God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe

[Big Don]

God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe

LA Times writer slaps around a historian's ideas.
Interesting.

 

[Steel Tiger]

You know that's not a bad critique of the book by the looks of things. It was well reasoned and not as scathing as I expected.

I fear that Umayyid Spain is going to continually create these sorts of opinions. Its sort of like an Islamic Camelot. A perfect land that should be the example for every state.

I think I might have to get a hold of this book and have a read. It seems to be part of a phenomenon I'm seeing these days. Its not a careful re-evaluation of history, but a complete rewriting based on a few points and some sweeping generalisations.

 

[Sukerkin]

Written 'History' does this periodically, does it not ST? It's interesting to evaluate how the same set of facts, with maybe a few new ones in the mix, get re-interpreted by each generation of historians.

For me it's one reason why the whole broad expanse of the subject is endlessly fascinating. Even recent events (from the past couple of centuries) can be reassessed and given an entirely different 'meaning' as the current mores evolve.

Just look at how the British Empire is being viewed now, as a prime example.

 

[Xue Sheng]

You mean the whole El Cid movie staring Charlton Heston isn't true :uhyeah:

 

[tellner]

I haven't read the book to which he's referring, so I can't comment on it. But I have read a fair bit about the history of Dark Ages through eighteenth century Europe and the history of the Muslim world in the same time.

Without a doubt Muslim Spain was one of the best places to be in that period. Religious and ethnic tolerance really did prevail, and it was a center of trade, the arts and sciences and many other things. After the Reconquista Spain fell behind and never really caught up until the late twentieth century. Even tons and tons of New World gold were mostly spent on things that other people made or used to buy titles and land to grow sheep on. The real action during that time was in Basque and Catalan country whose people do not consider themselves to be Spanish.

You could make a case - and many do - that the development of the West was funded in large part by Spain's devolution. It was Germans, English, Catalans, Dutch, Basque and the French who made the goods and developed the technology from the money that the Spanish were not prepared to do the same with. Even the Turks benefited. When Muslims, Jews and the most educated Christians were driven from Spain Sultan Bayezid II Wali took them in saying "Who are these Spaniards who enrich me by impoverishing themselves?"

Up until the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries depending on how you cut it, Europe was not the great center of culture, civilization and innovation. The Turks and Persians were well ahead of the game by honest measures from sanitation to stable laws, from science to literacy.

During the period that Rutten speaks of as romanticized in the Muslim world it is undeniable that Europe tolerated no Muslims, only one sect of Christianity except where the Orthodox forbade the Catholics, and Jews only some of the time and then under humiliating oppression. The Holy Wars, Crusades and Inquisitions against everyone were as bad as anything done by Muslim governments today. Jihad? Not exactly. Christian Holy Wars are a little different than Jihad as described in the Quran and Sunnah. But Ibn Wahab and Sayyid Qutb have nothing on Arnaud Amalric and "Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" (Kill them all! The Lord will know His own.)

The Enlightenment and Scientific and Industrial Revolutions were certainly the great strengths of the West. It must be noted that they were contemporaneous (I will not be suckered into saying "caused by") with decreases in the authority of the Church and a willingness to radically question old ways of doing things. In fact, much of the Renaissance to which he refers was the result of increased trade and interaction (some of it unfriendly) with the East and the influx of classics and ideas which had originated in the West but been preserved in the Orient. When this was coupled with the wealth of colonies which tended not to be included in the benefits of these developments it created great things. Similar things happened in other parts of the world at other times albeit not to quite the same degree. The historians can and will argue forever about to what extent these were due to religion, the lack thereof, the right time combined with cheap resources and any number of other things. I don't think the reporter makes much of a case here.

Early Dutch travelers to Audoghast, Timbuktu and other (mostly Muslim) West African cities marveled at how clean, orderly and well laid-out they were.

Things certainly changed. You can go to Jared Diamond or The Rise and Fall of Great Powers or What Went Wrong? for some ideas about what and why. But you're left with the simple fact that until comparatively recently Europe was a backwater off the West end of Asia. The real action was elsewhere, and much of it was in Turkish or Farsi or Fan or Arabic or Kurdish or Urdu.

How much of this is due to Islam in particular I don't know. Muslims argue about whether the fall of the Muslim world was due to too much Islam, not enough Islam, the wrong sort of Islam or other things entirely. Christians argue about the same sort of thing. But I do know that travel and trade were much more advanced in the Muslim world than in Western Europe at the time. Ideas moved from China to Spain, and goods and people went from one end of the Caliphate to the other. That this enriched the nations involved and allowed them to develop and spread that development is basic economics.

The origins of the Quran are certainly a hot topic where "hot" can mean literal burning. I'm not going to address that too much. Let's just say that every capital-C Christian will insist that the Bible is exactly the same as it was written down just after the time of Jesus and comes from unimpeachable original sources. Anyone who says that is either ignorant or deluded as has been known since the beginning. Start with Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why and go from there. If they are going to talk about inconsistencies in the history of the Muslim Book they open themselves up to even more serious criticism. And it's ultimately bootless. The back-stories of the Books and religions mean little or nothing compared to what happened later.

 

[tellner]

You mean the whole El Cid movie staring Charlton Heston isn't true

What's even screwier is the real story of Roland. When Charlemagne invaded Spain he was not terribly successful. He gained an ally and buffer or two, but there wasn't much conquest and even less plunder. He had previously hired Basques to guide him through the Pyrenees. When his expedition failed he turned the Basque locals, demolishing and looting the city of Pamplona. He did this while he was still on the wrong side of the mountains from home. The Basque have been running around those mountains smuggling, stealing and bushwhacking since at least early Roman times.

Oops.

