Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (26 page)

Thus the fabulous epoch of the Caliphs of the eighth and ninth centuries remains as elusive as ever. If we were to judge by the archaeology of Samarra, Susa and Siraf, and ignore the written sources, we would have to say that the Islamic cities were established by the Sassanids in the seventh century, then abandoned by the start of the eighth, and reoccupied in the second half of the tenth century; at which point they experienced their greatest prosperity.

No matter where we go, it is the same story. Spain, as we have seen, is supposed to have witnessed a flowering of Islamic culture and civilization in the two centuries after the Arab conquest of 711; and the city of Cordoba is said to have grown to a sophisticated metropolis of half-a-million people or more. We recall the description of a flourishing and vastly opulent metropolis painted by the medieval Arab chroniclers. Yet it is admitted that “Little remains of the architecture of this period.”
[20]
Little indeed! As a matter of fact, the only standing Muslim structure in the whole of Spain dating from before the eleventh century is the so-called Mosque of Cordoba; yet even this, strictly-speaking, is not an Islamic construction: It was originally the Visigothic Cathedral of Saint Vincent, which was converted, supposedly in the days of Abd er-Rahman I, to a mosque. Yet the Islamic features that exist could equally belong to the time of Abd er-Rahman III (latter tenth century) whom we know did conversion work on the Cathedral, adding a minaret and a new façade.
[21]
Most of the Islamic features in the building actually come after Abd er-Rahman III, and there is no secure way of dating anything in it to the eighth century.

The poverty of visible Islamic remains is normally explained by the proposition that the Christians destroyed the Muslim monuments after the city’s re-conquest. But this solution is inherently suspect. Granted the Christians might have destroyed all the mosques – though even that seems unlikely – but they certainly would not have destroyed opulent palaces, baths, fortifications, etc. Yet none of these – none at least ascribed to the eighth, ninth or early tenth centuries – has survived. And even granting that such a universal and pointless destruction did take place, we have to assume that at least under the ground we would find an abundance of Arab foundations, as well as artifacts, tools, pottery etc. Indeed, in a city of half a million people, as Cordoba of the eight, ninth and early tenth centuries is said to have been, the archaeologist would expect to find a superabundance of such things. They should be popping out of the ground with almost every shovel-full of dirt; and yet, as we saw in Chapter 8, almost nothing in the city can be confidently assigned to the eighth or ninth centuries.

The sheer poverty of these remains makes it clear that the fabulously wealthy Cordoba of the eighth, ninth and early tenth centuries is a myth; and the elusive nature of all material from these three centuries, in every part of the Islamic world, makes us wonder whether the rise of Islam has been somehow misdated: For the first real mark left (in archaeological terms) by Islam in Spain is dated to the mid-tenth century, to the time of Abd er-Rahman III, whose life bears many striking comparisons with his namesake and supposed ancestor Abd er-Rahman I, of the eighth century. Again, there are strange and striking parallels between the major events of Islamic history of the seventh and eighth centuries on the one hand and of the tenth and eleventh centuries on the other. Thus for example the Christian Reconquista in Spain is supposed to have commenced around 720, with the victory of Don Pelayo at Covadonga; but the real Reconquista began three hundred years later with the victories of Sancho of Navarre around 1020. Similarly, the Islamic invasion of northern India supposedly commenced around 710-720 with the victories of Muhammad bin Qasim, though the “real” Islamic conquest of the region began with the victories of Mahmud of Ghazni, roughly between 1010 and 1020. Yet again, the cultural impact of Islam on Europe seems not have been felt until the late tenth and eleventh centuries, though commonsense would suggest that it should have been felt three hundred years earlier. Pirenne, for example, was criticized by Dopsch for suggesting that Islam terminated classical civilization in Europe in the seventh century by its blockade of the Mediterranean. If that were the case, said Dopsch, Europe should have become “medieval” by the late seventh century. Yet many of the characteristics of medieval society, such as the rise of feudalism and castle-building, only appear in the late tenth century. And obviously Islamic ideas, such as Holy War, were only copied by the Europeans in the eleventh century.

What then does all this mean?

