by Carrie
Fri Mar 31st, 2006 at 02:41:14 AM EST
Richard Fletcher (2004) The Cross and The Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to the Reformation, Viking Penguin, ISBN 0-670-03271-9, $22.95
In December of 2002, in what seems like a different life altogether, I found myself in the gift shop of Granada's Alhambra and I ended up buying myself a copy of Richard Fletcher's delicious little book Moorish Spain. I never added to the Wikipedia my newly gained insight into Al-Andalus, as I originally intended, but I liked the book so much that I couldn't resist the urge, on seeing another book by the same author in a Notting Hill discount bookstore, to buy it, read it, and now write an ET diary about it [for no human activity is truly complete if it is not chronicled here].
In 161 pages of large print in a small format [not counting ancillary material such as indices, notes, or references), the late British historian Richard Fletcher (March 2005 obituary) reviews the relationship between the two civilizations, Christian and Muslim, over the first millennium of existance of the latter. The conclusion I draw from this very instructive book is this: the present attitudes between the West and the Muslim world are very similar to what they have always been, namely: the West sees Islam as a false religion, and Muslims as violent thugs, while at the same time being caught in Orientalist fascination of their culture; the Muslim world is, by and large, indifferent to the West [to its great peril, as we have seen after about 1800] if not dismissive of it and considering that Mohammed's revelation supersedes Christianity. From the Epilogue:
Christian-Muslim relations took the form that they did because attitudes could not have been other than what they were. Christians first encountered Muslims as conquerors: it is readily intelligible that they should have perceived Islam as inherently martial. Given the intellectual and religious climate of the age, the only manner in which Christians could explain Islam is a fashion convincing to themselves was as an aberrant form of Christianity. There you have the two essential ingredients of the Christian image of Islam: Muhammad as a pseudo-prophet, impostor, heretic; his followers as men of blood and violence. Other elements would be added, for instande accusations of self-indulgence and sexual licence, but these two would always be the principal ones. They were already present in what seems to be the earliest record of Christian reaction to Islam, the Doctrina Jacobi quoted in Chapter I, composed perhaps as early as 640 or so. The resultant image has proved quite remarkably long-lasting.
Muslims were from the first imbued with the supreme self-confidence born of the conviction that they had been chosen to receive God's last and most complete revelation; necessarily, therefore, they looked upon Christians with scorn. In addition, Dar al-Islam occupied, by God's mercy and providence, a more favoured portion of the earth's surface than did Christendom. Seen from Baghdad in, say, the year 900, the Christian world was a jumble of confused sects and petty monarchies squirming about in an unappealing environment. The Islamic community had no rival in its wealth, its technology, its learning and its culture as well as in its faith. A lofty disdain was the only intelligible attitude for Muslims to adopt towards Christians.
Attitudes laid down like rocks long ago continue to shape their moral environment for many centuries thereafter. There is a geology of human relationships which it is unwise to neglect.
There you have it. The firebrand accusations of conservative Christian preachers that "Islam is a false religion and Mohammed was a terrorist" after 9/11 and the resentment in Islamist manifestos at the exploitation by the West of the oil wealth that, by the mercy and providence of God, had been put under Muslim soil. It's all been there since the 7th century.
With the conclusion out of the way, let's take a quick tour of the book's five chapters.
1. Ishmael's Children is a quick summary of the birth and expansion of Islam, but to me very novel in that it puts the emphasis on the mutual attitudes between the existing peoples and cultures and the expanding Muslim empire. However, I want to highlight what the attitude of the Byzantine empire towards Arabs was before the birth of Mohammed, because those attitudes are with us still today and have nothing to do with Islam:
The Arabs were the semi-nomadic tribespeople, sharing a common language and culture, who clustered along the frontiers of the two major imperial powers on the fringes of the Syrian Desert and were scattered in the habitable zones of the Arabian Peninsula proper.
...
The settled peoples of the two empires had that disdain for the Arabs that so frequently marks the attitude of the sedentary towards the nomad. Enmity between pastoralists and cultivators, the desert and the sown, goes back to Abel and Cain. Ammianus Marcellinus, last of the great Latin historians of antiquity. writing towards the end of the fourth century, is representative. He considered the Arabs a destructive people, who would swoop down like birds of prey to seize whatever they could find
...
Christian writers such as Ammianus' contemporary St Jerome, a near neighbour of the Arabs during his long residence at Bethlehem between 386 and 420, agreed with him. And these Christian authorities knew how to explain these peculiar people. It was all there in what the Bible had to say about Ishmael, whose birth and destiny are described in genesis 16. Ishmael would be 'a wild man, his hand against every man's, and every man's hand against his; and he shall live at odds with all his kinsmen'.
Whoa, dude, from yesterday's dirt comes today's mud.
2. An Elephant for Charlemagne draws its title from the gift that the Abbasid Caliph Harun ar-Rashid gave to Charlemagne on the occasion of his crowning as Emperor. This is a chapter on the building of the Islamic empire, the role the existing Christian and Persian state structures and literate public servants played in the Umayyad Caliphate, and how the Abbasid Caliphate sought (and achieved) an entirely Muslim identity, symbolized in the capital moving from Damascus to the purpose-built Baghdad.
3. Crossing Frontiers examines the interaction between the two civilizations after Muslim expansion came to a halt. The first part of the chapter centers on the two frontier regions, Spain and Turkey, and two characters: a presumably fictional Basil, the two-blooded border soldier (Digenes Akrites is the title of the Greek epic poem about his exploits) in Turkey in the 9th century; and Rodrigo Díaz, El Cid, in 11th Century Spain. Both men are taken as representative of the relatively relaxed attitude to political (and even religious) allegiances that existed in the border regions, while both heartlands remained by and large ignorant of each other. The latter part of the chapter deals with the crusades, including the strange [for they never actually met in person] friendship between Richard the Lionheart and Saladdin.
4. Commerce, Coexistence and Scholarship deals with the Italian trading colonies in the Eastern mediterranean, what the life of religious minorities was like on either side, and also the first scholarly approaches to "the other", which were almost invariably bigoted polemics with no attempt at understanding.
5. Sieving the Koran is the English title of Nicholas of Cusa's Cribratio Alcoranis, commissioned by Pope Pius II in hopes of getting a great work with which to stir up crusading spirit but that turned out to be "dedicated to the proposition that if the Koran is intensively studied in the proper spirit ('sieved') it will be found to be compatible with the teachings of Christianity as found in the New Testament". This is indicative of the early Renaissance spirit of religious tolerance that would go up in flames with the zealotry of the Reformation and Counter-reformation. The chapter also deals with the latest crusades (of Nikopolis and Granada), and very summarily with the developments of the 16th century, when Europe stops looking towards the near East to embark instead in the exploration of the oceans and the New World, and on the scientific revolution.
All in all, a very instructive book, very necessary after 9/11 (and timely: it was planned in 1998-2000 and written in 2001) and which really warrants reading and, for myself, re-reading.
