Rethinking Islam & the West

by Ahmed Keeler

  The same lack of understanding exists regarding Islam in Africa south of the Sahara, and the amazing transformation that took place. Islam was carried to this distant region by merchants attracted by the most extensive gold deposits known at the time. But it was Mansa Mūsā, the Sultan of Mali, whose pilgrimage to Mecca in 1325 quite literally put this part of Africa on the map and turned him into a legend; he is depicted in a Catalan Atlas of 1375, seated on his throne holding a gold coin. The 16th century Malian historian Mahmud Kati in his Chronicle of the Seekers places Mansa Mūsā’s pilgrimage in context:

  From the far reaches of the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus River, the faithful approached the city of Mecca. All had the same objective: to worship together at the most sacred shrine of Islam, the Kaaba in Mecca. One such traveller was Mansa Mūsā, Sultan of Mali in Western Africa. Mansa Mūsā had prepared carefully for the long journey he and his attendants would take. He was determined to travel not only for his own religious fulfillment, but also for recruiting teachers and leaders, so that his realms could learn more of the Prophet’s teachings.

  Western accounts have focused on his fabulous wealth, describing how his caravan of sixty thousand men was like a city on the move, a city whose inhabitants, all the way down to the slaves, were clad in gold brocade and finest Persian silk. A hundred camels were in tow, each camel carrying hundreds of pounds of pure gold.

  However, it was what he brought back with him that had lasting significance. He gathered together scholars and artisans, including the Andalusian poet and architect Abū Ishāq al-Sāhili, whose masterpiece was the famous Djinguereber mosque. Timbuktu was transformed into a great centre of education, with its universities attracting scholars and students from across the world of Islam. The University of Sankore became the most famous of several universities in Timbuktu. It had its roots in the Sankore Mosque which was founded in 980, and is reputed to have had libraries containing a million manuscripts. As well as gold, Timbuktu became famous for the production and copying of books which were exported to North Africa and Egypt.

  In recent times, the discovery of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts in private collections, contained in chests found in houses and tents in Mali and across the Sahel, has demonstrated the depth of scholarship that reached into the whole society – city dwellers, villagers and nomads.

  During the centuries of Islamic civilisation, slaves came from many quarters, including Africa. Over time they were integrated into the civilisation through the various vocational routes. Travel today from Morocco to Malaysia through all the countries that were under Islam and you will not find the remains of a slave caste as you have in the Americas. In Islam, a child born to a slave woman by a freeman had the same rights as his children born in marriage. The slaves were absorbed into the mainstream of society, many becoming eminent scholars, famous warriors and wealthy merchants.

  A fragmented understanding of the past and the jaundiced view of Islam which exist today have meant that the overwhelming impact that Islamic civilisation had upon the world has been little researched and even less understood. Islam’s conquest was far reaching, long lasting and enriching, both for those who chose to remain within their historic communities, as well as for those cultures and civilisations neighbouring Dār al-Islām.

  THE WEST

  The European conquest of the world can be divided into two periods, with the watershed being the Industrial Revolution. In the first period, the Americas were completely vanquished and the rich sea trade of Asia monopolised. With the Industrial Revolution the pace quickened, the great civilisations of Asia were either conquered or brought under European control, and the vast continent of Africa was shared out between the European nations. A new global structure was formed, with Europe at its centre.

  By the 16th century, the newly formed European sovereign states consisted of an exclusive version of Christianity, an idealised civilisation, a company of voracious merchants and a warrior caste honed in the continuous warfare that was becoming endemic in Europe, and increasingly brutal with each new technological development. And these new warlike entities were about to erupt into an unsuspecting world. The sense of superiority which the European now embodied had gone far beyond what was natural to human collectives.

  Each nation state was creating its myth of origin, and we can see this taking place in the case of Portugal in Camoes’ epic poem The Lusiads. It tells the story of the saving of the land of Portugal from the Moors, and Vasco de Gama’s triumphant entry into the Indian Ocean. It invokes all the ancient gods as well as Jesus Christ in claiming Portugal and the Portuguese to be the greatest seafaring conquerors the world had ever witnessed, who far surpassed the heroes of the ancients, most of whom only existed in myth. The nobility and courage of the Portuguese and the savagery and cowardice of those they encountered, particularly the Muslims, leaps eloquently from the pages. The reader is left in no doubt that the Portuguese are another breed compared to the rest of humanity, and this over-arching pride in nation was enjoyed by every European state, reaching its summit with the British in India.