The lack of substantial Muslim archaeology from before the tenth and eleventh centuries (with the exception of two or three monuments such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Amr ibn al-As mosque in Cairo, usually of the mid-seventh century), would seem to leave only three possible explanations. Either (1), the Arab conquests and the regime that followed were so destructive that they extinguished almost all settled life in the Middle East and North Africa for three centuries, or (2), some form of catastrophe, of a natural order, in the form of a plague or climatic disturbance, destroyed a great percentage of the populations of the Near East and North Africa sometime in the mid-seventh century, or (3) the rise of Islam has been misdated, and that some form of error, of a fundamental nature, has crept into the chronology. None of these options, so radical in their implications, have endeared themselves to the scholarly community, which naturally abhors such dramatic and revolutionary paradigm-shifts. Yet though such talk may be shunned in academia, the fundamental fact of the extreme poverty of all archaeology from the mid-seventh to mid-tenth centuries will not go away. And the circumstance that virtually nothing from before the mid-tenth century has been found means that Islam was not a flourishing, opulent and cultured civilization whilst Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. By the late tenth century Europe was experiencing her own “renaissance”, with a flowering of “Romanesque” art and architecture, much of it strongly reminiscent of the late classical work of the Merovingian and Visigothic period.

The meaning of this archaeological “dark age” is then of central importance to our understanding of European and Islamic history; and it is a feature to which we are drawn repeatedly as soon as we look at the history of these obscure and enigmatic centuries. We should note that, of the above three explanations, it is likely that the answer may not reside in one alone, and we may be compelled to consider a combination of more than one. Having said that, it seems beyond question that proposition (1) will have to form a major part of the solution: For, whatever we might say about faulty chronologies or natural disasters, the destructiveness of the Arab conquests is not to be doubted; and the coming of the Arabs was a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions for the settled peoples of the Mediterranean world. It is worth remarking that even when substantial archaeology does again appear in the Middle East and North Africa, from the middle of the tenth century, the world they reveal – Islam at its most flowering and opulent – is little more than a pale shadow of the classical civilization which disappeared in the seventh century. The urban centers of the time, Cordoba, Alexandria, and Antioch, are tiny (and few and far between) compared to the great metropolises of the Byzantines, and not to be compared with them in any meaningful way.
[22]

[1]
Mango, op cit., p. 128

[2]
Ibid.

[3]
Ibid.

[4]
Margaret Deanesley,
A History of Early Medieval Europe, 476 to 911
(Methuen, London, 1965), p. 207

[5]
Samuel Sambursky,
The Physical World of Late Antiquity
(Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962)

[6]
It should be noted that even in an art such as music, important developments occurred at this time. Thus the violin, which overcame the problem of tonal discontinuity through the bow, was invented in the Eastern Empire sometime between the seventh and ninth centuries. Similarly, the bagpipe, which solved the same problem in wind instruments, appeared in Europe during the same epoch.

[7]
See eg. Bertrand, op cit.

[8]
Some features of classical culture survived for a short while – and in a few sites – after the Arab Conquests. Thus for example a few centers continued to erect buildings decorated with classical-style mosaics. This however only emphasizes the fact that classical culture was alive and well up until the Arab invasions, and was not terminated before that.

[9]
The abandoned cities of the Middle East include some of the most iconic and well-known settlements of the region, including Petra, Palmyra, Caesarea Maritima and many many more. The destruction of the latter of these by the Arabs was described in detail by the Egyptian writer John of Nikiu.

[10]
Kenneth Clark, op cit., p. 7

[11]
Rhoads Murphey, “The Decline of North Africa since the Roman Occupation: Climatic or Human?”,
ANNALS, Association of American Geographers
, Vol. XLI, no. 2, (June 1951).

[12]
Ibid., p. 124

[13]
Ibid.

