By Brahim Younessi – Confluences, autumn 1996
The relationship between Islam and Europe is neither new nor recent; it goes back a very long way. Barely a century after the birth of the Muslim religion in Arabia, the world of Islam replaced the powerful Byzantine empire everywhere and controlled the entire Mediterranean rim.
Gaston Wiet notes that “the Mediterranean, a Byzantine lake under Justinian, became an Arab sea: the Christian nations, writes an Arab historian, could no longer even float a plank on it“.
André Miquel points out that “a famous debate arose on this subject a few decades ago between two renowned historians, Pirenne and Lombard. The former asserted that the irruption of the Arabs into the Mediterranean (the mare nostrum of the Romans) had compromised, and for a long time, the pivotal role of this sea in the exchanges of the Old World, thus hampering the rise of Europe. Lombard held the opposite thesis. The truth, writes André Miquel, probably lies, as in many cases, somewhere in between” (1).
Hichem Djaït, who thirty years ago devoted a substantial work to this question of Europe and Islam, stresses the West’s hostility towards triumphant Islam and states that “between the 8th and 10th centuries, the Christian West was wounded in its flesh and in its soul by the last extensions of the Arab conquest, in its second wind. This threatened world, which had known no rest for centuries, was nevertheless touched by the Saracen wave only on its margins: Spain, southern Italy, southern Gaul“.
Europe’s encounter with Islam began in earnest in 711, when the Berber Tariq ibn Ziyad won the battle of Algeciras, defeated the Visigothic king Roderic and took Toledo in 712. In 714 Spain became Muslim and took the name al-Andalus (Andalusia). In 720 the Muslims seized Narbonne and held Carcassonne. Defeated before Toulouse, they entered the Rhône valley in 724 and reached Burgundy. On their way to Poitiers they were stopped by the troops of Charles Martel in October 732. Along with the battle of Marignano in 1515, 732 is no doubt the date best remembered by French schoolchildren. Poitiers has fed the imagination on both sides.
Muslims consider that it was civilisation that was stopped at Poitiers in 732. The military victories of Harun al-Rashid over Byzantium, more than a century later, resonated far beyond the borders of the Muslim empire. The caliph exchanged embassies with Charlemagne’s Carolingian state. And yet, “to this day confusion remains established in people’s minds, which explains why a Marc Bloch speaks of the Arabs’ “lairs” and “fruitful raids” and describes Fraxinet as “the most dangerous of the nests of brigands” (2).
We also learned from Nikita Elisséeff that the Mediterranean East had become for Westerners “the Holy Land” and that “the existence of Islam made the West uneasy, because it detected in it an immeasurable and unpredictable threat; and what troubled the men of the West was its vigour and its influence, which reached their fullness around the 9th and 10th centuries“.
The golden age
The 10th century is unquestionably the golden age of Islamic civilisation, which took off and reached its peak in every discipline: literature, philosophy, the sciences and the arts. As Charles Pellat said, Muslims cultivated the cult of poetry and belles-lettres. In poetry and literature, a few names little known to the Western public, including cultivated men and women, bear witness to the richness of Arabic prose and ofadab (belles-lettres), which fascinated many European men of letters: al-Jahiz, al-Tawhidi, Abu Nuwas, Omar Khayyam; in philosophy, the names generally remembered are al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Hazm, al-Ghazali, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Through them Greek philosophy was transmitted to Europe, which obscures this major fact in the intellectual development of the Old Continent.
In the sciences, who in the West today knows the great mathematician and father of algebra Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, al-Hakim, al-Biruni, Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, author of an important treatise on mechanics entitled The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, astronomers such as al-Battani and Ibn Yunus, or geographers such as Ibn Hawqal and al-Muqaddasi? A great many Muslim scholars are literally excluded from universal knowledge and consigned to oblivion by the sacrosanct college of men of science. References to the scholars of Islam are rare, even though they were fundamental to the development of scientific knowledge and to the history of science. Hichem Djaït observes that “during the early Middle Ages, the West, confined within narrow horizons, was unable to produce a coherent and sufficiently informed vision of Islam“. The 20th-century West does not seem to have a more accurate and coherent vision of the world of Islam either. It is true that we are dealing with two totally different religious systems and with two social systems as dissimilar as they are opposed. Nikita Elisséeff points out that “the West was an agrarian, feudal and monastic society at a time when the strength of Islam rested on great cities, opulent courts and a system of long communication routes by sea, by land and by river. The one was closed in on itself; the other opened up to the world and even invaded it“.
