Notes on a Century: Reflections of A Middle East Historian

by Bernard Lewis

  The ancient civilizations of Asia, notably of China and India, were rich and creative and made an enormous contribution to human development but they never claimed exclusive or global truth. Their religious systems sometimes exercised considerable influence, but it was indirect, for the most part unintentional, and limited. Christianity and Islam are different. Between two such religions, related in their historic past, almost identical in their self-perceived mission, conflict was inevitable.

  In one of his sermons Saint John of Capistrano, a Franciscan whose name, along with those of other Franciscans, graces the map of California, accuses the Jews of propagating the monstrous and absurd idea that everyone can be saved in his own religion. Saint John of Capistrano said many things about the Jews and the Muslims, both of whom he disliked intensely (recommending pogroms on the one and crusades against the other) but on this particular point he was right. The Talmud says that the righteous of all faiths have a place in heaven.

  That is not the Christian or the Muslim point of view. Their message is that only their religion can save you. If you accept it, you will be saved. If you don’t accept it, then your religion is either incomplete and superseded, or false—incomplete and superseded if it is previous, false if it is subsequent. For those who believe they are the fortunate recipients of God’s final revelation to mankind, followers of a previous religion have a faith that is outdated. It can however contain elements of truth. This was the classical Christian perception of the Jews; it remains the orthodox Muslim perception of both Jews and Christians. In the foundation narrative of Islam, in the Koran and the biography of the Prophet, Christians are viewed more favorably than Jews, since the Prophet had no direct and hostile encounters with them. In subsequent stages of Islam, these attitudes were reversed. For one thing, Jews did not embrace the Trinity, seen by Muslims as a form of polytheism; nor did they accept the divinity of Jesus, seen by Muslims as a form of idolatry. More important, unlike the Christians, they did not constitute a global rival and were even, at various times and in various ways, useful. More recent developments changed these attitudes dramatically.

  There is a long history of Muslims and Christians attacking each other, and invading one another’s territory. At first clashes arose from their resemblances more than from their differences. Christians and Muslims could argue meaningfully. They did so right through the Middle Ages in areas where they met, notably Spain and Sicily. When a Christian said to a Muslim or a Muslim said to a Christian, “You are an infidel and you will burn in hell,” each understood exactly what the other meant because they meant the same thing. Their heavens are somewhat different, but their hells are the same. Saying that to a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Confucian would not convey much meaning. When you have two religions making the same claim with the same self-perception and in the same geographical area, you are bound to have trouble.

  According to the Muslim narrative the Prophet Muhammad, during his lifetime, sent messages to the emperors of Byzantium, Iran and Ethiopia, telling them of his mission and urging them to accept this final version of the true faith. Iran was conquered and Islamized. Christianity, despite many defeats and losses, survived both in Byzantium and in Ethiopia, as well as beyond in Europe, and the long struggle continued between the two rival claimants to the mission—that is, the custodianship and spread of God’s final message to humanity.

  The followers of the Prophet conquered the hitherto Christian countries of Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, and invaded Europe, conquering Sicily, Spain, and Portugal and invading France. After some hundreds of years Christians were able to reconquer Spain and Portugal and Sicily but they could not reconquer North Africa, and failed in their attempt, known as the Crusades, to recover the lost Holy Land of Christianity.

  The second Muslim attack came when the Ottomans created a new empire in the Middle East. They conquered the ancient Christian city of Constantinople, and invaded Europe. Their allies, the Barbary Corsairs—we might call them privateers—operating from the North African coast, raided the shores of Christendom as far away as Iceland, and seized hundreds of thousands of Christians to be sold in the slave markets of Algiers and elsewhere in North Africa.

  That phase too ended in defeat. The decline and collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I was followed by the expansion of the European imperial powers, Britain, France, Russia and to a lesser extent the Netherlands and Italy, into the lands of Islam. That domination was ended after World War II, and what is happening at the present time is seen by some as the third attempt by Muslims to fulfill their divinely appointed mission of bringing God’s truth and final revelation to all humanity. This time it is not by invasion and conquest, but by migration and demography.

  In the past one might have said that the clashes between Islam and Christendom arose less from their differences than their resemblances; the same global view, the same historic background, the same self-perceived sense of mission. But the growth of secularism in the Western world has brought a radical change. Far from sharing the Muslim self-perception, most people in the West are unable even to understand that perception, and react with bafflement and incomprehension to the challenges that it presents.

  Politics and Islam

  All history, as the great German historian Leopold von Ranke remarked, is contemporary. This applies no less to the Islamic than to the Western world—indeed, perhaps more so, since the Islamic world is only now beginning to traverse the great sequence of social, cultural, economic, and religious changes which transformed Europe from the world of medieval Christendom to that of the modern secular, industrial states. Religion still has a public and social significance in the Islamic world—as the source of authority, the focus of loyalty, the definition of identity—which it has not known in Europe since the changes resulting from the Renaissance, the Discoveries, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution.