[14]
Ibid., pp. 124-5

[15]
Hodges and Whitehouse, op cit., p. 69

[16]
Ibid., p. 71

[17]
M. Dunand,
Fouilles de Byblos I
, (Paul Geuthner, Paris, 1939); and N. Jidejian.
Byblos through the Ages
, (Beyrouth, 1971)

[18]
Gunnar Heinsohn, “The Gaonic Period in the Land of Israel/Palestine,”
Society for Interdisciplinary Studies; Chronology and Catastrophism Review
, No. 2 (2002)

[19]
In the words of Hodges and Whitehouse, “Abbasid Baghdad is buried beneath the modern city for, as Guy LeStrange remarked, so wise was the choice of site that it has served as the capital of Mesopotamia almost without interruption. Our knowledge of the city of al-Mansur, therefore, comes from written sources …” op cit., p. 128

[20]
H. St. L. B. Moss, op cit., p. 172

[21]
See eg Bertrand, op cit., p. 54

[22]
Again, the exceptions to this rule are said to be in Mesopotamia, where Baghdad and Samarra are held to have been great metropolises in the tenth and eleventh centuries. However, as we have seen, Abbasid Baghdad is notable by its non-appearance in the archaeology, whilst Samarra survived as a great center for no more than a few decades. The city seems to have experienced its first prosperity under the late Sassanids, and continued to be occupied by the early Arabs, though the latter appear to have been abandoned it at the end of the seventh century. It was reoccupied by the later Abbasids in the tenth century, and completely abandoned in the early eleventh century.

E
mpires had come and gone before in the Mediterranean. Wars of conquest had been waged. Barbarian peoples had occupied territories from Asia Minor to Spain. Yet none of them had destroyed trade and agriculture in the way these things were destroyed in the seventh century. What was it about the Muslim empire which produced such disruption?

It has to be understood that with the coming of Islam there appeared on the world stage an ideology like none that had existed before. One of the fundamentals of the Islamic faith was the acceptability, even the duty, of Muslims to wage war against the infidel. Muhammad himself preached the necessity of war and participated in violent conflict. Indeed, he is said to have ordered at least sixty raids and wars and personally participated in twenty-seven of them. Gibbon, as unbiased an authority as may be found, attributed the spectacular success of Muhammad’s faith to the promise of plunder. “From all sides the roving Arabs were allured to the standard of religion and plunder; and the apostle sanctified the licence of embracing female captives as their wives and concubines; and the enjoyment of wealth and beauty was a feeble type of the joys of paradise prepared for the valiant martyrs of the faith. ‘The sword,’ says Mahomet, ‘is the key of heaven and of hell: a drop of blood shed in the cause of God, a night spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fasting or prayer: whosoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven ...’” (
Decline and Fall
, Ch. 50) And it cannot be stressed too strongly that all of the early spread of Islam involved the sword. Contrast this with the growth of Christianity, or Buddhism, for that matter. In fact, Islam is virtually unique among world religions in that its primary scriptures advocate the use of military force and its early expansion – indeed its expansion during the first six or seven centuries of its existence – invariably involved military conquest and the use of force.

In 1993 Samuel P. Huntington famously noted that “Islam has bloody borders.”
[1]
He might have added that Islam has always had bloody borders. Before he died, Mohammed told his followers that he had been ordered to “fight with the people till they say, none has the right to be worshipped but Allah.” (
Hadith
, Vol. 4:196) In this spirit, Islamic theology divides the world into two parts: the Dar al-Islam, “House of Islam” and the Dar al-Harb, “House of War.” In short, a state of perpetual conflict exists between Islam and the rest of the world. There can thus never be a real and genuine peace between Islam and the Dar al-Harb. At best, there can be a temporary truce, to allow Muslims to recuperate and regroup. In the words of Bat Ye’or, “the jihad is a state of permanent war [which] excludes the possibility of true peace.” All that is allowed are “provisional truces in accordance with the requirements of the political situation.”
[2]
According to medieval historian Robert Irwin, “Since the jihad [was] … a state of permanent war, it [excluded] … the possibility of true peace, but it [did] … allow for provisional truces in accordance with the requirements of the political situation.”
[3]
Also, “Muslim religious law could not countenance the formal conclusion of any sort of permanent peace with the infidel.”
[4]
In such circumstances, it is evident that, when the Islamic forces were in a position of strength, almost all contact between them and the outside world was warlike. And this was not war as is waged between two kingdoms, empires, or dynasties: this was total war, war that did not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and war that did not end. In this spirit, Islamic generals launched attack after attack against the southern shores of Europe during the seventh and eighth centuries; and these “official” actions were supplemented by hundreds, even thousands, of lesser raids, carried out by minor Muslim commanders and even by private individuals. For it was considered legitimate that the Muslim faithful should live off the infidel world. Whatever spoils could be taken, were divinely sanctioned.