Islam is no doubt the object both of great fascination and of a rejection stemming at once from fear and from Christian dogma. For Hichem Djaït, the Christian West held two visions of Islam: that of the popular world and that of scholasticism. The crusades fostered the first, and the Islamic-Christian confrontation in Spain the second. The author of L’Europe et l’Islam states that “one unfolded at the level of the imagination, the other at the level of reason. In popular literature, Muslims were pagans and Muhammad a magician (…). And the Song of Roland, for its part, presents the Saracens as idolaters of Tervagant, mixing the epic with the extravagant. In the scholarly vision, by contrast, there was prior knowledge. Thanks to the corpus of Cluny (1143) and the translation of the Qur’an by Ketton, scholastic controversy drew, one might say, from the source“. Jerusalem was taken by the Seljuks in 1071, and Antioch was conquered seven years later. Western religious thought accepted “the right to kill“, so much so that Alphandéry speaks of “the theology of armed action“. Pope Urban II prepared the first crusade, he claimed, to recover lands that belonged to the Church. The Holy Sepulchre and Jerusalem were undoubtedly, for Christendom, the places for which blood had to be shed in the name of religion. The Christians of the West were to deliver the Christians of the East from Muslim “domination”. The Christians of the East then enjoyed the status of protected people (dhimmis) paying the poll tax (jizya) and were in no way threatened by the Muslims. At the council he addressed at Clermont, Urban II declared: “It is from you that Jerusalem awaits help, because God has granted your nation, more than any other, the outstanding glory of arms.” “Gesta Dei per Francos (the Deeds of God through the Franks) will call down full absolution of their sins on all who go to massacre the infidels, the killing of an enemy, he proclaimed, being pleasing to God“. Troops were raised everywhere in France and Germany to cries of “God wills it“. Jerusalem, flooded with blood by the Christian warriors, was stormed on 14 July 1099 by Godfrey of Bouillon. “70,000 Muslims, men, women and children, were massacred, even in the mosque of Omar” (3).
The seven crusades, spread over nearly two centuries, from 1099 to 1254 for the last, became a permanent threat; Jerusalem was nevertheless taken definitively by Muslim armies in 1244. The mere mention of the name of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (Saladin), who faced the third crusade (1189–1192) led by Richard the Lionheart, king of England, Frederick Barbarossa, emperor of Germany, and Philip Augustus, king of France, arouses passions in both the Muslim and the Christian worlds. According to Émile G. Léonard, “the real legacy of the crusades was to lie elsewhere: in the missions that had modestly accompanied them since the 13th century; in the revival of the great trade with Asia, whose beginnings are illustrated by the name of Marco Polo; in the great discoveries of the late 15th century, since their promoters and makers sought, as much as gold and spices, to reach, behind Islam, the enigmatic Prester John, the black or yellow king.”
The beginning of the break-up of the Muslim empire in the 13th century, with the Mongol “revolution” of Genghis Khan, brought about the irremediable fall of the Abbasid caliphate, which for five centuries had enjoyed great renown in Europe, to which the tales of the Thousand and One Nights were no stranger. While Europe was changing, transforming and developing, the Muslim world, until then indifferent to the West because “it did not know it, having nothing to gain from it” (4) began an era of stagnation and regression.
“The fact remains that medieval prejudices have crept into the collective unconscious of the West at so deep a level that one may wonder, with dread, whether they can ever be uprooted” (5). In an atmosphere of break-up and disintegration, the Muslim world still continued to produce great works, especially in Spain, in the kingdom of Granada, where the Alhambra today illustrates the architectural genius of the Muslims; literary genius was represented in the mid-14th century by the geographer Ibn Battuta, whose travels made generations of young people dream, as the Venetian Marco Polo had before him, and by the founder of sociology, Ibn Khaldun, for too long ignored in the West. Ibn Khaldun’s work, translated between 1862 and 1868 by Baron de Slane, is now regarded as one of the summits of medieval thought.
