Investigations of the Future

by Brian Stableford

  Things proceeded there with a promptitude to which one cannot pay too much homage. After having established, not without supportive evidence and testimony, the rectitude of the Andalusian cities and the bad faith of the Moroccan government, it listed minutely the conciliatory measures attempted in the interests of peace; it did not try to conceal that these measures had remained sterile; it showed the Sultan rejecting all the advances of diplomacy, refusing any explanation of his military preparations, making alliances alarming to general tranquility—in a word, organizing all the elements of an offensive war. In those conditions, the Grand Council judged that a conflict was becoming more likely by the day, and concluded that force would probably have to be met, before long, with force.

  In order not to be found wanting, it voted three resolutions: firstly, to send to His Majesty the Sharif an official letter designed to make an impression on his mind by signaling the gravity of the events that were about to occur and for which he would bear the responsibility before history; secondly, to appeal to the sentiments of solidarity of Europe entire, and to ask for help in the form of men, arms and equipment; and thirdly, to verify the number of condition of the mercenary contingents and reinforce them by supplementing them with all the free citizens that the physicians declared approximately sound and fit for service.

  The second part of the last article was not passed without difficulty, but it passed. The embarrassment was renewed, however, when serious discussion began as to how it was to be executed. The young people proposed as recruits were devoid of any enthusiasm. The beauty of the task confronting them was represented to them in a celebratory fashion; the necessity of communal salvation was alleged; they were even proclaimed in advance as “heroic defenders of the great humanitarian fatherland”—but these various means of persuasion left them cold. They replied with the celebrated line that one of the first apostles of social emancipation—a député in the Parliament of the Third French Republic—had written: “The fatherland is wherever one feels at ease.”49 And they affirmed that they felt very ill at ease in a country where people were at risk of getting killed. Frequently desertions soon emphasized the disfavor attached to the idea of enrolling free citizens, and the project was abandoned.

  The appeal to European brotherhood similarly had only limited success. Ordinarily, the Andalusians were not well-liked; the mildness of their climate, the richness of their soil and the eternal clarity of their blue sky, beneath which life was spontaneously joyful and carefree, had spared them much effort in the conquest of happiness; they were seen as possessors of privileges that were due solely to chance; without anyone daring to admit it, a vague sentiment of envy was mingled with the apparent cordiality of habitual relationships; no one was displeased to witness, for once, their distress. To be sure, these deplorable jealousies were not unanimous, and some exceptions merited praise. The city of Orléans, among others, only listened to its generous inspirations; to each of the ten most seriously threatened communes it sent two special delegates, who lavished fine words on the inhabitants and congratulated them warmly for devoting themselves thus to the cause of civilization.

  It is sad, even today, to think that all that feverish activity was a complete waste of effort. No appeal to humanity or justice could prevail against the brutal fanaticism of the Sultan. He wanted war regardless; he had been anticipating and preparing for it for a long time; as soon as the moment seemed opportune, he unleashed it without scruple.

  To tell the truth, it was less a war than a simple takeover. As soon as the first movements of the enemy fleets had been advertised by the semaphores of the European coasts, the municipalities went to the invaders to surrender to their discretion and beg for mercy. Only one city, Cadiz, thought it was in any shape to resist. Confident in the energy of its militia and a corps of volunteers recruited to the last minute, it refused access to its harbor to the ships arriving there, sank three of them that tried to force access, and obliged the rest to retreat to the open sea. That act of temerity earned it a few days respite. A paltry advantage! Especially when one thinks of what that ephemeral independence was going to cost.

  Two days later, a double assault, by land and by sea, ended with a check to the Muslim troops. The Moors retreated again, but the besieged had suffered as much as the assailants; sixty per cent of their mercenaries, the only resource on which they could seriously count, were killed or injured; the rest, exhausted by fatigue, were killed at their posts the following morning when the second attack was launched—and the way was open for the frightful reprisals that the victors exacted.

  As much out of vengeance as to issue a warning to other adversaries of the futility of any attempt at self-defense, Emir Ali-el-Hadji, the commander of the Muslim forces at Cadiz, resolved to destroy the unfortunate city. Before the battle, he had promised his soldiers ten hours of pillage; until sunset he unleashed them into the houses and the streets, with no restraint or control; only at dusk did he order his officers to sound the rally and reorganize their troops. The remaining men, women and children were sent to Africa and sold in the slave market—and the Emir withdrew, leaving behind, as a monument to his wrath, a heap of deserted ruins from which the smoke of recent fires rose up.

  That atrocious example had not even the excuse of political necessity; it was gratuitous cruelty. For, if such a crime terrified populations, it could not distress them any more than they already had been since the disembarkation of the first enemy launch. The Arab leaders knew, and did not doubt, that their campaign would be reduced to a simple military stroll. With a little patience and mildness, they would have ended up, without spilling a single drop of blood, by triumphing over a paltry band of fanatics.