  But beyond that there is, in a more profound sense, a link between religion and politics in Islam which has never existed in the Christian religion. The founder of Christianity bade his followers render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s. For more than three hundred years, Christians were a minority, deprived of power, and often subject to violent persecution. It was not until the conversion of Constantine that Christianity became the religion of the state, and by that time it had formed its own institution, the church, which had its own laws, its own courts, and its own administering hierarchy. Throughout Christian history, and in virtually all Christian societies, it has been accepted that there are two authorities, dealing with two different matters—God and Caesar, church and state, religious and secular affairs. These two have sometimes been associated, sometimes separated, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict, sometimes one dominant, sometimes the other, but always two.

  In premodern Islam, in contrast, there was only one. The founder of Islam was not forbidden, like Moses, to enter his promised land, still less did he suffer martyrdom. On the contrary, he achieved military and political success during his lifetime. After his migration from Mecca, his birthplace, to Medina, he created a new state and was ultimately able to conquer and rule Mecca itself. Muhammad became a sovereign—commanding armies, making war and peace, levying taxes, dispensing justice; in a word, performing all the acts of sovereignty in which, in the Muslim perception, he set a model for generations to come.

  There is thus in Islamic history, and more specifically in the early formative events which are the common possession of Muslims everywhere and which shape their corporate awareness, an interpenetration of creed and power, of correct belief and worldly dominance, that has no parallel in Christianity, and that has had no parallel in Judaism since the earliest books of the Old Testament. “Islam,” said the late Ayatollah Khomeini, “is politics or it is nothing.” Not all Muslims would go that far, but there is no doubt that the Ayatollah was putting his finger on an important element in the relationship between religion
and politics, as conceived by Muslims and as manifested in Islamic history.

  This does not mean, as some have assumed, that the activities of those who present themselves as terrorists in the name of Islam are in any sense encouraged, or even condoned, by Islamic doctrine, tradition, or law. Far from permitting such practices as the indiscriminate murder of noncombatants or the taking of hostages for blackmail, Islamic law expressly forbids them. No man, says the Koran in several places, shall bear another’s burden. Islamic law does indeed regulate the giving and taking of hostages, but this is on a voluntary basis, when hostages are exchanged between parties to an agreement, as pledges for the fulfillment of their obligations. Such practices were at one time very common and have nothing whatever to do with the modern practices of kidnapping and blackmail. Similarly, while Islamic law enjoins holy war, that is to say, warfare for the faith against infidels and apostates, it lays down certain rules of warfare, including respect for noncombatants. The earliest formulations of these rules of warfare go back almost to the beginning of the Islamic era.

  In the past, the Muslim world was perhaps unique in its sense of history and of its mission, constantly renewed by the annual pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which brought millions of Muslims from all over the world to share in common rites and rituals. Today modern communications and the media have given the Western world a similar opportunity, but for the most part that opportunity is not exploited as both our historical knowledge and historical awareness remain extraordinarily deficient. The Islamic world still defines itself in terms of its religion and its religious civilization. Such terms as “the Middle East,” and even “Europe” and “Asia” are comparatively recent innovations in Islamic usage. In contrast, the West no longer defines itself as Christendom; indeed, to do so would be seen as both misleading and offensive. Such terms as “the West” obviously lack the resonance and power of the word “Islam.”

  In my work I was constantly reminded of these significant differences between the Islamic and the Western worlds. I also became aware, from the late 1950s, of the changing mood among Muslims. This awareness came and grew in a number of ways: by reading or hearing what was written and said in Muslim countries, by talking to Muslim students, and by traveling in Muslim countries. In all these cases being able to follow what Muslims said and wrote among themselves in their own languages was crucially important. To understand what is going on a knowledge of the languages of the region is essential. But it is not in itself sufficient. In this society appeals to the past, sometimes no more than a name, a date, or a place, are common.

  For a while it seemed that the Islamic world, even in its opposition to the West, was becoming Westernized, perceiving its identity and loyalty, its grievances and ambitions, in Western terms. But in the course of the twentieth century this began to change, and there were increasing signs of Islamic identity and loyalty. One of the most notable was the development of the organization known as the Muslim Brothers, founded in Egypt by a religious teacher, Hassan al-Banna.

  The Muslim Brothers began with social, religious and educational work and extended that first into economic and then into political activity. They actively protested the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, which legitimized the British military presence in Egypt, and later took up the cause of the Palestinian Arabs against both British and Zionist rule. In 1948 they sent volunteers to fight with the Arab armies against Israel and from that time onward they have played some role in public affairs. The then Egyptian Prime Minister, Nuqrashi Pasha, dissolved the organization and confiscated its property. He was assassinated by one of them in 1948 and shortly after that the leader of the Brothers was himself murdered in circumstances that remain obscure. For a while the Brothers functioned as a secret organization. In April 1951 they were again legalized in Egypt, though not officially permitted to engage in any clandestine or military activities. They took part in the actions against British troops in the Suez Canal zone and seem to have had links with the so-called “Free Officers” who seized power in Egypt in 1952. Thereafter their relationships with the rulers of Egypt have gone through different phases, sometimes openly hostile.