The Spanish Reconquista had been under way since the 11th century. Ferdinand of Castile had already given impetus to the struggle against the Muslims. The retreat of the Muslim empire was confirmed in the 15th century. In 1492 the kingdom of Granada fell to the blows of the “Most Catholic Majesties”. Passion reached its height with the defeat of the Ottomans at the battle of Lepanto in 1571. Mohammed Arkoun rightly considers that this date “offers a good chronological landmark for dating the final reversal of the balance of power between “Muslim” and “Christian” power. We are living, he adds, at the end of this twentieth century, the disastrous consequences of this historical process. People continue to hurl abuse at each other using theologies conceived as cultural systems of mutual exclusion.” Modern Europe, born of the Renaissance and the Reformation, and the Europe of the Enlightenment each continued, in its own way, to take Islam as a target. Voltaire took an interest in it and expressed his fierce hostility to Islam in his play “Mahomet, or Fanaticism“. The Islamophobia of Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, is even more irritating, provocative and passionate.
The 19th century ushered in the European colonisation of Muslim peoples; the Ottoman empire lost its provinces in the Muslim West one by one, Algeria being no doubt the most emblematic case. “You are now ruled by the Roumi (the foreigner), judged by the Roumi and administered by the Roumi… He uses your mosques for profane purposes. He has taken your best lands and given them to his own people. He has bought the virtue of your women… The day of your awakening has come! Rise up, all of you, at the sound of my voice! O Muslims, God has placed this sword of fire in my hands, and we shall go forward, fertilising the plains of our country with the blood of the infidel“, declared Emir Abdelkader to his people, who had just elected him sultan in 1832. Yet in 1855, in his Letters to the French, at the end of his epistle, he paid tribute to France, which he believed had gained authority, and said that the “French had kings to whom no one among the non-Arab and Arab sovereigns of that time could be compared. Nations submitted to them, and the sciences and practical knowledge flourished abundantly among them, so much so that they came to desire ardently the acquisition of virtues, and from then on there was no glory left to share between Greeks and Romans. The inhabitants of France thus became a model for all men in the field of science and knowledge” (6).
Writing as the Paris correspondent of the English newspaper The Northern Star , Engels wrote on 22 January 1848, a few weeks after Emir Abdelkader’s surrender in December 1847: “Upon the whole it is, in our opinion, very fortunate that the Arabian chief has been taken. The struggle of the Bedouins was a hopeless one, and though the manner in which brutal soldiers, like Bugeaud, have carried on the war is highly blamable, the conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilisation. (…) And if we may regret that the liberty of the Bedouins of the desert has been destroyed, we must not forget that these same Bedouins were a nation of robbers whose principal means of living consisted of making excursions upon each other (…). After all, Engels continues, the modern bourgeois, with civilisation, industry, order, and at least relative enlightenment following him, is preferable to the feudal lord or to the marauding robber, with the barbarian state of society to which they belong” (7).
Let us return once again to Hichem Djaït, who discussed the case of Ernest Renan, who held a special place in 19th-century Orientalism, so vehement and harsh were his writings on Islam. “The Muslim East, writes Ernest Renan, used to defeat the West, had better armies and a better policy, sent it wealth, knowledge and civilisation. Now the roles are reversed. The European genius is developing with incomparable greatness; Islamism, on the contrary, is slowly decomposing; in our day it is collapsing with a crash. At this moment, the essential condition for the spread of European civilisation is the destruction of the Semitic thing par excellence, the destruction of the theocratic power of Islamism, and therefore the destruction of Islamism; for Islamism can exist only as an official religion; when it is reduced to the state of a free and individual religion, it will perish. Islamism is not only a state religion, as Catholicism was in France under Louis XIV and still is in Spain; it is religion excluding the state, an organisation of which only the Papal States offered the type in Europe. There lies the eternal war, the war that will cease only when the last son of Ishmael has died of misery or been relegated by terror to the depths of the desert. Islam is the most complete negation of Europe; Islam is fanaticism (…); Islam is disdain for science (…); it is the dreadful simplicity of the Semitic mind, shrinking the human brain, closing it to every delicate idea, every fine feeling, every rational inquiry, to set it before an eternal tautology: God is God. The future, gentlemen, therefore belongs to Europe, and to Europe alone” (8).