  Fortunately, that monstrous violence was not renewed. Impressed by the noble moral resignation of his victims, His Majesty the Sharif consented to formulate in advance the law that would be imposed upon them; everyone knew thereafter what to expect. So harsh were the conqueror’s conditions that they were even worse than the capricious exigencies of soldiery.

  In exchange for immediate submission, the communes would be respected; given a solemn promise to convert to the region of the Prophet, the citizens would retain their lives and the liberty, and keep all their property; in case of refusal, they would be obliged, three hours after an announcement by the public criers, to have evacuated the cities in order to withdraw northwards, beyond the mountains of the Sierra Morena; any attempt at rebellion, any infraction of the regulations or even any delay in carrying them out, would be punished by death or slavery.

  Thanks to the self-control of the vanquished, these excessive penalties rarely had occasion to be employed; out of dignity and prudence, the Andalusians did not expose themselves to them. Not much inclined to try out the political and social advantages of the Moroccan regime, they emigrated en masse, without waiting to be obliged to do so, hastily carrying away a few remains of their past splendor.

  In the confusion of that immense exodus, however, which retreated before the impatient march of Berber cavalry, who would ever be able to count the number of unfortunates who died of fatigue, fright or distress? The survivors of the lugubrious tragedy were dispersed throughout the continent according to the hazards of exile. Those who, at the price of a sorry abdication, were able to remain in their homes rapidly succumbed to a mode of existence to which they were ill-adapted. In less than two months, the last vestiges of a great human family had been swept from the surface of the world. And if the invasion stopped, it was because that was what the invaders wanted.

  Europe, initially more surprised that frightened by that bold display of force, did not take long to feel grave anxiety. Conscious of the splendors of its civilization, it had only ever envisaged with disdain the hypothesis of foreign aggression. This one struck it with amazement, then fear. Suddenly, it thought itself doomed. Calm returned on the day when it acquired the assurance of not seeing the Moors extend their conquests beyond Andalusia—but the memory of the alarm was not completely effa
ced as soon as the crisis was over, and for a long time it furnished material for interesting discussions between the various schools of political theorists.

  The theoreticians, a few of whom still existed in each commune, could be divided in a general fashion into two principal groups: those who had been frightened and had been reassured, and those who had also been frightened, but were not reassured. The former enjoyed a reputation for wisdom and clear-sightedness that was refused to the latter, and achieved much greater success with their contemporaries. People were grateful to them for having confidence in the future, appreciative of the subtle scientific, philosophical and strategic considerations by means of which they proved that further offensive action by the Muslim armies was implausible and impossible. People like to hear them talk, if only to reassure themselves.

  As for the others, there would be no need to mention the sinister prophecies they repeated incessantly if events had not justified their apprehensions in a most untoward fashion. Then again, it is not widely known that it was by virtue of their efforts and with their support that the famous Anti-Peace League was organized, the vogue for which occupied idle public opinion for a while.

  The founder of that society with the bellicose title was the famous Frédéric Ledoux, already well-known for his works on Methods of Intense Reproduction for the Human Species. He set out, in the heart of civilization, to resuscitate the military spirit and organize a movement for the creation of permanent armies. He only contrived interminable purely oratory polemics, from which nothing emerged and nothing could emerge. When people wearied of hearing the same arguments indefinitely repeated with regard to a single question, they moved on to something else; the Anti-Peace League ceased to attract lovers of casuistry and eloquence; it died for want of adherents.

  Nevertheless, it had succeeded in maintaining a few vague dreads in the strongest minds. On the other hand, several communes in Spain, predisposed to circumspection by the proximity of the Moors, issued complaints in all directions, demanding protection against the peril of an eventual Arab irruption. As much to give them satisfaction as a measure of general security, three hundred and thirty-two cities formed a syndicate with the aim of founding a new society called The Modern Missions, which took responsibility for civilizing the Islamic populations and proving to them that all humans are siblings, free and equal.

  This vast project, whose history will not be forgotten by philanthropy, would certainly have exerted the most salutary influence if its impetus had not been interrupted at the outset by the ill will of the Mohammedan functionaries. Not only did they welcome the delegates of the Modern Missions unsympathetically, but when they discovered the objective of their voyage they expelled them brutally. The majority took that as read and did not persist; the most devoted reacted audaciously by commencing lecture tours.

  They came to grief; at the first meeting, they were nearly stoned to death by the audience as sacrilegious blasphemers; the police showed up in time to disperse the crowd with truncheon-blows and rescue the injured orators. The justice of the cadis, however, to which they were immediately deferred, did not think the punishment sufficient. Accused of propagating perverse doctrines and provoking disturbances, they were condemned to various punishments. Some were beaten on the soles of their feet; others had their ears or noses cut off; the most severely compromised were subjected to an amputation that, in raising their voices by an octave, deprived them of any future criminal conversation with women. They were then invited once again to return to their native land, not without having been warned that in case of recidivism, their heads would simply be cut off.

