For Lust of Knowing (4 page)

Some have argued that in the centuries that followed the writings of Aeschylus, Euripides and Herodotus, the Greeks and Romans continued to develop a taxonomic lore about the Orient and this was passed on to Christian Europe. At first sight, this may seem plausible, but there is a big gap in continuity and until the fifteenth century very few scholars in Western Europe were able to read Greek. As we shall see when we come to consider the writings of such medieval figures as Peter the Venerable and Ricoldo da Monte Croce, they do not seem to owe anything at all to any taxonomic lore adumbrated by Greek playwrights and historians. They had their own fresh medieval Christian prejudices.

And at that time Sir Palamides, the Saracen, was in that country, and well cherished with the king and queen. And every day Sir Palamides drew unto La Beale Isoud and proffered her many gifts, for he loved her passingly well. All that espied Tramtrist, and full well knew he Sir Palamides for a noble knight and a mighty man.

Sir Thomas Malory,
Morte d'Arthur
, Book VIII, ch. 9

‘Of the Middle East in about AD 600 one thing can be said for certain: its chances of being conquered by Arab tribesmen in the name of a new religion were so remote that nobody had even speculated that it might happen. Islam came upon the world as a totally unexpected development…'
¹
Nevertheless, by 632, the year of the Prophet Muhammad's death, most of the Arabian peninsula had submitted to Islam. In the next few years, not only Syria was taken from the Byzantines, but the Sasanian Persians had also been defeated and their capital, Ctesiphon, occupied. The Arabs conquered Egypt in 642. Thereafter Arab armies pressed on eastwards through Iran and Khurasan, ultimately reaching the frontiers of China, while other Arab and Berber forces moved westwards across North Africa and crossed into Spain in 711. For a while, it even seemed that areas of the south of France and Switzerland might be included within the frontier of the Arab caliphate. For reasons that remain mysterious,
the new conquerors were referred to in the earliest Latin sources either as ‘Hagarenes' or as ‘Saracens'. Though the Muslim Arabs made little attempt to convert their newly conquered subjects, nevertheless there were political, social and, above all, fiscal advantages in converting to Islam. Consequently Christendom was faced with not just a military threat, but an ideological one as well.

It was natural for Christian thinkers to interpret the unfamiliar and unexpected phenomenon of Islam in terms of what was familiar to them already. Therefore they tended to present Islam to themselves not as a new religion, but rather as the variant of an old heresy. As Richard Southern has observed: ‘There was only one way in which this chaos (as it must have appeared) of truth and falsehood could be treated by a twelfth-century thinker if it were to be brought within the range of his equipment: it must be treated as a heresy, more mysterious in its operation than other heresies which had appeared in the course of Christian history, but like them a more or less deliberate perversion of the true faith, which required refutation by the ordinary rules of argument.'
²
Usually Christian thinkers characterized Islam as a variant of Arianism. Arius (
c.
250–
c.
336) had taught that God the Son was inferior to God the Father and, unlike God the Father, Jesus was born of a woman, endured mortal tribulations and ultimately death. This doctrine was rejected by the Council of Nicaea in 325. The contention that Islam was a Christian heresy was bolstered by the dissemination of the legend of Muhammad's early encounter with a heretical monk. The twelve-year-old Muhammad's meeting with a Christian monk called Bahira (or, in some versions, Sergius) in the Syrian desert is attested by Ibn Hisham's ninth-century life of the Prophet. In the Muslim version, the monk recognized the seal of prophethood between Muhammad's shoulders and foretold his future importance. Christian polemicists, however, invented tales about how a monk (in some versions actually a renegade cardinal) instructed Muhammad in the elements of a pernicious Christian heresy.
³

During the Middle Ages, Christians came under attack from Muslim polemicists. Muslims rejected the idea that a God could be born from a woman's flesh. They denied that Jesus had died on the cross. They claimed that the Christians were not true monotheists, for they really worshipped three gods.
⁴
Christians were also alleged to have tampered
with the texts of the Old and New Testaments. The Christians for their part characterized Islam as a sensual cult – and hence its sanctioning of polygamy. Pointing to the number of women taken as wives by the Prophet, they accused him of being motivated by sensuality. Islam was a violent religion that owed its success to force of arms. Christian polemicists derided the earthy, sexual nature of paradise as described in the Qur'an. They mocked the failure of Muhammad to perform miracles. But of course, the most fundamental issue was the Muslims' refusal to acknowledge the divinity of Christ.
⁵

