The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (44 page)

The Golden Age of Tolerance?

Despite the failure of any of its earthly manifestations to live up to its ideals, however, the caliphate remained a potent symbol for Muslims worldwide, and to this day many, both Muslims and non-Muslims, regard the early period of the Abbasid caliphate as the high-water mark for Muslim cultural and societal advancement. The Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad from the eighth century to 1258 is generally considered to be the great cultural and intellectual golden age of Islam, with Baghdad becoming an international center of culture and learning. This is the time of Muslim philosophers Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina (known in the West as Averroes and Avicenna). Claims for the Golden Age under the Abassids are often inflated nowadays by people trying to show another face of Islam besides violence and terror, but in any case, this vaunted Golden Age of Islam did not generally extend to the caliphate’s subject people.

Like any laws, Sharia laws are often honored in the breach, and at various periods many Jews and Christians did attain to positions of power and influence. But at other times the laws mandating their subjugation and humiliation were strictly reinforced. The Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil (847–861) was so intent on making sure that Jews and Christians were thoroughly humiliated and subjugated that he ordered them to wear yellow clothing so that they could always be recognized
as non-Muslims and treated accordingly. He also demanded that they put images of devils on their homes, and not ride horses, but only mules or donkeys.
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And in the Umayyad domains of al-Andalus, so widely touted these days as a beacon of tolerance and proto-multiculturalism, things were little better. Historian María Rosa Menocal speaks of Andalusia as a fount of “our cultural memories and possibilities.”
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In his foreword to Menocal’s book on Islamic al-Andalus, Harold Bloom laments that “there are no Muslim Andalusians visible anywhere in the world today.”
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However, historian Richard Fletcher has noted that “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.”
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On December 30, 1066, Muslim mobs rampaged through Jewish areas of Granada and murdered around four thousand Jews.
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What had enflamed them was that the Berber King Badis had appointed a Jew, Samuel ibn Naghrila, to be vizier of Granada, and that Samuel had passed on the office to his son Joseph. The Muslims were outraged that these Jews had authority over Muslims, which they saw as a “breach of
Shari’ah
.”
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The Muslim jurist Abu Ishaq composed a poem that incited the mobs: “I myself arrived in Granada and saw that these Jews were meddling in its affairs. . . . So hasten to slaughter them as a good work whereby you will earn God’s favour, and offer them up in sacrifice, a well-fattened ram.”
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A Muslim chronicler (and later Sultan of Granada), Abd Allah, said that “both the common people and the nobles were disgusted by the cunning of the Jews, the notorious changes they had brought in the order of things, and the positions they occupied in violation of their pact [i.e., the dhimma].” He recounted that the mob “put every Jew in the city to the sword and took vast quantities of their property.”
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Joseph ibn Naghrila was murdered, and his dead body crucified on Granada’s city gates, in accord with the Qur’an’s command to crucify those who “spread corruption in the land” (5:33).
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The Ottoman Caliphate

One of the principal challenges to the authority of the Abbasid caliphate came from the Ottoman Turks, who had migrated from Central Asia to Anatolia in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and gained power over other Turkish domains in Anatolia. In 1362, the Ottoman sultan Murad I proclaimed himself the caliph, rejecting the authority of the Abbasid caliph Al-Mustakfi I in Cairo, who by then was recognized by few Muslims outside his immediate domains in any case.

Ninety-one years later, the Ottoman claim to constitute the authentic caliphate was considerably strengthened by the Sultan Mehmet II’s conquest of Constantinople (and the consequent destruction of the Christian Byzantine Empire) on May 29, 1453. Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad himself had prophesied the Muslim conquest of Constantinople.

The Muslims had first tried to conquer Constantinople in 711 and had made numerous attempts after that; Mehmet’s victory was the culmination of seven hundred years of efforts to destroy the great Christian empire. The caliphate, going back to the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, had always been a might-makes-right proposition, and Mehmet’s resounding victory was taken as a clear sign of Allah’s favor on the Ottomans. The Abbasid claim to the caliphate was weaker than ever, and the Ottoman stronger.

The Ottomans continued to pressure Christian Europe. On October 7, 1571, they were defeated by the Holy League, a group of Mediterranean Christian states, in the Battle of Lepanto, preventing further Ottoman expansion into Europe. Nonetheless, they kept coming, impelled by Muhammad’s prophecy about the conquest of Rome following that of Constantinople, and by the jihad imperative. In the summer of 1683 the Ottomans besieged Vienna, as they had done unsuccessfully in 1529; the siege was broken on September 11—a date on which Muslim warriors of a later century would choose to embark on their own jihad.

