Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (32 page)

Yet even now the Church had to fight for supremacy, a struggle which commenced in the tenth century, with the aid of the Ottonians, and which ended in the eleventh, with papal victory. “They [Church reformers] fought to secure ultimate control of a self-contained, independent, dominant, monarchical Church. Such a contest was a frontal challenge to the old system of the Roman Empire. It was a frontal attack on the kings who presumed that they had inherited the rights of the Roman emperors. It was an indirect attack on the emperor of Constantinople who, in the East, continued to maintain the old system [of secular supremacy] and was now called schismatic for his pains.”
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The very peak of the medieval Church’s power came a century later in the age and in the person of Innocent III (1198 – 1216). This man judged between rival Emperors in Germany and had Otto IV deposed. He laid England under an interdict and excommunicated King John for refusing to recognize Stephen Langdon as Archbishop of Canterbury. His two most memorable actions however were the establishment of the Inquisition and the launching of the notorious Albigensian Crusade, which led to the elimination of the Cathar movement. Innocent III then, the most powerful of medieval theocrats, was a proponent of Holy War, and an enforcer of absolute doctrinal conformity. Apostasy under Innocent III became a capital offence. During his time too the other Crusades, against Islam in Spain and in the Middle East, continued to rage.

Ironically, Innocent’s attitude to apostasy and doctrinal conformity – as well as to “Holy War” – is completely in accord with Islamic notions, and we must consider to what extent these extreme positions of the European theocracy derived ultimately from the Islamic one.

Islam itself was, of course, from the very beginning, theocratic in nature. In it, there was no “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”. Right from the start, in the person of Muhammad, spiritual and temporal power was united. After Muhammad, under the Caliphs, the same situation pertained. Every Caliph was, first and foremost, a “commander of the faithful”. For all that, we cannot judge that the founding of theocracy in Europe was a result of deliberate imitation of Islamic notions, as was iconoclasm and Holy War. Islam’s contribution to the European theocracy was real enough, but rather more accidental, or rather, inferential As we saw, the impoverishment of Europe and her monarchs caused by Islam’s blockade of the Mediterranean, left them little option but to turn to the Church for support. Also, the fight for the defense of Europe, because of the very nature of the enemy, took on a religious dimension (all faiths gain in strength when faced with opposition), and this too would have increased the power and prestige of the Church.

So, whilst the medieval European theocracy was not the result of direct imitation of Islamic ideas, Islam was still instrumental in giving birth to it. Furthermore, the type of theocracy which took shape in Europe, and some of the underlying ideas associated with it, very definitely derived from Islam.