There was a tendency among those writing in Greek and Latin to explain the Muslims' capture of Jerusalem and the other Muslim successes in terms of punishment for Christian lack of unity and other failings. (This sort of explanation would remain popular well into the eighteenth century.) There were also some pious thinkers who interpreted the triumph of Islam as a presage of the Last Days. The Muslims were surely one of the horns of the fourth beast, foretold by Daniel in the Old Testament, whose coming immediately preceded the enthronement of the Ancient of Days: ‘After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.'
⁶

But though a handful of churchmen composed libellous polemics or prophecies directed against Islam, the essential fact was that most Christians had no interest at all in the new religion. Bishop Arculf went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem around the year 700. Since he was possessed by the desire to walk and worship in the place where Christ had once walked, the Muslims (who had been in occupation of Jerusalem since 637) were all but invisible to him. He merely noted that in the Temple area, ‘the Saracens have now erected a square house of prayer, in a rough manner, by raising planks and beams upon some remains of old ruins, and it is said that it will hold about three thousand men', before he went on to write about the Christian holy places.
⁷
Similarly, the Venerable Bede in his
History
mentioned the attacks of Saracen pirates on the British Isles, without troubling to enquire as to their religion.

St John of Damascus, also known as Yuhanna ibn Mansur (d.
c.
749), was probably the first to engage with Muslim theology in some detail. John of Damascus seems to have been of Arab parentage. He certainly knew Arabic, though he was also literate and indeed fluent in Greek. In Damascus, he had been a schoolfriend of Yazid, son of the Umayyad Caliph Muawiya I. When the Byzantines still ruled Syria, John's father had worked for the Emperor Heraclius as a financial official. John did the same for the Umayyad caliphs, even though John apparently regarded himself as formally a subject of the Byzantine emperor. In 724 he left public life, as it had become impossible for Christians to continue to hold high office under the caliphs in Syria. The former public servant retired to the monastery of St Sabas in Palestine, where he studied theology and philosophy.

‘The last Father of the Byzantine Church', as Peter Brown has characterized John, wrote extensively upon theological matters. Islam, as such, was not a major issue in his eyes. Arabrule in Syria was viewed as a temporary vexation. He was far more concerned with the iconoclast movement within the Orthodox Church and his priority was to combat those who denied the validity of prayer before holy images and who sought to destroy the icons of the Church. Most of what he wrote about Islam was written within the context of a much wider survey of the schisms that threatened the Church. His orthodox summa,
The Fount of Knowledge
, written in Greek some time after 742, was concerned primarily with Christological problems and it became the basic text of Byzantine orthodoxy on such matters. The work is in three parts, the second of which is devoted to heresies. Over a hundred heresies are discussed, but they divide into four basic types: Barbarism, Scythism, Hellenism and Judaism. For most of the section on heresy, John drew on earlier knowledge, but the sections covering iconoclasm and Islam seem to be original with him. Islam is covered in a chapter on ‘The Heresy of the Ishmaelites' (though John also called the Muslims Hagarenes). Naturally he concentrated on the Islamic doctrine concerning Christ, which he denounced because Muslims denied Christ's special redemptive mission. John transmitted
the polemical legend that Muhammad had been instructed by an Arian monk. The reason that John judged Muhammad to be an Arian heretic was that Muhammad, like the Arians, denied co-eternity of the Son with the Father. John also argued that much of the alleged Prophetic revelation was lifted from Old and New Testaments. John evidently knew the Qur'an fairly well and adduced what he thought were textual parallelisms between the revelation received by Muhammad and the earlier scriptures. He denounced the sanctioning of polygamy as immoral. He also made polemical use of the episode when Zayd ibn Haritha, Muhammad's adopted son, having married the beautiful Zaynab, was induced to divorce her so that the Prophet could marry her. There was a Qur'anic revelation to sanction this.
⁸
In John's eyes, this was further evidence of the sensuality of Islam. (Today it is widely accepted among scholars that the Prophet's marriages were chiefly contracted for political rather than sexual purposes.)

