The Undivided Past (5 page)

This fanciful description of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks unmistakably echoes Gibbon’s earlier remarks in
The Decline and Fall
, about the banner of the Cross being unfurled triumphantly on the ruins of the Roman Capitol. Once again,
he depicts a deeply rooted and seemingly diametrical conflict between two religious collectivities as the determinative and implacably destructive agent of history. But whereas in the West, Christianity had (to Gibbon’s regret) undermined paganism from within, in the East, by contrast, militant Islam had (this time to Gibbon’s delight) vanquished Christianity from without. Incorrigibly hostile to the Byzantine Empire, as well as to its emperors, he dismissed its entire history as “a tedious tale of weakness and misery.”
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Islam, by contrast, Gibbon viewed more sympathetically, as a
tolerant, unmystical, undogmatic religion, which was preferable to Christianity. Although it revered its sages, who were learned in sacred writings, Islam had stopped short of developing a rich, privileged, and powerful priesthood; this meant that, in contrast to the tortuous elaborations and schismatic tendencies of Christian thought, it retained a primordial doctrinal simplicity, which did not compete with and deter human aspirations. Nor did Islam weaken the sinews of the state by preaching disengagement and otherworldliness; instead, it actively encouraged such civil and civic values as hospitality, honor, and justice. In short, and like many of his contemporaries who were influenced by
Enlightenment thinking, Gibbon found in Islam a less clerically and theologically oppressive religion much preferable to Christianity (and especially to Roman Catholicism).
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In retrospect, it is clear that Gibbon’s views of Byzantium were excessively and exaggeratedly hostile, for no empire could have lasted for more than a millennium being as corrupt, degenerate, and sclerotic, as infirm of purpose, or as wholly devoid of redeeming characteristics as the one he described in the second half of
The Decline and Fall.
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Moreover, the fact that this Christian imperium had lasted for so long after the demise of the Western Empire casts serious doubt on the notion that the rival religion of Islam was a direct cause of its demise (can an empire be plausibly described as “declining” for over a thousand years?). By the same token, much that Gibbon wrote in praise of Islam was just plain wrong: it did in practice possess a sort of professional priesthood, its
theology was neither static nor monolithic but evolving and disputed, and there was fierce internal strife and schism. To a greater extent than Gibbon was prepared to recognize
(and it was an error of perception that many since have also made and, regrettably, still do), Christianity and Islam were in many ways mirror images of each other: both were monotheistic, both had spread thanks to charismatic early leadership, expanding rapidly after the deaths of their founding figures, and both were inclined to internal schism.
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As a result, the interrelations between an ostensibly monolithic “Christianity” and a no less putatively homogeneous “Islam” were more complex and equivocal than Gibbon’s
Manichean depiction of that sustained and belligerent encounter suggests.

To be sure, when he came to write
The Decline and Fall
, violent clashes between Christianity and Islam had been taking place for more than a thousand years, as the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE was immediately followed by the initial Arab conquests of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Tripoli, and Carthage between 637 and 698, and by two sieges of
Constantinople itself in 674–78 and 716–18. Nor was it just the
Byzantine Empire that was thus threatened; at the other end of the Mediterranean, the entire Iberian Peninsula was in Arab hands by the early eighth century.
Charles Martel’s subsequent victory at the Battle of
Poitiers in 732 and Constantinople’s stubborn and successful resistance blunted these Arab attacks for a time, but in the ninth century, Sicily was conquered,
Rome itself was raided, and for the next hundred years or so, Christianity was on the defensive throughout the Mediterranean.
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From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, there was a Christian counterattack: five brutal and bloody
Crusades for a time won back the holy places in the eastern Mediterranean, Sicily was reconquered by the Normans, and the
Arabs were pushed back on the Iberian Peninsula. But the holy places were soon lost again, and from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries a revived and reinvigorated Islam, espoused by the
Ottoman Turks, not only captured Constantinople (the point in time at which Gibbon had ended
The Decline and Fall
), but subsequently took Belgrade, conquered Crete, and twice besieged Vienna, in 1529 and again in 1683.
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Nor was that the end: the Ottomans’ last major westerly conquest was of Oran in North Africa in 1709, less than thirty years before Gibbon was born; anxieties about the “Islamic threat” to “Christian” Europe
thus remained real and vivid, albeit diminishingly so, throughout his lifetime; and the Ottoman Empire would survive long after his death until its defeat and dismemberment at the end of the
First World War.

