Emmet Scott - The Impact of Islam

The Impact of

Islam

Emmet Scott

Copyright Emmet Scott, 2014

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Introduction

T he work that follows is a survey and an evaluation of the impact that Islam as a faith and a civilization had upon Europe during the High Middle Ages, from the late tenth through to the fifteenth or sixteenth century. It is also, to some degree, an examination of how that impact has been viewed by Western academics over the past century. These, as we shall see, have tended to present a sanitized and frankly disingenuous view of Islamic civilization and have fostered a series of myths which are currently causing much mischief in academic and government circles throughout the Western world. The source of this Islamophilic viewpoint is a frankly anti-Christian mindset which first appeared during the Enlightenment and thereafter spread inexorably throughout Europe and the Americas. This anti-Christian bias has now become the default mode of thought in academic circles in the West: As Christianity was talked down so it became, as the twentieth century progressed, more and more the custom to talk up Islam. Take for example the following quote from Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle Eastern studies at Princeton, whose 2001 book What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response , looked at the decline of the Islamic world vis vis the Christian, from the Middle Ages onwards:

It is often said that Islam is an egalitarian religion. There is much truth in this assertion. If we compare Islam at the time of its advent with the societies that surrounded it the stratified feudalism of Iran and the caste system of India to the east, the privileged aristocracies of both Byzantine and Latin Europe to the West the Islamic dispensation does indeed bring a message of equality. Not only does Islam not endorse such systems of social differentiation; it explicitly and absolutely rejects them. The actions and utterances of the Prophet, the honored precedents of the early rulers of Islam as preserved by tradition, are overwhelmingly against privilege by descent, by birth, by status, by wealth, or even by race, and insist that rank and honor are determined only by piety and merit in Islam. (p. 82) Furthermore, though this pristine egalitarianism was in many ways modified and diluted, it remained strong enough to prevent the emergence of either Brahmans or aristocrats and to preserve a society in which merit and ambition might still hope to find their reward. In later times this egalitarianism was somewhat restricted. In spite of this, however, it is probably true that even at the beginning of the nineteenth century a poor man of humble origin had a better chance of attaining to wealth, power and dignity in the Islamic lands than in any states of Christian Europe, including post-Revolutionary France. (pp. 83-4)

Sounds enlightened, doesnt it, almost idyllic? How fortunate those free and forward-looking Muslims compared to the Christians and others, hidebound by decrepit systems of privilege and inequality. On the other hand, equality isnt everything. Stalins Soviet Union was the most egalitarian society ever to exist and yet it ranks among the most oppressive and brutal regimes in history. And Nazi Germany was a truly egalitarian meritocracy. Any young man of German blood, no matter how humble his circumstances or origins, could rise to the very pinnacle of German society during the 1930s and early 1940s if his abilities were up to it. Of course, not everyone was equal under the Nazis; Jews and Gypsies did not share in the great freedoms provided by the National Socialists. But then again it turns out that not everyone was equal in Islam either. Almost regretfully, Lewis notes that,

The egalitarianism of traditional Islam is not however complete. From the beginning Islam recognized certain social inequalities, which are sanctioned and indeed sanctified by holy writ. But even in the three basic inequalities of master and slave, man and woman, believer and unbeliever, the situation in the classical Islamic civilization was in some respects better than elsewhere. (pp. 82-3) So, some people were less equal than others, but these had a better time of it in Islam than in other societies. Even the slaves, it seems, had a great life. Islam, in contrast to ancient Rome and the modern colonial systems, accords the slave a certain legal status and assigns obligations as well as rights to the slaveowner. He is enjoined to treat his slave humanely and can be compelled by a qadi to sell or even manumit his slave if he fails in this duty. It is not, however, required, and the institution of slavery is not only recognized but is elaborately regulated by Islamic law. Perhaps for this very reason the position of the slave in Muslim society was incomparably better than in either classical antiquity of nineteenth-century North and South America. (p. 85)

The truth or otherwise of the above assertion may be judged by the following simple fact: In the course of four centuries the Ottoman Empire imported between four to six million slaves from black Africa most of whom were settled in Anatolia. Of these millions there is barely a trace to be found in the genetic inheritance of modern Turks. A similar number of slaves were imported from the seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries into North America, where their descendants now number in excess of thirty millions.

The reality is that the three groups identified by Lewis as not sharing in the general beneficence of Islamic egalitarianism and freedom women, slaves, and non-Muslims suffered, throughout the centuries, indescribable hardships at the hands of their Muslim masters; and two of these groups, women and non-Muslims, continue to suffer to this day. That there are no more slaves in Islam (or very few, officially, at least), is due entirely to the efforts of Westerners during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The impact of Islam cannot be understood without a knowledge of what it actually teaches, and an outline of those teachings, and how they have been applied, is provided early in the present study.

An oft-heard assertion in our times, especially among members of the political class who have no doubt been influenced by writers such as Lewis, is that Islam is a religion of peace, or even that Islam means peace. It is true that these statements are not made with quite the same frequency or conviction as a decade ago, but they still occur, along with the claim usually in the aftermath of some new atrocity that this had nothing to do with Islam. The jihadis who carry out these atrocities (which seem to occur with depressing frequency irrespective of how often Western politicians assert that the threat from Al Qaida is receding), claim that the Quran instructs them to carry out these attacks; and a substantial proportion of the Muslim populations in the Middle East and in Europe seem to agree.

Most students of religion are familiar with the story of Islams origins as it has been recounted for over a thousand years. We are told how Muhammad, a young man of Mecca, who was much given to prayer, received a vision of the archangel Gabriel in a cave just outside the city; and how the angel recited to him the contents of the book we now call the Quran or Koran. The new revelations conveyed by Muhammad were however rejected by the citizens of Mecca, forcing the young visionary to flee for his life to the city of Medina. In Medina he found much support, and presently returned to Mecca in triumph at the head of a victorious army. Following this, Muhammad led his followers in a series of campaigns throughout the Arabian Peninsula, conquering and converting to Islam the entire country before his death in 632. We are told that upon his death the leadership of the movement devolved upon a series of caliphs, who led the armies of the faithful in a series of astonishing conquests which, within thirty years, established Islam as the dominant power from Libya in the west to the borders of India in the east.