Making War In The Name Of God. Christopher Catherwood
those from Persia, were bitter about their second-class status.
Christians, Jews, and others deemed to be of monotheistic faith who did not convert were known as dhimmi, or peoples of the Book, granted special but nonetheless subservient status by the Quran, In recent years, mainly due to the pseudonymous author Ba’t Yeor, the precise status of the dhimmi class under Muslim rule has become one of considerable debate, not just in academic circles but also in the way in which Islam has become part of the culture wars in the United States since 2001.
As a consequence it is hard to know who is right, and how exactly dhimmi were treated. I tend to think that their treatment varied enormously both geographically and chronologically, some Islamic rulers being highly enlightened—such as the Ummayad rulers of Andalus in Spain—whereas others being viciously oppressive, not hesitating to murder those of their subjects who refused to conform. In other words, generalization is impossible, as local circumstances vary.
One of the reasons why conversions were not forced is that non-Muslims had to pay a special poll tax. This meant that it was financially beneficial to the community for the dhimmi to not convert, as becoming Muslims eventually exempted them from the tax. So it was several centuries before the region that we now think of as inexorably Muslim actually turned to the Islamic religion. Even today the Middle East has large Christian minorities, most notably the Copts in Egypt.
By 711, Islamic armies were poised on the edge of Europe. A local dispute in Vandal-ruled Spain—Vandals being the Germanic tribe that had conquered the Iberian Peninsula after the fall of Rome—gave Tariq, an ambitious Muslim general, the chance that the invaders needed to cross over into Europe and begin what soon turned out to be yet another story of lightning conquest and Islamic triumph.
The peninsula was overrun in no time and, by the early 730s, Muslim armies were in southern France, not all that far from Paris. It seemed as if Western Europe itself would be the next victim of holy war.
However, in France, in Charles Martel, the mayor of the palace to the nominal French kings, the Merovingians, the forces of Islam had finally met their match after one hundred years of effortless conquest. In 732, a century after the death of Muhammad, at a battle somewhere between the modern towns of Tours and Poitiers, the Islamic invaders were defeated and the Frankish forces prevailed. France was safe and so was the rest of Western Europe.
Edward Gibbon, the great British eighteenth-century historian, wondered how life would have been different had that battle gone the other way. Would the Islamic scholars of Oxford have been expounding the Quran, instead of the Christian clergy upholding the Bible there instead? It is an interesting counterfactual question, and, as Gibbon also outlined in the same paragraphs, it shows how close the West came to conquest, since, as he put it, the rivers of Western Europe were surely no greater a natural barrier to invaders than were those of the Middle East and North Africa.
The Islamic conquests did not stop altogether, though. In 751, Islamic soldiers won a major battle over Tang dynasty forces at Talas, in Central Asia, expanding the Muslim conquests there with consequences we shall see in the next chapter. In 831, Muslim armies also conquered Sicily, which was not fully liberated until 1091, and the fact that the latter date is very close to that of the proclamation of the First Crusade in 1095 is surely no coincidence.
(Sicily was to be multicultural for centuries after liberation, especially under its subsequent German Hohenstaufen rulers, and through that, a major conduit of wholly positive Islamic learning in medicine, science, and similar fields in the twelfth century—we should not forget that there were some Islamic invasions, in this case of advance learning, that were entirely beneficial.)
From Sicily, occasional Islamic raiding parties were able to seize parts of southern Italy, albeit temporarily, and raiders from North Africa—later to be nicknamed the Barbary pirates—were able to spread terror on successful slaving expeditions to all parts of Western Europe, Britain included, until finally destroyed by the Americans under Thomas Jefferson as recently as the nineteenth century.
As for Spain, the liberation of the peninsula took until 1492, well over seven hundred years after it was first captured by the invaders from northern Africa. Although the Christians were able to gain as far south as Toledo by 1085, it was an immensely slow process.
In 750, yet another sanguinary coup occurred within Islam, when the Ummayads were overthrown—one of them escaped to Spain to establish his dynasty there in Andalus—and relatives of Muhammad, the Abbasid dynasty, seized power. They were to rule in Baghdad at least in name, until 1258. In terms of civilization, this was to be the golden age of Islam, when the Abbasid caliphate enabled the world of Islam to be one of the greatest intellectual power houses on earth, with discoveries in science, medicine, and philosophy that were to change history and be to the long-term good of mankind. In Spain, especially under the Ummayads, one can make a claim that there really was interreligious tolerance, since in the Iberian Peninsula—unlike, say, Egypt or what is now Iraq, where most inhabitants eventually did become Muslim—the ancestors of today’s Spaniards and Portuguese remained firmly Christian.
Nevertheless, we cannot get away from the fact that all these parts of the Dar al-Islam were so because of conquest, and that while there was no compulsion to convert to Islam, nonetheless the political as well as religious leadership by Muslim caliphs was secured by these military invasions and not by the consent of the people over whom they ruled.
All this goes, I think, to prove the point made by American historians such as Thomas Madden and Victor Davis Hanson, that we need to rethink how we see the traditional strife between Islam and Christianity. Because in the past two centuries or more the West has been significantly ahead, and because in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was undoubtedly the West that was the conquering colonial power, we forget that for most of history it has in fact been in reverse—the Muslims were the conquerors and the Christian West was on the permanent defensive.
Although I don’t buy the idea that the Crusades were no different, say, from the Normandy invasions of 1944 to liberate France, nonetheless, looked at in the long perspective, there is no doubt that, from 632 to 1683, the Islamic world was the imperial power, and the countries of Europe, from Spain to Greece, were the objects of its imperialism.
Where I differ from such historians as Ephraim Karsh, the author of Islamic Imperialism, is on whether such imperialism is endemic in Islam in all places and for all time. While some extremists of the al Qaeda variety certainly hold such ideas today, I do think that it is fair to argue that this is not the case, because so many millions of Muslims, for the first time, no longer live under Islamic rule, but in the West and, indeed, many are not themselves Arab. However undeniably bad the past—and some of the present—I do think that the twenty-first century might see a major shift within Islam, and, we can all hope, this will be very much for the better.
But as for the era of Islamic invasions, especially in the period of effortless conquest between 632 and 831, from the death of the Prophet to the seizure of Sicily, invasion, and the militaristic form of jihad surely prevailed. It is in that context that we ought now to go on to the Crusades, and the attempts of Western Christians to conquer the lands seized by Islam in the seventh century.
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