This confrontation between the collectivities of
“Christianity” and “Islam” was more protracted and more warlike than that between pagans and Christians had been, and it also took place across a much greater geographical area. From the seventh to the seventeenth centuries and beyond, and from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, Christians and Muslims (mainly Arabs) were aggressively yet also anxiously made aware of the “other” as the infidel—a wicked, rapacious, and virtually subhuman being, by turns a terrible threat and an inferior creature, to be both feared and loathed.
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Hence the summons of
Pope Urban II for
Crusader knights to take part in a “holy war” in 1095; hence the many atrocities and acts of aggression that followed, as the Crusaders established their small Latin kingdoms collectively known as Outremer; and hence the Islamic response to such “infidel” encroachment: the proclamation of a “jihad,” justified by the Koranic injunction to “kill the idolators wherever you find them.”
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As contemporary and competing monotheisms, Christianity and Islam were alike
intolerant, their respective followers equally convinced that anyone espousing an alternative belief system was evil in this world and damned in the next. There were countless polemics produced on both sides, full of vitriol, hatred, and negative stereotyping, and on the Christian side, which had no injunction against representational art, there were many lurid visual images—paintings, engravings, or caricatures—depicting the hideousness of the irredeemable horde on the other side of the unbridgeable chasm.
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Even after the Ottoman Empire was dismantled, the reciprocal sense (and the fear) of a great, threatening, and unresolved Christian-Muslim divide remained throughout the twentieth century—and still remains in our own time.

One twentieth-century version of this confrontation, and of an unbridgeable gulf, was vividly outlined by the great Belgian historian
Henri Pirenne in
Muhammad and Charlemagne
, in which he described (and lamented) the shattering of the “Mediterranean unity” of the Roman Empire as a result of the seventh-century
Arab conquests. The sea “which had hitherto been the centre of Christianity became its frontier,” as two “different and hostile” faiths now faced and fought each other “on the shores of Mare Nostrum.”
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It cannot be coincidence that Pirenne wrote his essentially
Manichean account when the western European powers were again fighting the Turks during the
First World War, and in the aftermath of 9/11 this interpretation of the long-term relations between Christianity and Islam as eternally prolonged has been reinvigorated by pundits and
historians. Here are two examples that must stand proxy for many more. According to
Andrew Wheatcroft, in a book entitled
Infidels: The Conflict Between Christendom and Islam, 638–2002
, there was a “single thread” of sustained and cumulative “antagonism between the western Christian and the Mediterranean Islamic worlds,” characterized by “atavistic” hatred, fear, loathing, disgust, enmity, antipathy, abomination, and abuse on both sides, which makes it “permanent, natural, inevitable and pre-ordained.”
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In the same way,
Anthony Pagden’s
Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West
has recently given extended attention to what he describes as the “perpetual enmity” and the “perpetual hostility” between Christianity and Islam, focusing on such antagonistic and confrontational episodes as the early Arab conquests, the Christian Crusades, and the subsequent expansion of the
Ottoman Empire.
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Both Wheatcroft and Pagden repeatedly insist that “the Christian and Muslim worlds have been religious, geographical, political and economic rivals and competitors since their point of first contact,” and their accounts of successive battles, sieges, massacres, pillaging, and violation add up to a vivid and horrifying story of religious war and confessional vengeance between collective identities in what seems to be preordained and unavoidable conflict.
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But as the two authors coyly concede, in qualifying passages buried deep in their texts, animus was far from being the whole of the picture, for the chasm they depict was often “illusory” or merely “metaphorical.” In practice there was “endless” “ambivalence” and “ambiguity” in the relationships between these ostensibly monolithic and antithetical faiths, so that “statements of enmity may not represent the reality of everyday life.” Indeed,
conflict between the two supposedly ever-warring sides “has been neither continuous nor uninterrupted,” as in certain places “Christianity and Islam existed side by side over a long period” when, pace
Pirenne, there was a “skein of mutual economic and political interests that dominated the Mediterranean and the Balkans.”
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Such significant qualifications to these faux-
Gibbonian depictions of clashing creeds and battling
beliefs deserve examination in more detail.

