Faith and Sword: A Short History of Christian-Muslim Conflict (Reaktion Books - Globalities)

258 Pages·2006·1.03 MB·English

by  Alan G. Jamieson

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Christian–Muslim Conflict
 . 

faith and sword
globalities
Series editor: Jeremy Black
globalitiesis a series which reinterprets world history in a
concise yet thoughtful way, looking at major issues over large
time-spans and political spaces; such issues can be political,
ecological, scientific, technological or intellectual. Rather than
adopting a narrow chronological or geographical approach,
books in the series are conceptual in focus yet present an array of
historical data to justify their arguments. They often involve a
multi-disciplinary approach, juxtaposing different subject-areas
such as economics and religion or literature and politics.
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Faith and Sword
A Short History of
Christian–Muslim Conflict
alan g. jamieson
reaktion books
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx,uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2006
Copyright © Alan G. Jamieson 2006
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publishers.
Printed and bound by cpi/Bath Press Ltd, Bath
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Jamieson, Alan G.
Faith and sword : a short history of Christian-Muslim
conflict. - (Globalities)
1. Christianity and other religions - Islam - History
2. Islam - Relations - Christianity - History
I.Title
261.2'7'09
isbn-10: 1 86189 272 1
Contents
list of maps 6
1 Introducing the Longest War 7
2 The Arab Conquests, 632–750 13
3 Byzantine Defiance, 750–1000 27
4 Rise of the West: Christian Advances in the
Eleventh Century 41
5 Muslim Reaction: Victory over Outremer,
Defeat in Spain, 1100–1300 58
6 Rise of the Ottoman Turks, 1300–1500 77
7 Ottoman Challenge: The Sixteenth Century 95
8 Ottoman Revival and Decline, 1600–1815 114
9 Triumph of the West, 1815–1918 136
10 Breaking Free, 1918–1979 157
11 Challenging America, 1979–2005 182
12 Conclusion: A New Conflict? 208
glossary of place name changes 216
chronology 218
selectbibliography 223
acknowledgments 240
index 241
List of Maps
Europe and the Middle East at the time of the Arab conquests 20–21
The Iberian Peninsula in the 12th and 13th centuries 68
Central Asia and the Indian Ocean in the 16th century 97
Arabic and Turkish spellings have been simplified throughout, and
where an English version of an Arabic or Turkish name is common,
e.g., Saladin, it has been used.
one
Introducing the Longest War
It had been a long day for the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, Hussein
Selim al-Husaini. Once the Ottoman Turkish forces had left
Jerusalem, the mayor had borrowed a white sheet from an
American missionary and set out on the morning of 9December
1917 to surrender the holy city of three world religions,
Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to the approaching British army.
First he met two army cooks who had blundered into Jerusalem
in search of water, but they felt unable to accept the responsibil-
ity of taking the surrender. Then the mayor encountered two
infantry sergeants patrolling on the Lifta–Jerusalem road. They
declined the honour as well, but had their photograph taken
with the mayor and his party. Eventually, before the end of the
day, the mayor worked his way up the British chain of command
until he reached Major-General J.S.M. Shea of the 60th
(London) Division, who was ready to accept his surrender of
the city on behalf of General Sir Edmund Allenby, the British
commander-in-chief.
Allenby made his formal entry into Jerusalem via the Jaffa
Gate at noon on 11December 1917. To show his respect for the
holy city, the general entered on foot. In his proclamation to the
inhabitants of ‘Jerusalem the Blessed’, Allenby made it clear
that he would respect and protect the holy places of all the three
religions that held the city to be sacred. The British prime min-
ister, David Lloyd George, had asked Allenby to capture
Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the British nation. He had
carried out that task with two weeks to spare, and not a single
sacred building had been damaged.
General Allenby was the first Christian conqueror of
Jerusalem since 1099, when the city had been stormed by the
7
soldiers of the First Crusade, who had massacred the Muslim
and Jewish inhabitants. Allenby had tactfully avoided any men-
tion of crusades in his proclamation to the people of Jerusalem,
but press accounts of his success were less reticent. British pro-
paganda sought to make much of the capture of Jerusalem from
the Turks at the end of 1917, but the war-weary allied popula-
tions were largely unimpressed. Crusader imagery could not
offset the grim realities of a bad year for the allied cause, with
events such as the French army mutinies, the slaughter of
British troops in the mud of Passchendaele, Russian withdrawal
from the war and Italian defeat at Caporetto. The year 1918
brought further crises, but in the end the allied cause was victo-
rious. In the autumn of 1918Turkish resistance in the Middle
East finally collapsed and an armistice was agreed. Allied forces
took possession of Constantinople, which had been lost by the
Christians in 1453, and the Ottoman empire, for centuries the
most powerful Muslim opponent of Christian Europe, lay pros-
trate. When Turkey rose again after 1919under the leadership
of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), it would be a very different state,
committed to secularism, modernization and other aspects of
Westernization.
The Turks lost the Arab parts of their empire. Despite British
promises of independence for the Arabs, these territories were
divided between the French and the British. France was to receive
Syria, but local Arabs declared Prince Feisal king of Syria in
March 1920. Four months later, French troops under General
Henri Gouraud swept aside Arab resistance and expelled Feisal
from the Syrian capital Damascus. The British would later make
him king of Iraq. General Gouraud, who had lost an arm fighting
the Turks at Gallipoli in 1915, was to prove less tactful than
General Allenby. Once he was in control of Damascus, Gouraud
went to the tomb of Saladin, perhaps the greatest Muslim hero in
the centuries-long struggle between Christianity and Islam, and
boldly declared: ‘Saladin, we have returned. My presence here
consecrates the cross over the crescent.’
In France the memory of that country’s major role in the
Crusades had never been forgotten, but Gouraud’s triumphal-
ism also reflected the view of Christians in many countries. For
them the victory of the allied powers over the Ottoman empire
8 . faith and sword