Making War In The Name Of God. Christopher Catherwood
was far from the case, with eminent Sufi leaders in the past, such as the medieval al-Nuwayri, taking part in battle, in addition to Muslim rulers of more martial bent. Sufis, in centuries gone by, have been as militaristic in their interpretation of jihad as anyone else, even if, like al-Ghazali, the great philosopher, they put more emphasis on the inner rather than violent version.
So while the many Sufi orders, from the Balkans to northern Africa, practiced the inner jihad, Muslims of all descriptions were involved as soldiers in the martial version, that of conquest. Islam was, in effect, perpetually on the march, conquering new territory from 632 to 1683, a period more than a millennium long. The predominance of the West is incredibly recent, and if nations such as China or India catch up with us during the twenty-first century, Western hegemony will be seen as a transient phase lasting not much longer than four hundred years, well under half the time scale of Islamic supremacy. Come a hundred years from now, both Western and Islamic domination will both be phenomena of the past, as we continue in what might well be the Asian Millennium.
ISLAM’S WARS OF CONQUEST:
THE MUSLIM EMPIRE 632–751
“Who started it?”
How often has an irate teacher or parent entered a room in which two children are fighting with each other, only for each child to blame the other one for starting the quarrel.
It is somewhat the same scenario with the age-old dispute between Christianity and Islam. Back in 1998, one thousand years after the start of the First Crusade, a group of Christian pilgrims walked the original Crusader route from France to Jerusalem, in apology for the Crusades of a millennium earlier. Even today, when debates take place between Christians and Muslims, one of the first things that the Islamic side of the discussion will do is to ask the Christians to apologize for the Crusades.
All this has done is to perpetuate what is in fact untrue—that the West is responsible for aggression against the Islamic world, and that Muslims throughout history have been the hapless victims of Christian-inspired Western imperialism.
This, in turn, ties in with two major strands of thought: first, that of self-loathing by many of my fellow intellectuals in the West, in particular those who are motivated by a strong dislike of religion of any kind; and, second, by extremist Islamic groups for whom any attempt or opportunity to tarnish the West, especially its imperialism, is always welcome. As I was writing this book, al Qaeda’s number two leader, al-Zawahiri, issued a statement roundly condemning what he regarded as a Crusader and Zionist alliance against the Muslim world, i.e., those living in Lebanon and who are under Israeli attack.
What is significant about such beliefs is that millions believe in them, well beyond those writing and speaking in the two previous categories: Western secular intellectuals and Islamic hard-line religious extremists. I think Victor Davis Hanson is right, in Between War and Peace, to say that often people simply do not learn such things at school; and lest non-American readers feel complacent, I have found this among pupils on both sides of the Atlantic.
One of the main tasks I want to accomplish in this book is to show that this is, in fact, a wholly false perspective. In the near fourteen hundred years in which Christians and Muslims have been living side by side, there is, in reality, very little to choose between them when it comes to wars of aggression or of imperial intent. Not only that, but for the first millennium, roughly from 632 and the death of Muhammad, right up until the second attempt by the Ottoman Turks to capture the city of Vienna in 1683, the boot was firmly on the Islamic foot, with the Muslim powers on the offensive and those of Christianity on the defensive.
Although the motives of the Crusaders were often spiritual rather than imperialistic, their actions were—with some similarity to Sheikh Badawi’s post-9/11 observation—quite contrary to the foundational tenets of Christian faith. To attack Christianity for the Crusades is therefore historically and theologically mistaken, even by the standards of the “just war” theory that evolved in the Church after it became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the late fourth century.
All this debate—indeed much of the subject matter of this book—is, alas, also part of the internal culture wars in the present-day United States, something wearily familiar to many American readers, and also a debate that frequently baffles those living outside it, including often-bewildered British regular visitors like me.
It is therefore important for me to say here—as someone who has close friends on both sides of the cultural conflict in the USA—that I will attempt to write as someone neutral in internal American discussions, and that what follows should be read without bias in that regard. Muslims are often perceived in stark terms, as all wonderful, peace-loving victims of Western oppression, or evildoers in whom no good is ever to be found, enemies of the West and everything we stand for. (I am exaggerating but, in the light of some books I have read on each side, sadly not by all that much.) Thankfully, too, there are plenty of historians who, while having strong views of their own, are scrupulously fair to all standpoints, and I will do my best to be the same.
So let us transport ourselves back to the seventh century, to see what happened then, regardless of whether we think that twenty-first-century Muslims are nearly all peaceful people who love us or fanatics out to blow Western civilization into oblivion.
Whatever our views on the advice Princeton sage Bernard Lewis played in advising the Bush administration in 2003 on the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, I think that his views on the contrast between early Christianity and the dawn of Islam are incontrovertible. Christianity, he shows in his many books, spent its first three hundred years as an underground, persecuted religion. Islam, from the beginning, was a faith of military and political power, with its founder, Muhammad, not just the spiritual leader, but the head of state and army commander all rolled into one.
This difference, Lewis argues, makes all the difference even today, in how those of us in the West perceive life and issues in a way quite distinct from those inspired by Islam. This will be crucial for our understanding of the final chapter, when we look at Islamic-inspired terrorism, but its application to the subject of the present topic—the historical Islamic wars of conquest—is obvious.
Islam is, and always has been, a religion of power. There is surely no doubt that the early Muslim centuries are those of political and military conquest, and what controversial British/ Israeli academic Ephraim Karsh calls in his latest book, those of Islamic imperialism.
While the first century of Christianity saw martyrdoms, of converts being thrown to the lions in the Circus, or used as human torches by the emperor Nero, the first generation of Muhammad’s followers were engaged in creating one of the biggest land empires that the world has ever seen. From 632, the year of his death and the election of Abu Bakr, as his first successor or caliph, until exactly a century later, when, in 732, the Muslim invaders of France were checked at a battle between Tours and Poitiers by the army of Charles Martel, the Islamic shock troops conquered an empire far bigger even than that of Rome at its peak. From the Atlantic coast of Spain in Europe, across the whole of North Africa and the Middle East, through to Persia and the borders of the Indus in what is now India: all this was under the rule of the caliphs, and under the banner of the Prophet Muhammad and his law.
Christianity also spread in its first century, but slowly and clandestinely, since to be caught promoting or practicing this faith could involve death. As a result, the growth was through conversion—through persuasion—and in the teeth of opposition from the ruling authorities.
Islam, to be fair, later also grew through a mix of trade and conversions, especially in what is today the biggest Muslim nation in the world, Indonesia. We must never forget that most Muslims are not Arabs, and that for them the actual language of the Quran is as foreign to them as it is to us. Even now, for instance, while the millions of Christians in Nigeria read the Bible in their own language, the only permitted version of the Quran remains that of the Arabic original—although Islam, like Christianity, is a universal monotheistic missionary faith, it remains rooted in its Middle Eastern origins in a way that Christianity is not.
As British scholars Peter Cotterell and Peter Riddell remind us, this is in itself part of the military triumph of early Islam, when Islam was a both a faith and a tool of Arab