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From its inception, Islam regarded apostasy and heresy as capital offences,
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and almost immediately after the death of Muhammad there erupted serious and extremely violent disputes over conflicting claims to the leadership of the movement. Assassination and murder was the order of the day. Even those with no leadership pretensions, but with heterodox views, were subject to violent suppression. The most notorious early example is found in the fate of Mansur Al-Hallaj (858 – 922), the Persian mystic, whose death mimicked that of Christ – though before being crucified Al-Hallaj was first, it is said, blinded and otherwise tortured. And the killing of political and religious opponents, or those who deviated in any way from orthodox Islam, occurred at the very start and was continuous throughout Muslim history. So it was with infidels such as Christians and Jews who, though theoretically dhimmi, or “protected,” were in fact always the subject of violent attack. We know, for example, that in 704 or 705 the caliph Walid (705-715) “assembled the nobles of Armenia in the church of St Gregory in Naxcawan and the church of Xrain on the Araxis, and burned them to death. Others were crucified and decapitated and their wives and children taken into captivity. A violent persecution of Christians in Armenia is recorded from 852 to 855.”
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There even existed, in Spain and North Africa, at least from the time of the Almohads (early twelfth century), a commission of enquiry, a veritable “inquisition”, for rooting out apostates. We are told that the Jews, who had at this time been forced to accept Islam, formed a mass of “new converts” who nevertheless continued to practice their own religion in secret. But the “Almohad inquisitors, doubting their sincerity, took away their children and raised them as Muslims.”
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Medieval Christianity, beginning in the late twelfth/early thirteenth century, adopted the same attitude. Christians now had their own Inquisition for exposing heretics, and the death penalty was now prescribed for such miscreants. The judicial use of torture too, “a novelty in Europe” at the time, became accepted practice.
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All of these practices were in fact novel in Europe of the eleventh or twelfth century: The barbarous treatment of criminals and dissidents which had been customary in Imperial Rome was phased out during the early Christian centuries. Constantine abolished crucifixion as a form of execution, and attempted to do away with gladiatorial displays. These were finally abolished in the time of Honorius (early fifth century). The condition of slaves was dramatically improved by the Christianization of the Empire, and the Church worked to end the institution entirely – a goal finally accomplished by the eighth or perhaps ninth century. Torture of prisoners, routine in Imperial Rome, was gradually done away with around the same time. Nor is there any evidence, in the early Christian centuries, of the lethal intolerance which characterized the Inquisition. It is true that in the early centuries, the Church was involved in a series of prolonged and bitter disputes over the correct interpretation of Christ’s life and mission. Those who disagreed with the mainstream dogmas, as laid down by various Councils, were decreed to be heretics, and fairly severe condemnation of these people and groups was common: indeed, it was almost endemic. Yet, intemperate as was the language used in these disputes, they rarely turned violent; and even when they did, the violence was on a very small scale and invariably perpetrated by those with no official sanction or approval. And the use of force to enforce orthodoxy was condemned by all the Church Fathers. Thus Lactantius declared that “religion cannot be imposed by force; the matter must be carried on by words rather than by blows, that the will may be affected.” He wrote,

Oh with what an honorable inclination the wretched men go astray! For they are aware that there is nothing among men more excellent than religion, and that this ought to be defended with the whole of our power; but as they are deceived in the matter of religion itself, so also are they in the manner of its defense. For religion is to be defended, not by putting to death, but by dying; not by cruelty, but by patient endurance; not by guilt, but by good faith. … For if you wish to defend religion by bloodshed, and by tortures, and by guilt, it will no longer be defended, but will be polluted and profaned. For nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion; in which, if the mind of the worshipper is disinclined to it, religion is at once taken away, and ceases to exist.
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Later, St. John Chrysostom wrote that “it is not right to put a heretic to death, since an implacable war would be brought into the world.”
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Likewise, St. Augustine was to write of heretics that “it is not their death, but their deliverance from error, that we seek.”
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In spite of these and many other such admonitions, incidents of violence against heretics did occur; but they were isolated and never approved by Church authorities. Such, for example, was the case with the suppression of the so-called Priscillian Heresy in Spain in the latter years of the fourth and early years of the fifth century. Several followers of Priscillian were put to death, and the sect was persecuted in other ways. Yet the killing of Priscillian and his immediate associates (seven in all) and was thoroughly condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities.

The same was true of another, and more famous, case – the murder of Hypatia. This incident, in the early fifth century, has achieved, in some quarters, almost legendary status, and is seen as the example par excellence of Christian bigotry and obscurantism. But from what little we know of it, it is clear that the murder was carried out by a group of lawless fanatics and not by the Church. We should note too that the murder occurred in Egypt, a land with a long tradition of religious fanaticism. During the time of Julius Caesar an Egyptian mob lynched a Roman centurion (an act which could have brought upon them a terrible retribution) for having the temerity to kill a cat. Such isolated acts of fanaticism have occurred in all faiths at all periods of history. Even that most pacifist and tolerant of religious ideologies, Buddhism, is not entirely free of it. So, in itself, the murder of Hypatia cannot tell us much. The Christian writer Socrates Scholasticus, in the fifth century, regarded it as a deplorable act of bigotry, whilst just three centuries later his fellow-countryman John of Nikiu fully approved of the killing. He described Hypatia as “a pagan” who was “devoted to magic” and who had “beguiled many people through Satanic wiles.” What could have produced such a change?