Since the 16th century the Muslim world has been in decline; the Renaissance is European. Concessions (capitulations) were granted to France, Poland and Venice by Suleiman the Magnificent from 1535. In 1580 Murad III granted England the same capitulations as France, and in 1612 the Dutch obtained them in turn. As the Ottoman Empire weakened, almost every European country received the same advantages. The Capitulations were treaties of favour granted by the Sublime Porte, at the height of its power and in the fullness of its sovereign rights, to the subjects of Christian powers residing temporarily or permanently in all the territories under its rule. Under the Capitulations, the foreigners who benefited from them were not subject to Turkish law and paid no taxes; their homes and shops were inviolable; they could not be arrested except on the order of their own consuls. Disputes between foreigners were settled by the consular courts of the defendants according to the law of their country.
In 1650, Hajji Khalifa devoted a work to the West entitled Guide for Those Intrigued by the History of the Greeks, the Romans (Byzantines) and the Christians. In it he denounced the weakness of Muslim writers on the question of Europe, in which they took little interest. This was one of the first signs of an awareness of the Western danger and of the need to understand European systems.
The first journeys to Europe began early in the 18th century under the reign of Sultan Ahmed III, who inaugurated the “Tulip Era”. The Ottomans saw for themselves the changes and progress of Europe, which fascinated Muslim writers and elites. Çelebi Mehmed and his son came to France. Çelebi Mehmed described everything he discovered: hospitals, museums, observatories, ports, zoological and botanical gardens, and took an interest in printing, which Ibrahim Müteferrika would adopt in 1727. Military art and technique captivated all the visitors, so much so that Mahmud I called on foreigners, particularly the French, to organise the Ottoman army; but foreign technicians had to convert to Islam, as the comte de Bonneval (1675–1747) did. This requirement was abolished by Abdülhamid I, who used foreigners in a great many fields. Said, Çelebi Mehmed’s son, learned French, mastered it and spoke it excellently. Students were sent to France, among them the Egyptian Rifa’a Rafi’ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), who would translate the French Civil Code and suggest introducing a constitutional system of government in his country. Following Europe’s example, Egypt modernised its education system, set up a printing press to publish educational works in 1821, and founded a Faculty of Medicine in Cairo in 1827.
In Algeria, Muslims demanded recognition of their rights as citizens in the name of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. Emir Khaled, Abdelkader’s grandson, became the herald and champion of this struggle for the civil and political rights of Algerian Muslims. This Islam–West “dispute” is eloquently explained by Mohammed Arkoun, with whose words we shall conclude: “First there is, he says, the well-known phase of colonisation, legitimised by the discourse on the universal, humanist character of Western and Christian civilisation. It would lead to the wars of liberation, of which the typical example is the Algerian war of 1954 to 1962. Then, after independence, comes the phase of what I would call “economic and cultural cooperation”. And there an imbalance with major consequences arose. Underdeveloped economically, socially and culturally, Muslims find it hard to accept the great rupture between their glorious past (the classical Islam of historians) and their cruel destitution today. They feel that Westerners want to impose on them, turnkey, a modernity for which they are not ready, because since the 16th century they have remained outside its development. From the 1950s to the 1970s, relations between the West and the Islamic world were dominated by the postulate (and the reality) of Western superiority. (…)“.
Notes
1 André Miquel, “De la foi au pouvoir”, in Les Arabes, Fayard, Paris, p. 168.
2 Hichem Djaït, L’Europe et l’Islam, éditions Le Seuil, Paris, p. 17.
3 Gabriel Bonnet, La France et l’intolérance, Editions Roblot, p. 32.
4 Hichem Djaït, op. cit.
5 Idem.
6 Abdelkader, Lettres aux Français, Editions Phébus, p. 227.
7 Marxisme et Algérie, Textes de Marx/Engels, collection 10/18.
8 Ernest Renan, in Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, Presses-Pocket, pp. 197-198.