  Christianity was an exclusive religion with the belief that it was the only way to salvation; all other religions were false. But within Christendom pride in oneself was powerfully controlled through its ethical teachings. With the split in Christendom came certainty concerning one’s own version of the Faith, and intolerance and hostility towards the versions followed by others. However, it was the Europeans’ approach to civilisation that set them apart from all other cultures and civilisations. Their idealisation of the dead world of Greece and Rome meant that no living civilisation could compare with them. Added to this, the Europeans had become so used to communing with a dead world that they had difficulty in relating to the living. This meant that every culture or civilisation that the Europeans encountered was either completely or partially destroyed and replaced by the European ideal. Their cultural remains were gathered up and placed in museums – mausoleums where they could be preserved and properly studied.

  However, at the end of the 15th century the eruption of Europe upon the world stage seemed highly unlikely. Christendom was in retreat before a resurgent Islam. The Holy Land had been lost and the Ottoman Empire had conquered Byzantium, bringing Constantinople under its rule and the Eastern Mediterranean under its control. The only light for the Christians was their conquest of the entire Iberian Peninsula. A new strategy to defeat the Muslims began to form. The Portuguese had for decades been sailing further and further down the west coast of Africa. Their objective was to find a direct route into the Indian Ocean and the great wealth of Asia. It would also enable them to attack Islam from the south and destroy Mecca.

  Christopher Columbus had devised another solution to the same problem: to reach India by sailing west.

  He took his idea to a number of rulers, including Henry VII of England, but none of them felt inclined to support him. His final visit was to King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile, who were in Granada fighting the Moors. To begin with, they turned him down, but then Granada capitulated. In the euphoria of the moment, they called him back and agreed to fund his venture.

  Meanwhile, the Jews were expelled from Spain or forced to convert to Christianity. Whilst the Muslim merchants and courtiers were able to leave, a treaty was agreed allowing the majority of the Muslims, who were the farmers and craftsmen of the south of Spain, to remain and retain their religion. The treaty lasted a very short time and was followed by the imposition of conversion or death, with no possibility of being able to leave Spain. In his seminal work Blood & Faith, Matthew Carr relates the little-known story of what finally happened to the Muslims of Spain. By the beginning of the 17th century, Spain’s golden age was fading, and the Spanish became obsessed with the doctrine of Limpieza de Sangre, ‘purity of blood’. In an attempt to revive their flagging kingdom, they expelled all those with Arab or Berber blo
od, whether they were sincere Christians or only outwardly adhering to Christianity and keeping their Islam secret. After 120 years many had been completely absorbed into Spanish culture, but it did not matter. They had become the scapegoats for a Spain in decline, brilliantly captured in Cervantes’ masterpiece Don Quixote. In one of the worst events in European history, hundreds of thousands of Moriscos, as they were called, were torn from their homes and sent into exile, many dying on the way. Spain was damaged economically by this act with parts of the South never recovering their former prosperity. Now there were no Muslims in Christian Europe. Only Jewish communities remained, always living in a precarious position, and likely to be persecuted or expelled at any time.

  Let us return to Christopher Columbus. In 1492 he landed in the Americas imagining he had arrived in the Indies, and in 1498 Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered the Indian Ocean. The Pope proclaimed the voyages to be crusades, and in the treaty of Tordesillas he divided the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese, giving most of the Americas to the Spanish, save Brazil, and granting Asia to the Portuguese, excepting the Philippines. However, a great surprise awaited them: Islam and thriving Muslim communities were to be found throughout the Indian Ocean and China Sea. Mecca would not be conquered from the south.

  The Portuguese came to conquer and convert. For a hundred years they attempted to control and monopolise all the trade of Asia that travelled by sea. To achieve this they acquired, through superior firepower and strategy, the key ports of Malacca, Macau, Goa and many others. No merchant ship that used their ports or that they encountered on the high seas, was allowed to travel without a permit issued by the Portuguese authority. If those sailing the ships did not have a permit, they were treated as pirates and their cargo confiscated. A reign of terror existed at sea, and on land the Portuguese carried the Inquisition with them; inhabitants of their port enclaves were forcibly converted to Christianity. This strange empire of the sea, which had all the characteristics of a protection racket, could not last.

  By the beginning of the 17th century, the Portuguese were being harried by the great land empires, native shipping was becoming more difficult to control and other European nations were entering the arena. The Portuguese lost their monopoly and many of their ports; those that remained became absorbed into their Asian hinterland, and Portugal began its long decline.