  The Muslim Brothers and related organizations operated in the main in the Arabic-speaking countries, but there were parallel movements in Iran, in Turkey, and in the predominantly Muslim republics of the Soviet Union. The Brothers were also active among the Palestinians and for a while had links with Fatah, the largest and most important of the Palestinian guerrilla organizations.

  Muslim Identity and the Eclipse of Secularism

  My earliest recorded reference to the much-discussed “clash of civilizations” occurred at a conference held at the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C., in the last week of August 1957.2 In this I tried to answer a question of agonizing concern to Americans at that time, “Why should the United States, which has never annexed or occupied an inch of territory in the Middle East, which on the contrary has shown a generosity without precedent in history toward the states of the Middle East, be included in this generalized hostility to the West?”

  In response to this very natural, indeed obvious, question, I tried to explain that for the vast majority of the Muslim peoples of the Middle East, country and ethnicity, the main determinants of identity and therefore of loyalty in Christian Europe, were of secondary and usually of minor importance. Both patriotism and nationalism, identity and loyalty by country and nation, were new and imperfectly assimilated concepts. The basic identity and therefore loyalty was religion. In the West we think of a nation subdivided into religions. In the Islamic world, they think rather of a religion subdivided into nations, subdivisions which, though locally important, are globally secondary. In the Middle East the Western nations, primarily seen as Christendom, are often perceived as one group, sometimes, though not usually, including Russia.

  When I was working in the Turkish Archives in the 1950s, I stayed in Turkey rather longer than would be possible with a normal visitor’s visa. I therefore had to apply for a temporary residence permit. There was no difficulty. I filled in the form, handed it in to the office and called a couple of days later to collect my permit. As I was walking away, I noticed that under the identity line, they had written the word “Protestant.” I went back and said, “There’s some mistake, you have written me down as a Protestant. I am not a Protestant, I am Jewish.” The official said, “Well, you must have written ‘Protestant’ on your application form, otherwise we wouldn’t have put it in.” I said, “I most certainly didn’t. I know what I am.” So they looked and said, “You wrote ‘English’ and English means Protestant, everybody knows that.” It took lengthy explanations and an appeal to a higher authority before I could get my residence permit corrected. A similar incident occurred in Tehran where an English colleague and I went together to get our residence permits. There, more explicitly than in Turkey, was a line for religion. My case presented no difficulty. I filled in my religion and received my permit. My friend had a problem. He had written down “Christian,” and for the Iranian authorities this was insufficient. “We need to know what kind of Christian you are,” they said. “Are you Greek, Armenian, Catholic, Orthodox or what?” He tried to explain that he came from a secular family and did not participate in any kind of worship but this was not acceptable and he finally had to chose one specific denomination. This enabled him to get a temporary residence permit.

  By the mid-twentieth century there were already numerous indications of a growing awareness in the Islamic world of a common Muslim identity and of a common shared enemy in the global world of the unbelievers. Some examples: in November 1945 demonstrations were held in Egypt on the anniversary of the British publication of the Balfour Declaration. The organizers of the demonstration intended this as a protest against the British government and its Zionist protégés. It soon developed into an anti-Jewish riot and, more remarkably, into a more general anti-non-Muslim outbreak in the
course of which several Catholic, Armenian and Greek Orthodox churches were attacked and damaged. A similar expansion of the enemy occurred in January 1952, when demonstrations were organized in Suez against the continuing British occupation of the Suez Canal. The anti-British demonstrators also looted and set fire to a Coptic church and killed a number of local Christians of various denominations. The Copts, with a history going back to antiquity, are surely the most authentically Egyptian of all the inhabitants of that country. As I write this book in late 2011, events have forced almost a hundred thousand Copts to leave Egypt. In the moments of passion, they have been seen as part of the enemy and treated accordingly. According to a saying attributed, probably falsely, to the Prophet, “Unbelief is one nation.” That is to say, the world is divided basically into two, on the one hand the community of the true believers, on the other hand the world of the unbelievers, the subdivisions of which are small and of diminishing importance.

  This religious perception was increased by such events as the Lebanese civil war of 1958 and the struggle in Iraq the following year between the nationalists and the communists. On March 17, 1959, a prayer was recited in Egyptian mosques and published on the front pages of the Egyptian papers for those who had been killed in Mosul. It included the following passage: “Oh God Almighty . . . strengthen the community of Thy Prophet with Thy favor and disdain for their enemy . . . in sincerity we call upon Thee, the blood of our martyrs we entrust to Thee . . . for the glory of Thy religion they shed their blood and died as martyrs: believing in Thee, they greeted the day of sacrifice blissfully. Therefore place them, O God, as companions with the upright and the martyrs and the righteous.” The religious passion and fervor caused growing alarm among Christian minorities in Lebanon and elsewhere.