Europe and the Islamic World: A History

605 Pages·2012·3.49 MB·English

by  John Tolan

E I W
UROPE AND THE SLAMIC ORLD
EUROPE ISLAMIC
AND THE
WORLD
A HISTORY
J T , G V , H L
OHN OLAN ILLES EINSTEIN AND ENRY AURENS
Translated by Jane Marie Todd With a Foreword by John L.
Esposito
Copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William
Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tolan, John Victor, 1959– [Europe et l’islam. English]
Europe and the Islamic world : a history / John Tolan, Gilles Veinstein, and Henry Laurens ; translated by
Jane Marie Todd With a Foreword by John L. Esposito.
p. cm.
Henry Laurens’s name appears first on the original French ed.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-14705-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Europe—Relations—Middle East. 2. Middle East—
Relations—Europe. 3. Europe—Relations—Islamic countries. 4. Islamic countries—Relations—Europe. 5.
Europe—Civilization—Islamic influences. 6. Islamic civilization—Western influences. I. Veinstein, Gilles.
II. Laurens, Henry, 1954– III. Todd, Jane Marie, 1957– IV. Title.
DS63.2.E8L3813 2013
303.48'2401767—dc23
2012016021
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme
d’aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de
l’Ambassade de France représenté aux Etats-Unis.
This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the
French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.
This book has been composed in Minion Pro Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
CONTENTS
Foreword by John L. Esposito
General Introduction
PART I: Saracens and Ifranj: Rivalries, Emulation, and
Convergences
By John Tolan
1. The Geographers’ World: From Arabia Felix to the Balad al-Ifranj (Land of
the Franks)
2. Conquest and Its Justifications: Jihad, Crusade, Reconquista
3. The Social Inferiority of Religious Minorities: Dhimmis and Mudejars
4. In Search of Egyptian Gold: Traders in the Mediterranean
5. On the Shoulders of Giants: Transmission and Exchange of Knowledge
PART II: The Great Turk and Europe
By Gilles Veinstein
Introduction to Part II: Continuity and Change in Geopolitics
6. The Ottoman Conquest in Europe
7. Ottoman Europe: An Ancient Fracture
8. Antagonistic Figures
9. The Islamic-Christian Border in Europe
10. Breaches in the Conflict
PART III: Europe and the Muslim World in the Contemporary
Period
By Henry Laurens
Introduction to Part III
11. The Eighteenth Century as Turning Point
12. Civilization or Conquest?
13. The Age of Reform
14. The Age of Empire
15. The First Blows to European Domination
16. The Great War and the Beginning of Emancipation
17. Contemporary Issues
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
FOREWORD
by John L. Esposito
CONTEMPORARY POLITICS and the media have too often produced a narrative of
conflicting paradigms that sees the world and the history of relations between the
West and Islam in terms of a clash of civilizations, Orientalism versus
Occidentalism, fourteen centuries of jihad versus Crusades and colonialism,
Islamophobia and anti-Westernism. Lost in the cultural crossfire are the
religious, historical, political, and cultural diversity rather than monolithic nature
of the West and the Muslim world and positive interactions and exchanges and
cross-fertilization.
Despite common historical and theological roots and beliefs, Muslim-Christian
relations have often been overshadowed by political and economic as well as
religious conflict as the armies and missionaries of Islam and of Christendom
have been locked in a struggle for power and for souls: from the fall of the
Byzantine (eastern Roman) Empire before Muslim armies in the seventh century
to the Crusades during the eleventh and twelfth centuries; the expulsion of the
“Moors” from Spain and the Inquisition; the Ottoman threat to overrun Europe;
European (Christian) colonial expansion and domination from the eighteenth to
early twentieth centuries; the political and cultural challenge of the superpowers
in the new colonialism or American “neocolonialism” since the latter half of the
twentieth century; the creation of the state of Israel by Western “Christian”
countries and Palestinian exile; the competition of Christian and Muslim
missionaries today from Africa to Southeast Asia; and the contemporary
reassertion of Islam in Muslim politics around the world.
Theologically, the very similarities of Christianity and Islam put the two on an
early collision course. Islam belongs to the Abrahamic family of great
monotheistic faiths. Muslims, like Jews and Christians, view themselves as the
children of Abraham, as proclaimed in each of their sacred scriptures: the Old
and New Testaments and the Qur’an. Despite specific and significant
differences, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share a belief in one God, the
creator, sustainer, and ruler of the universe who is beyond ordinary experience.
And all believe in angels, Satan, prophets, revelation, moral responsibility and
accountability, divine judgment, and reward or punishment. Yet while Jews and
Christians claim descent from Abraham and his wife, Sarah, through their son
Isaac, Muslims trace their religious roots back to Abraham (Ibrahim) through
Ismail, his firstborn son by Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian servant.
Both religions had a universal message and mission. Both possessed a
supersessionist theology—that is, each community believed that its covenant