The coming of Islam therefore signaled a wave of banditry and piracy in the Mediterranean such as had not been seen since before the second century BC, when such activities were severely curtailed by Roman naval power. Indeed, it seems that this new Islamic piracy surpassed in scope and destructiveness anything that had gone before.
[5]
Ordinary pirates might be deterred by powerful navies which threatened them with an early death: Muslim pirates would be less put off by such dangers since, in their minds, they were executing a divine ordnance, and to die in such activity was considered a sure to way paradise.
[6]

In the long stretch of time since the life of Muhammad, it is doubtful if there has been a single year in which Muslims, in some part of the world, have not been fighting against Infidels. In the history of relations between Europe and the House of Islam alone, there was continual and almost uninterrupted war between Muslims and Christians since the first attack on Sicily in 652 and on Constantinople in 674. In the great majority of these wars, the Muslims were the aggressors. And even the short periods of official peace were disturbed by the “unofficial” activities of privateers and slave-traders. For centuries, Muslim pirates based in North Africa made large parts of the Mediterranean shore-line uninhabitable, and it is estimated that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries alone they captured and enslaved something in excess of a million Europeans.

The centrality of war in Islamic theology is expressed succinctly by Ibn Abi Zayd al Qayrawani, who died in 966:

Jihad is a precept of Divine institution. Its performance by certain individuals may dispense others from it. We Malikis [one of the four schools of Muslim jurisprudence] maintain that it is preferable not to begin hostilities with the enemy before having invited the latter to embrace the religion of Allah except where the enemy attacks first. They have the alternative of either converting to Islam or paying the poll tax (jizya), short of which war will be declared against them. The jizya can only be accepted from them if they occupy a territory where our laws can be enforced. If they are out of our reach, the jizya cannot be accepted from them unless they come within our territory. Otherwise we will make war against them ...

It is incumbent upon us to fight the enemy without inquiring as to whether we shall be under the command of a pious or depraved leader.

It is not prohibited to kill white non-Arabs who have been taken prisoner. But no one can be executed after having been granted the aman (protection). The promises made to them must not be broken. Women and children must not be executed and the killing of monks and rabbis must be avoided unless they have taken part in battle. Women also may be executed if they have participated in the fighting. The aman granted by the humblest Muslim must be recognized by other [Muslims]. Women and young children can also grant the aman when they are aware of its significance. However, according to another opinion, it is only valid if confirmed by the imam (spiritual leader). The imam will retain a fifth of the booty captured by the Muslims in the course of warfare and he will share the remaining four fifths among the soldiers of the army. Preferably, the apportioning will take place on enemy ground.
[7]

The long-term consequences of this attitude are plain to be seen in any of the societies that came under the dominion of Islam. Early in the 20th century historian Louis Bertrand wrote extensively of Islam’s impact upon Spain; and what he says is devastating. In his words, “…the first part of this period [of Islam’s rule], that of the Emirs dependent upon the Caliphate of Damascus … is nothing but a long series of intestinal struggles, slaughterings, massacres, and assassinations. It was anarchy in all its horror, fed by family hatreds and the rivalry of tribe against tribe – Arabs of the North against Arabs of the South, Yemenites against Kaishites, Syrians against Medinites. All these Asiatics had a common enemy in the nomad African, the Berber, the eternal spoiler of cities and the auxiliary of all invaders.”
[8]

Executions, normally following torture, were most often by crucifixion. This was the fate even of the ninety year-old Abd el-Malik, who was beaten, slashed with swords and then crucified between a pig and a dog. “After that, Bertrand continues, “Yemenites and Kaishites … came to blows among themselves. The Kaishites, under the leadership of their chief, Somail, routed their adversaries in the plain of Secunda, the Roman town on the other side of the Guadalquiver opposite Cordova. The victorious Somail had the Yemenite chiefs beheaded in the square in front of the Cathedral of Saint Vincent, which as yet was only half turned into a mosque. “Seventy heads had already fallen when one of the chiefs in alliance with Somail protested against this horrible butchery, not in the name of humanity, but in the name of Musulman solidarity. Somail, nevertheless, went on with his executions until his ally, indignant at his excessive cruelty, threatened to turn against him.”
[9]

