled into a narrative rather as Victor Frankenstein had pieced together his revenant:

  Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?… I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame … The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased.50

  This chapter, like its subject matter, is deeply ambiguous. On one side it denies that “the Balkans” are uniquely given to cruelty and atrocity. On the other, it presents a long string of horrors that seem to prove the reverse. Had I catalogued the most recent Balkan horrors of the 1990s in all their stomach-turning detail, the pages would have been saturated bloody red. For the same reason I also drew back from repeating the famous account of impalement in Andrić’s Bridge over the Drina. There is scarcely a nation in the world that does not have a black past, but there is something special about the way history has been used in the Balkans. The Greeks can legitimately claim to possess the longest and most impressive heritage, but each of the Balkan nations has constructed a clear memory of its own heroic eras: Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serb, Croat, and Bosnian periods of imperial glory have all been carefully recorded. In virtually every case, and often by playing fast and loose with chronology, the idyllic Christian past was deemed to have been brought to a shuddering halt by the Turks. Everything could be blamed on their presence.