with God was the fulfillment of God’s earlier revelation to a previous
community that had gone astray. While Christians had little problem with their
supersessionist views toward Judaism, a similar claim by Muslims to have the
final revelation was unacceptable and, more than that, a threat to the uniqueness
and divinely mandated role of Christianity to be the only means to salvation.
Christendom experienced the early conquests and expansion of Islam not only
as a theological but also as a political and civilizational challenge to its religious
and political hegemony. Muslim rule quickly spread from the Byzantine and
Persian empires to Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, and swept across North Africa and
into Europe, where Muslims ruled Spain and the Mediterranean from Sicily to
Anatolia.
For non-Muslim populations in Byzantium and Persia, who had been
subjugated by foreign rulers, Islamic rule meant an exchange of rulers rather
than a loss of independence. Many in Byzantium willingly exchanged Greco-
Roman rule for that of new Arab masters, fellow Semites, with whom they had
closer linguistic and cultural affinities and to whom they paid lower taxes. Upon
declaration of their allegiance to the Islamic state and payment of a poll (head)
tax, these “protected” (dhimmi) peoples could practice their faith and be
governed by their religious leaders and law in matters of faith and private life.
Islam often proved more tolerant than imperial Christianity, providing greater
religious freedom for Jews and indigenous Christians; most local Christian
churches had been persecuted as schismatics and heretics by a “foreign”
Christian orthodoxy. As Francis Peters has observed:
The conquests destroyed little: what they did suppress were imperial rivalries and sectarian bloodletting
among the newly subjected population. The Muslims tolerated Christianity but they disestablished it;
henceforth Christian life and liturgy, its endowments, politics, and theology, would be a private not a
public affair. By an exquisite irony, Islam reduced the status of Christians to that which the Christians
had earlier thrust upon the Jews, with one difference. The reduction in Christian status was merely
judicial; it was unaccompanied by either systematic persecution or blood lust, and generally, though not
everywhere and at all times, unmarred by vexatious behavior.1
The rapid spread and development of imperial Islam produced a rich Islamic
civilization that flourished from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Urban cultural
centers emerged in Cairo, Baghdad, Cordova, Palermo, and Nishapur. With
significant assistance from Christian and Jewish subjects, Muslims collected the
great books of science, medicine, and philosophy from the West and the East
and translated them into Arabic from Greek, Latin, Persian, Coptic, Syriac, and
Sanskrit. The age of translation was followed by a period of great creativity as a
new generation of educated Muslim thinkers and scientists made their own
contributions to learning in philosophy, medicine, chemistry, astronomy,
algebra, optics, art, and architecture. Towering intellectual giants dominated this
period: al-Farabi (d. 950), Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna, 980–1037), Ibn Rushd
(known as Averroes, d. 1198), al-Biruni (973–1048), and al-Ghazali (d. 1111).
The cultural traffic pattern was again reversed when Europeans, emerging from
the Middle Ages, turned to Muslim centers of learning to regain their lost
heritage and to learn from Muslim advances in philosophy, mathematics,
medicine, and science. They retranslated the Greek philosophers and the writings
of their great Muslim disciples: men like al-Farabi, who had come to be known
as “the second teacher or master” (the first being Aristotle) and Ibn Rushd
(Averroes), remembered as “the great commentator on Aristotle.” Many of the
great medieval Christian philosophers and theologians (Albert the Great,
Thomas Aquinas, Abelard, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus) acknowledged their
intellectual debt to their Muslim predecessors.
F C E C
ROM THE RUSADES TO UROPEAN OLONIALISM
Few events have had a more shattering and long-lasting effect on Muslim-
Christian relations than the Crusades. For many in the West, the specific facts
regarding the Crusades are but a dim memory. Few remember that it was the
pope who called for the Crusades and that on balance the Crusaders lost.
For Muslims, the memory of the Crusades lives on as the clearest example of
militant Christianity, an early harbinger of the aggression and imperialism of the
Christian West. If many in the West have regarded Islam as a religion of the
sword, Muslims down through the ages speak of the Christian West’s Crusader
mentality and hegemonic ambitions.
For Muslim-West relations, it is less a case of what actually happened in the
Crusades than how they are remembered. Political and economic motives and
incentives are often forgotten or overlooked as each community looks back with
memories of its commitment to defend its faith and with heroic stories of valor
and chivalry against “the infidel.” Both Muslims and Christians saw the other as
militant, somewhat barbaric and fanatic in religious zeal, determined to conquer,
convert, or eradicate the other, and thus an enemy of God.
A second far-reaching and influential event affecting the relationship of Islam