  These signs of malevolence immediately discouraged the apostolate; after a few months of popularity, the Modern Missions suffered the same fate as the Anti-Peace League and other similar societies; they no longer served as anything but motives for periodic banquets, accompanied by speeches and toasts. In any case, their discredit was explicable by the remoteness of the catastrophes that had determined their birth; four years had gone by since the inauspicious events of 300. The emotion provoked by the sack of Cadiz had had time to die down; the conquerors were not thinking of advancing the limits of their conquests, and nothing authorized the anticipation that they would ever think of it. Europe was weary of the artificial agitation maintained around that already-ancient history; it demanded to be left in peace and that no one should any longer talk about Andalusia, Andalusians, Allah or his prophet.

  The Invasion

  Circumstances then seemed to conform with this desire for appeasement. In 302, the author responsible for the war, the Sultan of Morocco, died, abandoning a burdensome succession to his twenty-five year old heir, his son Ibrahim III—who was later to become Ibrahim-el-Kebir.

  That terrible manipulator of men had only vaguely revealed, in his childhood and youth, the characteristic predispositions by which superior destinies are announced. Taciturn and melancholy, he had the reputation of possessing an average intelligence. A few close acquaintances were however, astonished by the harshness of the gaze that sometimes pierced his ordinarily veiled pupils, and those who also knew about his cold determination, carefully dissimulated, his physical and moral strength of resistance and his secret religious mysticism divined that, beneath his superficial and insignificant personality, another was immersing itself, doubtless unknown to everyone else, in mysterious and redoubtable dreams.

  For a long time, no one in Europe knew about the part he had played in Andalusian affairs, the organizational genius he had deployed in preparing for the expedition, and the political activity with which he improvised the government of the annexed territories. His future subjects were unaware of it themselves, and, in the simplicity of their souls, attributed all the glory to his father, the Sultan. A dominator purely for the love of domination, certainly convinced of his divine right, Ibrahim cared little for the favor of crowds. He was a model of the veritable Oriental autocrat, enclosed in his superhuman majesty, almost invisible, exercising his unlimited power from the depths of his palace and only appearing at solemn moments to take command of the believers and lead them in holy war.

  It is only now, on looking back at the totality of his actions, that the implacable unity of his thought and the patient energy he employed in pursuit of its execution, becomes obvious. The vast projects accomplished on the threshold of his old age were incubating in his solitary mind from the days of his most distance adolescence. Before coming to the throne, he sketched out their first lines with the invasion of Spain. As soon as his rule began, he set to work with the stubborn tenacity of a monomaniac, and did not want to be distracted from them until he saw them completed.

  Indifferent to the means, by violence or by cunning, by cruelty or persuasion, for twenty-seven years he stirred up Islam until he had centralized its scattered strength in his hands. He had begun with his own empire, overhauling the old public services whose weakness he sensed from top to bottom. He had renewed his armaments according to the givens of modern science; he had ensured the resources of his treasury thanks to regular increases in taxation. A few attempts at more or less open resistance were drowned in blood, only contributing to the confirmation of his power and the increase of his prestige by means of terror. When he judged that he was the master of a solid instrument, he turned it against neighboring States; then began the series of murderous campaigns and the formidable assembly of political alliances that as to conclude in a sort of confederation of the African peoples, under the supremacy of Morocco.

  Not content with that uncontrolled temporal authority, the Sharif was able to combine it with the mirage of a pretended religious mission. A descendant of Mohammed, he claimed to receive inspiration directly from the prophet, and he made himself believed. At the same time as he demolished and reconstituted an immense continent according to his desire, he dared to retouch the Quranic texts, and his reform, instead of dooming him, elevated his renown to the level of sanctity and extended his moral influence to the ultimate bounds of the A
siatic world. A day came when he realized in his person the most prodigious dream of absolute despotism that had ever been able to haunt a human brain. He was both the infallible pope and the victorious Caesar of five hundred million fanatical and bellicose human beings.

  For whomever has penetrated the march of history, and knows that every seed tends in a fatal manner to develop until the full blossoming of its latent strength, the appearance of Ibrahim-el-Kebir in not an inexplicable phenomenon. The conqueror should have been anticipated long before the conquest; he was, in sum, the supreme conclusion, the finished incarnation of the genius of Islam in its various aspects. The struggle between the Orient and the Occident had only been intermittent since the Crusades. Europe believed that it had been terminated by victorious skirmishes distributed throughout centuries of truce. It was mistaken, and paid for its error with its ruination.

  The writer who will one day study the great Muslim invasion—if there is such a writer and anything is studied henceforth—will not be able to take any account of the distant origins to which the events of the year 329 are connected. Now, in the disarray of the frightful crisis, scarcely dormant, before a future veiled in black, who can think of a work of science and thought? The documents and the witnesses no longer exist. About the tragedy in which civilized society foundered, everyone only knows sparse fragments and particular details. The totality remains obscure, almost inconceivable, resistant for the moment to any kind of serious commentary.