The Books: “The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror” (Bernard Lewis)

History bookshelf:

Next book on the shelf is The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror by Bernard Lewis. I think this began as a lengthy article in The Atlantic or something like that – I remember reading part of it as an article, and he expanded it into a book. Actually, my favorite of all of Lewis’ book is a book called A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History (Modern Library Classics) – and I’m not including an excerpt from it because – he didn’t really WRITE it. It’s more that he COMPILED it. A huge book – filled with quotes throughout history about different aspects of the Muslim world. Travelers from the Middle Ages, emissaries from Muslim lands describing things in letters, first impressions, but also: poetry, snippets from recipe books, songs, legends … It’s a GREAT compilation – not the sort of thing to read cover to cover, but still: really fun, and thought-provoking. I love that first-hand stuff. It’s a Middle Eastern Commonplace Book.

Here, though, Lewis looks at the crisis of Islam. Everyone was talking about this book for a while, so I felt the need to check it out, having read some of his other stuff.

From The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror by Bernard Lewis.

The victories of Saladin and his capture of Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187 have long been and are today a source of inspiration to Arab leaders. Saddam Hussein refers frequently to two previous rulers of Iraq whom he claims as predecessors in his mission — Saladin, who ended the Western menace of his day by defeating and evicting the Crusaders, and Nebuchadnezzar, who dealt expeditiously and conclusively with the Zionist problem. On October 8, 2002, the prime minster of France, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, in a speech to the French National Assembly, told how Saladin was able “to defeat the Crusaders in Galilee and liberate Jerusalem.” This interesting use of the word liberate by a French prime minister to describe Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem from the Crusaders may be a reflection of present-day realignments or, alternatively, a case of extreme political correctness. In some other countries this formulation might be ascribed to ignorance of history, but surely not in France.

Even in Christian Europe, Saladin was justly celebrated and admired for his chivalrous and generous treatment of his defeated enemies. This treatment, however, did not extend to Reynald of Chatillon. The great Arab historian Ibn al-Athir explains the circumstances. “Twice, [said Saladin,] I had made a vow to kill him if I had him in my hands, once when he tried to march on Mecca and Medina, and again when he treacherously captured the caravan [bound for the Hijaz].” After Saladin’s great victory, when many of the Crusader princes and chieftains were taken captive and later released, he separated Reynald of Chatillon from the rest, and killed and beheaded him with his own hands.

After the success of the jihad and the recapture of Jerusalem, Saldin and his successors seem to have lost interest in the city, and in 1229 one of them even ceded Jerusalem to the emperor Frederick II as part of a general compromise agreement between the Muslim ruler and the Crusaders. It was retaken in 1244, after the Crusaders tried to make it a purely Christian city. After a long period of relative obscurity, interest in the city was reawakened in the nineteenth century, first by the quarrels of the European powers over the custody of the Christian holy places, and then by the new Jewish immigration.

The same period saw a first awakening of interest among Muslims in the Crusades, which had aroused remarkably little concern at the time they occurred. The vast and rich Arabic historiography of the period duly records the Crusaders’ arrival, their battles, and the states that they established but shows little or no awareness of the nature and purposes of their venture. The word Crusade and Crusader do not even occur in the Arabic historiography of the time, in which the Crusaders are referred to as the infidels, the Christians, or more frequently, the Franks, a general term for Catholic — and later also Protestant — European Christians, to distinguish them from their Orthodox and Eastern coreligionists. Awareness of the Crusades as a distinct historical phenomenon dates from the nineteenth century, and the translation of European books on history. Since then, there is a new perception of the Crusades as an early prototype of the expansion of European imperialism into the Islamic world. A more accurate description would present them as a long-delayed, very limited, and finally ineffectual response to the jihad. The Crusades ended in failure and defeat, and were soon forgotten in the lands of Islam, but later European efforst to resist and reverse the Mulsim advance into Christendom were more successful, and initiated what became a series of painful defeats on the frontiers of the Islamic world.

Under the medieval Arab caliphate, and again under the Persian and Turkish dynasties, the empire of Islam was the richest, most powerful, most creative, most enlightened region in the world, and for most of the Middle Ages, Christendom was on the defensive. In the fifteenth century, the Christian counterattack expanded. The Tatars were expelled from Russia, and the Moors from Spain. But in southeastern Europe, where the Ottoman sultan confronted first the Byzantine and then the Holy Roman emperor, Muslim power prevailed, and these other setbacks were seen as minor and peripheral. As late as the seventeenth century, Turkish pashas still ruled in Budapest and Belgrade, Turkish armies were besieging Vienna, and Barbary corsairs were raiding both shipping and seashores as far away as England, Ireland, and, on occasion, even Madeira and Iceland. The corsairs were greatly helped in their work by Europeans who, for one reason or another, settled in North Africa and showed them how to build, man, and operate oceangoing vessels in the North Sea and even in the Atlantic. This phase did not last very long.

Then came the great change. The second Turkish siege of Vienna, in 1683, ended in total failure followed by headlong retreat — an entirely new experience for the Ottoman armies. This defeat, suffered by what was then the major military power of the Muslim world, gave rise to a new debate, which in a sense has been going on ever since. The argument began among the Ottoman military, political, and later intellectual elite as a discussion of two questions. Why had the once ever-victorious Ottoman armies been vanquished by the despised Christian enemy? And how could they restore their previous dominance? In time the debate spread from the elites to wider circles, from Turkey to many other countries, and dealt with an ever-widening range of issues.

There was good reason for concern. Defeat followed defeat, and Christian European forces, having liberated their own lands, pursued their former invaders whence they had come in Asia and Africa. Even small European powers such as Holland and Portugal were able to build vast empires in the East and to establish a dominant role in trade. In 1593 an Ottoman official who also served as a chronicler of current events, Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, recorded the arrival in Istanbul of an English ambassador. He does not appear to have been much interested in the ambassador, but he was much struck by the English ship in which the ambassador traveled: “A ship as strange as this has never entered the port of Istanbul,” he wrote. “It crossed 3,700 miles of sea and carried eighty-three guns besides other weapons … It was a wonder of the age, the like of which has not been seen or recorded.” Another source of wonderment was the sovereign who sent the ambassador. “The ruler of the island of England is a woman who governs her inherited realm … with complete power.”