Again, “Nothing emerges from this perpetual killing but the savagery, the brutality, and the cruelty of the new-comers. Under their domination … Spain got used to being ridden over and devastated periodically, in a way that soon became as regular as the alteration of the seasons.”
[10]
This pattern, set at the beginning, continued throughout the Muslim period. The savagery inflicted upon fellow Muslims was but a pale reflection of the atrocities committed against the Christian unbelievers in the North, whose territory was raided twice a year by every Muslim ruler.
[11]
And to top all of this, Islamic Spain became the hub of a vast new slave-trade. Hundreds of thousands of European slaves, both from Christian territories and from the lands of the pagan Slavs, were imported into the Caliphate, there to be used (if female) as concubines or to be castrated (if male) and made into harem guards or the personal body-guards of the Caliph. According to Bertrand, “This army of Slavs [eunuchs] … was the main instrument of the Caliph’s authority. His power was a military dictatorship. He maintained himself only thanks to these foreigners.”
[12]

It is evident then that the Islamic conquests, wherever they occurred, unleashed a flood of anarchic violence. This was not war as was waged by highly disciplined and strictly commanded armies such as those of the Caesars. Islamic war had far more in common with the wars waged by barbarian peoples such as the Huns or Vandals. Yet even their conquests were arguably less violent and destructive than those of the Muslims; for they lacked the religious fanaticism that motivated the latter.

* * *

So much for the Dar al-Islam’s fraught relationship with the outside world: But even after the conquest of a territory and the submission of its inhabitants, the dictates of Islamic law meant that the non-Muslim inhabitants could never again enjoy lasting peace and security. In theory, the “religions of the Book” (ie. Christianity and Judaism), enjoyed a special “protected” (dhimmi) status under the new regime. In practice however the position of the Christian and Jewish population was anything but protected. This was because under the provisions of Islamic law (sharia), the rights of Jews and Christians were subordinate to those of Muslims. The legal testimony of a Muslim always trumped that of a Christian or Jew, no matter how many Christians or Jews testified. In practical terms, this meant that a dhimmi Jew or Christian might be insulted, robbed, or even murdered in the street, without any hope of legal redress. If such a complaint were taken to the authorities, the Muslim culprit would claim that the infidel had insulted the Prophet or the Koran. Two other male Muslim witnesses were needed to substantiate this claim, but these were invariably forthcoming, and the suit ended in the execution of the Jewish or Christian complainant.

As might be imagined, such oppressive conditions meant that Christians and Jews lived in permanent fear of the predatory attentions of Muslim neighbors, with the result that, over the centuries, the pressure to convert to Islam, or to emigrate from the Muslim-controlled territory, became almost irresistible.

A further exacerbating factor was that under Islamic law Muslims have a right to subsist off the labors and property of the infidel. This is enshrined in the concept of jizya, the tax which all infidels living in the Dar al-Islam must pay to their Muslim masters. But it was not just the Caliph and his emirs who were entitled to live off the infidels. All Muslims, irrespective of position, had this right; and Islamic law thus sanctified the plundering by individual Muslims of the local Christian and Jewish populations.

The long-term consequences of such an outlook are not too difficult to imagine. A general climate of banditry and lawlessness was fostered; and we see, for example, in a very immediate way why immigrant Arab goat-herders in the Middle East and North Africa felt free to allow their flocks to graze on the cultivated lands of their Christian and Jewish neighbors, thus destroying the agricultural viability of these territories and reducing them, within a very short time, to arid semi-desert. One of the most immediate consequences was a dramatic decline in the population. Although precise figures are unavailable, we know that the medieval populations of Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa were much smaller than those under the last Byzantine administration. Estimates put the decline at anything from threefold to tenfold; and the result was that by the later Middle Ages large parts of the Middle East and North Africa comprised sparsely populated wasteland, housing economically oppressed and largely impoverished populations. In the fourteenth century, for example, the Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun, writing in the squalor of what is now Tunisia, marveled at the wealth of a visiting delegation of Italian merchants. And the same attitudes continued to produce the same results well into the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries.