For Lust of Knowing (7 page)

William of Tripoli, a missionary based in the Dominican convent in the Crusader city of Acre, certainly knew Arabic very well. His
Tractatus de Statu Saracenorum
(1273) was a guide to Islamic beliefs and customs. He had read the Qur'an and he was particularly interested in the account the Qur'an gave of Jesus. However, he also accepted such familiar anti-Muslim libels as the story that the heretical monk Bahira taught Muhammad heresy, as well as the story that Muhammad only banned alcohol after getting disgracefully drunk himself. William claimed to have baptized more than a thousand Muslims (which seems wildly improbable) and he did not think that most Muslims were far from salvation, for he saw that Islam had a great deal in common with Christianity. Moreover, he thought that Islam was close to collapse and then the Muslims were bound to convert to the true faith. He had heard that this had been foretold by Muslim astrologers. Therefore there was no need for another crusade. William's view of the way things were shaping up in the East was unusually sanguine. Less than twenty years later, in 1291, Muslim armies under the command of the Mamluk Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil overran Acre and the rest of the Crusader cities and castles on the Syro-Palestinian littoral.
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Ricoldo da Monte Croce, a Dominican missionary, was in Iraq at the time of the fall of Acre. He saw the Christian captives being brought into Baghdad to be sold as slaves and he speculated about the fate of any nuns who might have been captured. (According to the folklore of the period, nuns were especially sought by the masters of harems because they were reputed to breed exceptionally fine warriors.) Ricoldo was baffled at the success and wealth of the Muslims. Why had God granted them all these things? All the same, he was exceptional
in the depth and detail of his knowledge of Islam and also in his favourable estimation of Muslim manners and customs. In his
Itinerarius
, or ‘Journey', he had much praise for the Arabs: ‘We therefore report certain Muslim works of perfection thus briefly, rather to shame the Christians than to praise the Muslims. For who will not be astonished if he carefully considers how great among these same Muslims is the attention to study, the devotion in prayer, pity for the poor, reverence for the name of God and the prophets and the holy places, their serious ways, their kindness to strangers, and their concord and love towards each other.'
Gravitas
was a leading feature of Muslim life.

Ricoldo was also particularly impressed by their
madrasas
, or religious colleges, and he correctly identified the two main ones as the Nizamiyya and the Mustansariyya. Ricoldo's homiletic contrast of virtuous Saracens with sinful Christians was to be taken up by other Christian writers, including John de Mandeville. Though the Saracens' devotion was admired, it was still, as far as Ricoldo was concerned, a devotion to a false faith and he excoriated their holy law as confused, obscure, lying, irrational and violent. (He had been attacked by Muslim Mongols when he left Baghdad. They beat him, tried to force him to convert to Islam and made him work as a camel driver. These things may have prejudiced him against the religion.) Later, in 1310, he also wrote a refutation of the Qur'an entitled
Improbatio alchorani
. Writing of his experience as a missionary, he observed that it was very difficult to convey a correct idea of the Trinity to a Muslim audience and that it was easier to attack Islam than to defend Christianity.
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Ricoldo (and John de Mandeville after him) only praised Muslim manners and customs in order to make his fellow Christians feel ashamed of their shortcomings and, in general, it must be evident from much of the above that Christian polemicists made only perfunctory attempts to understand their Muslim adversaries. The Muslims reciprocated and wrote their own inaccurate and libellous polemics about Christians and Christendom and, if Christians accused Muslims of worshipping idols, it was also the case that Muslims accused Christians
of polytheism. The Andalusian jurist and belletrist Ibn Hazm (994 – 1064) wrote a delightful treatise on courtly love called
Ring of the Dove
. But he also wrote the lengthy and rancorous
Kitab al-Fisal fi-al-Milal wa-al-Ahwa' wa-al-Nihal
, or ‘Book of Distinction in the Religions, Heresies, Sects', in which he sought to demonstrate the superiority of Sunni Islam to all other faiths and sects. The
Kitab al-Fisal
included a long and fierce attack on Judaism and Christianity. According to Ibn Hazm, Christians had tampered with the New Testament and removed prophecies concerning the coming of Muhammad. They corrupted the Gospels with lies. ‘All this shows the Christian community is altogether vile.'
⁴²

The rigorous Muslim jurist and theologian Ibn Taymiyya (1263 – 1328) similarly considered the Christian scriptures to have been carelessly corrupted.
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It was a commonplace of Muslim polemic to denounce Christian sexual freedom and lack of sexual jealousy. According to Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, writing in Islamic Spain, Slavic men divorced their women if they discovered them to be virgins. The same source denounced the Christians of Galicia in northern Spain as men who washed at most only twice a year. (Of course, he may well have been right about the second point.) The Persian al-Qazwini's thirteenth-century
Cosmography
made the same claim about Franks in general. (Qazwini died in 1283.)
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The anonymous
Sea of Virtues
, written in twelfth-century Syria, mocked the Christians for worshipping someone who was incapable of saving himself from execution. Moreover ‘anyone who believes that his God came out of a woman's privates is quite mad'. According to the anonymous author, unmarried women are allowed to fornicate with whomever they like, but sleeping with priests in churches was regarded as especially meritorious.
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Ibn ‘Abdun, inspector of markets and morals in early twelfth-century Seville, after decreeing that Christians and Jews were not allowed to employ Muslim servants, continued: ‘Muslim women shall be prevented from entering their abominable churches, for the priests are evil-doers, fornicators and sodomites. Frankish women must be forbidden to enter the church except on days of religious services or festivals, for it is their habit to eat and drink and fornicate with the priests, among whom there is not one who has not two or more women with whom he sleeps.'
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At a more popular and entertaining level, Arabic folk epics about legendary and quasi-legendary heroes such as Antar, Sayyid Battal and Baybars presented the Franks as vainglorious and cowardly warriors and portrayed Europe as a region of sorcerers, poisoners and pirates.
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Western epics tended to present a reversed mirror image of this, in which the Christians were paladins and the Saracens were the bad guys. It is important to remember that for much of the Middle Ages Christendom was on the defensive and, for example, the
Chanson de Roland
commemorates defeat, not victory. In the
Chanson
, which was written perhaps towards the end of the eleventh century, the heroic knight Roland and his small army is lured by an evil and treacherous counsellor, Ganelon, into a Saracen ambush in the Pyrenees. Subsequently Roland's liege lord the Emperor Charlemagne takes vengeance on the Saracens. Their commander, King Marsilion, is treacherous, but the Saracens are shown to be brave warriors and appreciated as such:

From Balaguet there cometh an Emir,
His form is noble, his eyes are bold and clear,
When on his horse he's mounted in career
He bears him bravely in his battle-gear,
And for his courage he's famous far and near;
Were he but Christian, right knightly he'd appear.
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Whoever composed the
Chanson
was not in the least interested in the realities of Islam. Just as the Christians worship the Holy Trinity, so the Saracen paynim, or pagans, worship their own dark trinity of idols: Mahound (a corruption of Muhammad), Termagant and Apollyon. Since the Christians have the Bible, it is (rightly) assumed that the Muslims too have a holy book. Saracen society appears to be feudal and chivalric, just like that of France under Charlemagne. There is no significant sense of the ‘Other'. The
Chanson de Roland
and other similar heroic poems of medieval France dealt in fantasy and those who composed those fantasies felt no need to consult any Latin translation of the Qur'an or Cluniac polemic in order to find out what Islam was really like. The Saracens were stock fantasy villains and, as such, the precursors of the Red Indians and the Daleks.
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A similar lack of curiosity about Islam and the Arab way of life is also characteristic of more serious literature in the medieval period. For example, the first thing to be said about Dante's attitude to Islam is that he was almost totally uninterested in it, one way or the other. He was very interested in the struggle between Papacy and Empire and between their Guelf and Ghibelline partisans. He was even more interested in the fate of his adored Beatrice in the afterlife and, above all, he meditated upon the divine ‘love that moves the stars'. But he seems scarcely aware of the world that existed beyond the frontiers of Christendom. In his
Divine Comedy
(which he probably began to compose in 1307), five Muslims are mentioned, all briefly. Muhammad and his cousin ‘Ali were not treated as founders of a new and false religion, but rather as sowers of dissension.
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Since Dante seems to have erroneously believed that Muhammad had started out as a Christian, he therefore did not regard him as some totally alien ‘Other'. However, since Muhammad and his followers had given the true Christian Church a lot of trouble, it was inevitable that he should have been damned in Dante's eyes. But then Dante put quite a lot of Christian Italians, including one of his own relatives, in yet lower circles of Hell. In so far as Dante was interested in anything Arabic, it was primarily the Averroist philosophy taught by the scholastic Siger of Brabant that engaged his favourable interest. The only other Muslims to feature in the Divine Comedy – ‘great Saladin, aloof and alone', Avicenna and Averroes – are in Limbo with other heroic and virtuous pagans.
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They are there because, despite their virtues, they did not and could not choose Christ. (Virgil, who acted as Dante's guide through Hell, was similarly a denizen of Limbo.) However, at the risk of repetition, Dante's lack of interest in Islam is conspicuous.
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Muslims feature in some of the stories of the
Decameron
by Giovanni Boccaccio (
c.
1313–75). The third story in the first day of storytelling presents a favourable portrait of Saladin as a generous and courageous ruler. This is the story of the three rings. In it Saladin asks a wise Jew which is the best religion. The Jew tells the story of a
man close to death who had three sons. The sons were led to believe that whoever received the father's ring would be his true heir. However, they did not realize that the father had had two more rings made that were identical in every way, so that it was impossible to tell who had the exclusive claim to his inheritance. From this tale, the Jew drew a moral: ‘My lord, I say it is the same with the three Laws given by God our Father to three peoples, concerning which you have questioned me. Each of them thinks it has the inheritance, the true Law, and carries out His Commandments; but which does have it is a question as far from being settled as that of the rings.' (Boccaccio also presented a highly favourable portrait of Saladin in the ninth story of the tenth day.)

Boccaccio seems to have been familiar with some of the stories that appeared in
The Thousand and One Nights
and he presented reworkings of several famous Oriental stories, such as the tale of the generosity of Hatim Tai in his
Decameron
.
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Ramon Lull, the Catalan polymath, was similarly familiar with Arabic story lore. Lull (
c.
1232 – 1315) was born to a wealthy Catalan family in Majorca and spent his life as a young rip. Then he experienced a religious crisis. According to one story, he was pursuing someone else's beautiful young wife. She was virtuous and resisted his suit, but he was persistent. ‘After asking permission of her husband to employ a drastic remedy, she summoned her admirer to attend her in some secluded place – perhaps her own chamber – when, instead of yielding, as no doubt he expected, to his demands, she uncovered her bosom, and displayed a breast that was being slowly consumed by a loathly cancer. “See Ramon,” she cried, “the foulness of this body that has won thy affection! How much better hadst thou done to have set thy love on Jesus Christ, of whom thou mayest have a prize that is eternal!”'

Lull's decision to abandon the pursuit of worldly things and leave his family for the service of Christ took place in 1263. Before his conversion, he had composed troubadour love poetry, but afterwards he wrote laments about his past enslavement to lust for women. He particularly dedicated himself to working for the conversion of Muslims and Jews: ‘to give up his life and soul for the sake of His love and honour; and to accomplish this by carrying out the task of converting to His worship and service the Saracens who in such
numbers surrounded the Christians on all sides.' It was obvious to Lull that anyone who proposed to do missionary work amongst the Muslims would need to master Arabic, but studying that language was not a straightforward matter in the Middle Ages, for there were no university courses on the language, nor any Arabic grammars. Lull therefore purchased a Moorish slave, intending that the slave should teach him Arabic. One day Lull received a report that the Moor had been blaspheming against Christ and he therefore struck the Moor several times. The Moor, accustomed as he was in his role as a teacher of Arabic to be treated as a master, became very angry. After biding his time for a few days, he went for Lull with a knife, crying, ‘Now you shall die!' He succeeded in wounding Lull, before Lull wrested the knife from him. The Moor committed suicide in prison.