The hostility that pervades John's account of Islam should be understood within the context of the time. Christians living under Islamic rule were tolerated, but there were strict limits to that tolerance. Under the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705) Arabic replaced Greek as the administrative language. Under Yazid II (r. 720–24) Christians were actively persecuted and Christian images and crosses were destroyed throughout the caliphate. The Church of St John in Damascus was demolished to make way for the Umayyad Mosque. The Monastery of St Sabas, where St John pursued his studies and composed his polemics, is situated ten miles to the south of Jerusalem. The cellar of its chapel contains the skulls of monks massacred in Bedouin raids. John was a stylish and learned writer, but since he wrote in Greek his impact was at first limited until
The Fount of Knowledge
was translated into Latin in the twelfth century and then became known to Aquinas, who read a few pages every day. John also wrote specifically against iconoclasm in
Three Orations Against the Calumniators of the Holy Icons
and he produced a short
Disputation
(between a Muslim and Christian). He was more concerned with propping up the fate of wavering Christians than with mounting a direct assault on Islam itself.
⁹

It was more or less inevitable that the earliest attacks on Islam should have been drafted in the Near East by Christians who felt their
faith was under threat. ‘Abd al-Masih ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (though this was probably not his real name) was a Christian Arab who compiled an attack on Islam some time in the ninth or tenth centuries. His
Risala,
or ‘Letter', was presented as an epistolary exchange between a Christian and a Muslim. The letter, allegedly drafted by a Muslim, put forward a not very persuasive case for conversion to Islam. The much longer Christian reply included a hostile version of the life of the Prophet, which denounced him for, among other things, an excessive recourse to violence and the repeated practice of taking many beautiful women as his wives. It also inevitably included the story of the Prophet's instruction by the heretical monk and drew attention to his fifteen wives. Al-Kindi defended the doctrine of the Trinity against Muslim claims that it was only faintly disguised polytheism. He drew attention to the violent means used to spread Islam. He pointed to areas where the Qur'an appeared to contradict itself and he queried the Muslim doctrine of abrogation, by which certain parts of the Qur'an are held to cancel out others. He argued against the Arabic of the Qur'an being the language of God, for, if this was the case, why were there so many loan words in it? Al-Kindi's Arabic was translated into Latin in the twelfth century in Toledo under the patronage of Peter of Cluny (see below). Versions of the
Risala
were frequently included in later compilations of anti-Muslim material, and for centuries in Western Europe al-Kindi's rather inventive treatise was regarded as the major source on the life of the Prophet. Al-Kindi's treatise offered the appearance of balance, as it mingled praise and blame of the Prophet (though much more blame than praise), and there was very little other material available in Latin against which it was possible to check the
Risala
's fabrications and misunderstandings.
¹⁰

Serious Christian attempts to understand Islam as opposed to mere abuse began in Spain, though naturally the clerics who sought to understand Islam better only did so in order to have more material with which to refute its errors. Even so, there were some who disapproved
of any study of Islam or Arabic for whatever reason. In the ninth century Paul Alvarus denounced those Christians who were engaged in ‘building up great libraries of them [Arabic writings] at enormous cost… hardly one can write a passable Latin letter to a friend, but innumerable are those who can express themselves in Arabic and can compose poetry in that language better than the Arabs themselves'. Christians in Spain pursued the study of Arabic philosophy, theology, science and so forth while neglecting their Latin and indeed their own faith.
¹¹
Alvarus assigned Islam a maleficent apocalyptic role, for it prepared the way for the coming of the Antichrist, as prophesied in the Book of Daniel. He denounced Islam as a combination of several heresies and a cunningly deliberate mingling of truth and error. Much of the appeal of the false faith was the sensual self-indulgence that it allowed its adherents. Alvarus, having consulted the stars on the matter, was confident that Islam was doomed. Under his influence, several Spanish Christians sought and found martyrdom at the hands of the Muslims. Those who abused Islam or who sought to convert Muslims to Christianity faced the death penalty. Alvarus's friend, the learned cleric Eulogius, was arrested for hiding a convert from Islam to Christianity and he was subsequently beheaded. He was one of the last of a number of fanatical Christians who, by publicly denouncing Islam and its Prophet, courted and found martyrdom in Cordova in the 850s.
¹²