Unable to conquer Christian Europe, the Ottomans contented themselves with making the lives of the Christians within their domains miserable, ensuring that they would “feel themselves subdued,” as per the Qur’an’s command (9:29). One specifically Ottoman feature of this persecution was the
devshirme,
the seizure, enslavement, forced conversion, and impressment into military service of Christian boys. The Sultan Orkhan began this practice in the fourteenth century, and his successors continued it until late in the seventeenth.

Taken from their homes at a young age, the boys were told to convert to Islam or they would be killed. Then they were given strict military training; once they successfully completed it, they would join the Janissaries, the caliph’s special forces.
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All in all, around two hundred thousand boys were enslaved and exploited in this way.
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The reality of life as a dhimmi in the Ottoman caliphate being what it was, some families welcomed the seizure
of their sons, as they saw it as a path to a better life than they could possibly provide.
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After failing to capture Vienna, the Ottoman caliphate went into a long, slow decline and by the middle of the nineteenth century was being referred to derisively as “The Sick Man of Europe.” This decline led to some reforms that relaxed the Sharia’s institutionalized oppression of Christians. Under Western pressure in the nineteenth century, the caliph agreed to significant departures from Islamic law regarding the subjugated dhimmis.

Stratford Canning, the British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte (the Ottoman government), in 1842 protested to the caliph Abdulmecid I after seeing two Christians who had converted to Islam and then returned to Christianity executed in accord with Islam’s death penalty for apostasy. He urged the caliph to “give his royal word that henceforward neither should Christianity be insulted in his dominions, nor should Christians be in any way persecuted for their religion.”
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Needing British support, Abdulmecid agreed, and Queen Victoria sent him congratulations. Then, with the British and French allied with the Ottomans against Russia in the Crimean War, Canning used the increasing Ottoman dependence on the Western powers to continue to press the Porte for further reform of the dhimmi laws. This pressure culminated in the Hatti-Humayun decree of 1856, which declared that all Ottoman subjects were equal before the law, regardless of religion.

The Europeans added this decree to the Treaty of Paris that ended the Crimean War, praising “the Sultan’s generous intentions towards the Christian population of his Empire.” But the British and French severely disappointed Canning by assuring the Ottomans and the world that they did not consider themselves to have any right “to interfere either collectively or individually in the relations of the Sultan with his subjects or in the internal administration of the Empire.”

Canning knew this would doom the reform: without Western pressure, the Ottomans would continue to enforce Islamic law. The Porte, he said, would “give way to its natural indolence and leave the firman [decree] of reform . . . a lifeless paper, valuable only as a record of sound principles.”
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And that’s how it played out. The British consul James H. Skene wrote to another British official on March 31, 1859, that “the Christian subjects of the sultan at Aleppo still live in a state of terror.” He attributed this fact to the trauma they had suffered nine years earlier, when

           
houses were plundered, men of distinction among them were murdered, and women violated. . . . They were not allowed to ride in the town, not even to walk in the gardens. Rich merchants were fain to dress in the humblest garb to escape notice; when they failed in this they were often forced to sweep the streets or act as porters in order to give proofs of their patience and obedience; and they were never addressed by a Mussulman without expressions of contempt.
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This contempt was mandated by the Qur’anic command to Muslims to be “merciful to one another” but “harsh to unbelievers” (48:29)—prescripts whose effect we see today in the Islamic State’s treatment of Christians and Yazidis.

Another British consul, James Brant, wrote in July 1860 about “the inability of the Sultans [sic] Government to protect its Christian subjects,” referring to massacres of Christians by Muslim mobs in Ottoman domains.
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Yet another British consul, James Finn, wrote at the same time that “oppression against Christians usually begins with the fanatic populace, but it is neither repressed nor punished by the Government.”
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These reports and Stratford Canning’s efforts to compel the Ottoman caliphate to ease the hardships mandated by Islamic law for religious
minorities make for interesting reading from a contemporary vantage point. In sharp contrast to the British officials’ forthright and unapologetic efforts to curb the enforcement of Islamic law in the Ottoman Empire, today the president of the United States and virtually every leader in what was once known as Christendom respond only with fulsome praise for the belief system that is motivating the Islamic State to persecute Christians with a ferocity not seen since Roman times.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the Ottoman caliphate’s gradual decline accelerated. The caliphate, the symbol and source of the unity of Muslims worldwide, was so diminished in influence by the time World War I broke out and the Ottomans joined the Central Powers against Britain, France, and its archenemy Russia, that the caliph Mehmet V declared a jihad and nobody came.