There wasn't any heroic battle with the perfidious Saracens. When the Franks went into the passes without their local guides, ticked off Basque guerillas ambushed the baggage train, defeating the rear guard and taking back a good chunk of loot.

Of course, once they got safely back home the story changed. Basques became Moors. A botched invasion became a noble crusade. The stupidity of killing your allies and burning their cities became the treachery of Muslims. Ah well. They say a departing invader should be allowed to cover his bleeding *** with as much glory as he wants as long as he doesn't carry away anything else.

 

[Xue Sheng]

What's even screwier is the real story of Roland. When Charlemagne invaded Spain he was not terribly successful. He gained an ally and buffer or two, but there wasn't much conquest and even less plunder. He had previously hired Basques to guide him through the Pyrenees. When his expedition failed he turned the Basque locals, demolishing and looting the city of Pamplona. He did this while he was still on the wrong side of the mountains from home. The Basque have been running around those mountains smuggling, stealing and bushwhacking since at least early Roman times.

Oops.

There wasn't any heroic battle with the perfidious Saracens. When the Franks went into the passes without their local guides, ticked off Basque guerillas ambushed the baggage train, defeating the rear guard and taking back a good chunk of loot.

Of course, once they got safely back home the story changed. Basques became Moors. A botched invasion became a noble crusade. The stupidity of killing your allies and burning their cities became the treachery of Muslims. Ah well. They say a departing invader should be allowed to cover his bleeding *** with as much glory as he wants as long as he doesn't carry away anything else.

You... You mean... that movies aren't true and that they didn't lash El Cid to a horse and send him galloping out of the castle... which by the way at the end of the movie he is still doing.. So how important can he be really if they just forgot about him and left him strapped to a horse galloping around without direction after it was all over. :uhyeah:

I seem to remember he was not exactly the hero hewas made out to be.

 

[Steel Tiger]

Things certainly changed. You can go to Jared Diamond or The Rise and Fall of Great Powers or What Went Wrong? for some ideas about what and why. But you're left with the simple fact that until comparatively recently Europe was a backwater off the West end of Asia. The real action was elsewhere, and much of it was in Turkish or Farsi or Fan or Arabic or Kurdish or Urdu.

How much of this is due to Islam in particular I don't know. Muslims argue about whether the fall of the Muslim world was due to too much Islam, not enough Islam, the wrong sort of Islam or other things entirely. Christians argue about the same sort of thing. But I do know that travel and trade were much more advanced in the Muslim world than in Western Europe at the time. Ideas moved from China to Spain, and goods and people went from one end of the Caliphate to the other. That this enriched the nations involved and allowed them to develop and spread that development is basic economics.

It is interesting that the region we know today as the Middle East has been the centre of civilised activity in the west for thousands of years. I say its interesting because it is not the kind of place you would expect such activity - vast deserts punctuated by rivers, mountains and rolling plains. Look at Europe and China, they look more like the places you expect dense settle and plenty of human activity.

I honestly think Islam got luck when it came to prominence in the Middle East. Early Christianity seemed obsessed with the Roman Empire and, thus, moved into Europe. It could just as easily moved east into the lands of ancient civilisation - Mesopotamia, the Persian/Parthian Empire.

I have to agree that Europe was something of a backwater from the collapse of the Roman Empire (6th or 7th century?) to the rise of the Normans (mid 11th century). From then on there seems to be a general increase in contact with the east. Increased military activity (the Crusades), trade and even intellectual exchange (though this was really limited until maybe the 15th century). I think the Renaissance saw a fusion of the sciences developed in the Muslim world with the dynamic drive, almost an urgency, to know that seems to have been, at the time, unique to Europe.

The period under consideration in the book (570 - 1215) is one of turmoil and constant change in Europe. There were migrations of whole peoples the rise and fall of numerous states. I can see why you might come to the conclusion that it was a brutal place that could well benefit from the seemingly stable influences of the Muslim world.

 

[exile]

It is interesting that the region we know today as the Middle East has been the centre of civilised activity in the west for thousands of years. I say its interesting because it is not the kind of place you would expect such activity - vast deserts punctuated by rivers, mountains and rolling plains. Look at Europe and China, they look more like the places you expect dense settle and plenty of human activity.

But on the other hand, take the combination of

• extraordinarily rich fertile soil, the result of annual flooding bringing huge silt deposits to the floodplain;
  
• massive agricultural surpluses arising from the availability of that arable land;
  
• large population growth resulting from those accumulating surpluses; and
  
• confinement of the burgeoning population to a very restricted area because of the extremely inhospitable nature of the surrounding enviroment...

... and waddya get? Competition amongst local groups with populations constantly exceeding the capacity of the increasingly intensely cultivated soil, escalating into serious armed conflict over land, and therefore cycles of conquest, with the losers (who, being confined to the habitable zone, couldn't flee anywhere en masse) being assimilated into an increasingly deep social hierarachy at the bottom (till the next cycle), leading to large-scale concentration of population in highly stratified, centrally directed, class-based societies, replacing the rank/kinship based 'tribal' settlements that had probably been the norm during the Mesolithic and early Neolithic periods... in two words: urban statism, leading ultimately to large-scale kingdoms and then empires. There's good evidence that the vast and mighty Inca Empire also began this way, in small villages in the fertile riverine valleys cutting perpendicular to the line of that long Pacific coastal plane, with the valleys separated by what are, apparently, the driest, most severe deserts on Earth.

So winding up with highly ramified, complex, urban civilizations in such places isn't really such a stretch. I know that there was a time when this was the mechanism of choice amongst paleoanthropologists for the emergence of state-level societies, advocated most energetically by Julian Steward, I think. The joker in the pack is the Aztec empire and a few others like that, as Robert Adams and some other mavericks who weren't all that impressed with Steward's particular brand of ecological determinism liked to point out...