To begin with, there is as much evidence characterizing both Christianity and Islam as religions of peace and mutual accommodation as there is supporting the view of them both as creeds of confrontation and conquest. It may be, as one historian has argued, that “western Christianity before 1500 must rank as one of the most intolerant religions in world history,” but against this must be set Christ’s exhortations to take in strangers, to love one’s enemies, to turn the other cheek, and to “do unto others as you would wish to be done to you,” and also the views of such Christian critics of the
Crusades as
Isaac de Étoile, who was against “forcing infidels to accept the faith at the point of the sword.”
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In the same way, the teachings of the
Koran had been more pacifically interpreted, based on its injunction that “there is no compulsion in religion.” Indeed,
Muhammad had explicitly set himself and his followers against religious wars and forced
conversions, and he did not see himself as the founder of a new religion, but as bringing the fullness of divine revelation, granted partially to such earlier prophets as Abraham, Moses, and
Jesus, to the
Arabs. As a result, Muslim teaching regarded Christians and
Jews as slightly errant relatives, who were worshipping the same
God, in receipt of similar revelations, and even reading some of the same scriptures. They were categorized and respected as “people of the book,” with whom Muslims were urged to live in some form of tolerant amity. As for the doctrine of “jihad,” this too could be interpreted in varying ways, not just (and not even primarily) as an exhortation to wage collective holy war against the Christian infidel, but rather (and more importantly) as an injunction to strive for individual self-improvement in finding and following the demanding path of God.
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Since neither the
Bible nor the Koran existed as a single
coherent text with a single uncontested religious message, it follows that neither “Christianity” nor “Islam” embodied a uniform, monolithic, collective religious identity.
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As
Gibbon wryly and repeatedly notes, Christians had been prone to schism and division from almost the very beginning, and this remained the case after the fall of Rome. Let three of the most conspicuous examples suffice. In 1054, papal legates entered the basilica of Hagia Sophia and on behalf of the pope excommunicated the patriarch of
Constantinople—an interdict that would remain in force until 1965. In 1204, the Latin knights of the fourth
Crusade, ostensibly on their way to the Holy Land to reinforce their Christian brethren there, got no farther than the
Byzantine capital, which they sacked and pillaged and plundered. And in 1453, the
Ottoman Turks were poised to take Constantinople, but the Christian West sent no help to the embattled capital of the Christian East.
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In the same way, and this time pace Gibbon, the greater Muslim world was also rent and divided, between Sunni and Shiite factions, between the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, between those who looked to Baghdad and those who looked to Cairo, between Arab and Berber, Turk and Persian. So while by the fourteenth century Islam had spread from modern-day Morocco as far as Indonesia, it assumed so many varied, particular, and localized forms that there was no real sense of collective consciousness or unitary religious identity among the millions who espoused it across three continents. As with Christianity, Islam’s initial cohesion soon evaporated, it subsequently splintered into hundreds of rival sects, and it has not been reunified since.
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So lacking, indeed, was such cohesion that on many occasions when the forces of “Christianity” and “Islam” confronted each other in what was alleged to be another head-on conflict, the reality was often of Christian and Muslim leaders (and followers) allied on one side, against Christian and Muslim leaders (and followers) taking up arms together on the other.
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In eleventh-century
Spain, the legendary warrior known as
El Cid not only fought alongside the Christian king
Alfonso VI of Castile against the
Arabs, but also, when circumstances warranted, joined with the Muslim king of Zaragoza against the Spanish; and early in the twelfth century, in Outremer, the Frankish count of Edessa allied
with the emir of Mosul to fight the Latin prince of Antioch and the Muslim king of Aleppo.
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Three centuries later, the Turkish sultan Suleyman the Magnificent was willing to join in a military alliance with the
Catholic French against the equally Catholic
Habsburg emperor, and sometime after,
Queen Elizabeth of England was equally prepared to contemplate a similar arrangement with the ruler of Morocco and his
Ottoman overlords against Catholic
Spain. As the traveler and historian
Barnaby Rogerson notes, having surveyed relations between Christendom and Islam during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the notion that the two leading empires, the (Christian) Habsburg and the (Muslim) Ottoman, were “locked in an obsessive war of attrition” that was “real, destructive and bloody” was far from being the whole truth, since this conflict “often took second place to obsessive rivalry with neighbours of their own religious faith”: the
Shiite empire of Persia in the case of the (
Sunni) Ottomans, and the French monarchy in the case of the Habsburgs.
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