The world we call “medieval” was one in which the reason and humanism of the classical world had to some degree disappeared. Dark fantasies and superstitions became more prominent. Belief in the power of magicians and sorcerers, a belief associated with the most primitive type of mind-set, made a comeback. In the most backward of modern societies we still find perfectly innocent people accused of “witchcraft” and brutally put to death for a crime which they never committed and which does not even exist. By the end of the Middle Ages this mentality had returned to Europe; and in 1487 a papal Bull named
malleus maleficarum
(“hammer of the witches”) pronounced the death of witches and Satanists. Even in Innocent III’s time the “heretics” of the age, the Cathars and Waldensians, were believed to be under the inspiration of Satan.

Yet Europe, as she emerged from the so-called Dark Age in the tenth century, still bathed in the light of reason and humanitarianism. Thus a tenth century canon of Church Law criticized and condemned the belief among country folk that “certain women” were in the habit of riding out on beasts in the dead of night and crossing great distances before daybreak. According to the canon, anyone who believed this was “beyond doubt an infidel and a pagan.” Somewhat earlier, Saint Agobard, Bishop of Lyons, declared it was not true that witches could call up storms and destroy harvests. Nor could they devour people from within nor kill them with the “evil eye”.
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“Only a few generations later,” note Colin Wilson and Christopher Evans, “any person who did not believe in night flying and witches as the Church defined them was in danger of being burned as a heretic.”
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What, ask these two authors, had happened in the intervening years to change the Church’s attitude?

In answer to that question, let us recall how, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries inquisitive young men from northern Europe flocked to Islamic Spain to study the knowledge and learning to be found there. But, as Louis Bertrand remarked, it was not so much the “science” of the Moors that attracted them as the pseudo-science: the alchemy, the astrology and the sorcery.
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What the Moors taught was a far cry from the learning now so widely praised in the politically-correct textbooks that fill our libraries and bookshops.

Sorcery and alchemy were not the only things learned by the Europeans from the Muslims: they took also ideas directly from the Koran and the Haditha; ideas about how heretics, apostates and sorcerers should be treated. And it is scarcely to be doubted that in establishing his own Inquisition Innocent III was directly imitating the example of the Almohads in Spain, who had set up their own commission for investigating heretics and apostates fifty years earlier.

Innocent III is viewed by the enemies of Christianity as the
bête noir
, the living embodiment of everything that was and is wrong with Christianity. Yet the fact that his attitudes had Islamic – but not Christian – precedents is never mentioned. And there is another point to consider: Whilst we do not seek to minimize the enormity of Innocent’s actions, we must never forget that in the 12th and 13th centuries the Muslim threat had by no means receded: it remained as potent and dangerous as ever. In such circumstances – indeed, in any war situation – internal dissent (such as the Cathars represented) is liable to be viewed as representing a fifth column working for the enemy. And it is well-known that all wartime dissent is suppressed with a thoroughness and ruthlessness much more severe than would normally be the case. The later Spanish Inquisition, which implemented draconian measures against dissenters in the Iberian Peninsula, must be seen in the same light. The threat of Islam was ever present, and we can be reasonably certain that the severe repression of Muslims at this time was directly attributable to the fear of a renewed Muslim invasion of the Peninsula (by the Ottomans) and the possibility that the native Muslims would form a fifth column in support of the invaders.

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We have found that in the years after 600 classical civilization, which was by then synonymous with Christendom, came into contact with a new force, one that extolled war as a sacred duty, sanctioned the enslavement and killing of non-believers as a religious obligation, sanctioned the judicial use of torture, and provided for the execution of apostates and heretics. All of these attitudes, which, taken together, are surely unique in the religious traditions of mankind, can be traced to the very beginnings of that faith. Far from being manifestations of a degenerate phase of Islam, all of them go back to the founder of the faith himself. Yet, astonishingly enough, this is a religion and an ideology which is still extolled by academics and artists as enlightened and tolerant. Indeed, to this day, there exists a large body of opinion, throughout the Western World, which sees Islam as in every way superior to, and more enlightened than, Christianity.