  The 17th century belonged to the Dutch. They did not make the mistake that the Portuguese had made by trying to monopolise the system; they focused their efforts on spices, the most valuable of which came from several islands deep in the Malay Archipelago. Led by Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Governor General of the Dutch East India Company, whose rallying call was ‘Despair not, spare your enemies not, for God is with us,’ they conquered the most important of these islands, killed, deported or enslaved the inhabitants, destroyed the crops on any of the other islands, and created for themselves an absolute monopoly. It has been calculated that the Dutch East India Company was the richest business organisation that has ever existed. Its fleet was greater than those of all the European nations put together, and it had honed its warlike prowess in a hundred years of warfare with the Spanish, from which it had emerged victorious.

  During the 17th century, Holland was the richest country in Europe and enjoyed its golden age. But by the 18th century the value of spices had plummeted, as it was found they could be grown in other environments. The Dutch moved to colonise the mainland of what is today Indonesia, and for three hundred years exploited the natural wealth of the Islands, maintaining an iron grip over the inhabitants. The Japanese ousted the Dutch during World War II, only for them to return after the war to reclaim their colony. A war of independence ensued which cost the Indonesians some 200,000 lives, but finally after 400 years they were rid of the Dutch.

  The 17th century also saw the arrival in the Indian Ocean of the French and the English. By this time, the rulers of India and China were taking a greater interest in who was carrying their trade by sea. The French and English companies were allowed trading posts and for a hundred and fifty years carried on normal trading to the benefit of both parties. Europe had an insatiable appetite for Indian cotton goods and Chinese silks as well as many other fine products. The Europeans had to trade in currency since they had nothing that the Asians wanted. The Europeans, however, were awash with gold and silver from the mines in the Americas and the profits from the triangular system of trade, with slaves brought from Africa to the Americas, and crops shipped to an expanding and growing Europe. They also had the considerable profits from the sale of the Asian trade goods in Europe and the Americas.

  However, in the 18th century the Mughal Empire, which had been the dominant power in India for two hundred years, began to fall apart. The French and English, who were at war with each other across the world, joined in the battles that ensued. The English won their war against the French in India and North America, and also became the rulers of Bengal, the richest province in India. With Great Britain’s ascendancy in India and what had taken place in the Americas, the stage was set for the revolution that would change the world.

  But first, we must return to the Americas. The European conquest had been total; superior arms and the diseases the Europeans were carrying wreaked havoc upon the indigenous people and they were decimated. The high civilisations of Inca, Maya and Aztec were reduced to rubble, and their wealth and treasure shipped to Europe. In time, artefacts were placed in museums to be studied. But during that time of destruction, thousands of books were put to the flame as the forced conversion to Christianity took place with the attempt to wipe out all traces of the indigenous systems. Bishop Diego De Landa described the process in 1562:

  We found a large number of books … and, as they contained nothing other than that which was seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.

  The Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors had brought with them the Inquisition. As had been the case with the Muslims in Spain, many conformed outwardly but in private retained their traditional beliefs, some retaining them to this day. The full horror of what had taken place was related by a Dominican Friar, Bartolome de las Casas, in a report to the Spanish King:

  The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed … The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination … and whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians.

  When the British, French and Dutch invaded North America, the indigenous people fared no better. They were hunted down and slaughtered or died of disease; those who survived were ferried into reservations or enslaved and put to work in the mines and plantations that would provision the Europeans back home or in their new lands. The doctrine of ‘purity of blood’, whilst explicit with the Iberians, was nonetheless inherent in the other European nations. From Alaska to Argentina, the indigenous peoples were turned into subcultures that remain to this day.

  From the beginning, it became clear that the decimated indigenous population could not provide the labour necessary to exploit the wealth that was waiting to be garnered, and so the infamous Slave Trade began. This episode has been researched, discussed and illustrated to such a degree that just the mention of its name is enough to communicate the horror of what it was. However, in preparing the ground for the Industrial Revolution that followed, it played a key role. In using the human being as an animal that was disposable, maximum production at minimum cost could be achieved. The European exceptionalism and obsession with purity of blood ensured that the Blacks remained a species apart, whose only function was to labour. White indiscretions would go unacknowledged and th
e resultant children absorbed into the Black community. Even today President Obama, whose mother is white, is referred to as ‘black’. The caste system remains.

  The Industrial Revolution launched the West onto another level and made the Europeans invincible. The first machines invented were for spinning and weaving, and the North of England, with its fast-moving rivers, was the ideal environment to power the machines. But the British woollen textile manufacture could not be industrialised; the guilds were far too strong and the market fully supplied. Cotton provided the answer as it was imported from India, and Great Britain now controlled Bengal, the most important state producing cotton goods. Within a few years Bengal was turned from being the producer and exporter of the finest cotton goods to being, on the one hand, the provider of raw cotton for the mills of Manchester and, on the other, importers of its finished products. This was done by placing high tariffs on the export of cotton goods from Bengal and low tariffs on the imports from Manchester.