Europe and the Islamic World

A History

John Tolan, Henry Laurens, Gilles Veinstein

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400844753
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea medieval

A sweeping history of Islam and the West from the seventh century to today Europe and the Islamic World sheds much-needed light on the shared roots of Islamic and Western cultures and on the richness of their inextricably intertwined histories, refuting once and for all the misguided notion of a "clash of civilizations" between the Muslim world and Europe. In this landmark book, three eminent historians bring to life the complex and tumultuous relations between Genoans and Tunisians, Alexandrians and the people of Constantinople, Catalans and Maghrebis—the myriad groups and individuals whose stories reflect the common cultural, intellectual, and religious heritage of Europe and Islam.Since the seventh century, when the armies of Constantinople and Medina fought for control of Syria and Palestine, there has been ongoing contact between the Muslim world and the West. This sweeping history vividly recounts the wars and the crusades, the alliances and diplomacy, commerce and the slave trade, technology transfers, and the intellectual and artistic exchanges. Here readers are given an unparalleled introduction to key periods and events, including the Muslim conquests, the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the commercial revolution of the medieval Mediterranean, the intellectual and cultural achievements of Muslim Spain, the crusades and Spanish reconquest, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of a third of Europe, European colonization and decolonization, and the challenges and promise of this entwined legacy today.As provocative as it is groundbreaking, this book describes this shared history in all its richness and diversity, revealing how ongoing encounters between Europe and Islam have profoundly shaped both.

PART I

Saracens and Ifranj: Rivalries, Emulation, and Convergences

by

John Tolan

CHAPTER 1

THE GEOGRAPHERS’ WORLD

From Arabia Felix to the Balad al-Ifranj (Land of the Franks)

WHAT NOTION DID the men and women of the Middle Ages have of the world they lived in? What were their perceptions of the boundaries—geographical, religious, cultural, and so on—that separated what we moderns call the Islamic world from Europe? Clearly, the responses are many, and the perspective changes with one’s point of view: from a Northumbrian monastery in the eighth century, from Baghdad in the tenth century, from the unstable border regions of Anatolia in the eleventh century, from a Genoese ship sailing off the coast of Egypt in the thirteenth century, from the Maghreb in the fourteenth century, or from Cape Sagres at the far southwest tip of Portugal in the fifteenth century. We are, moreover, obliged to rely on the reflections that a small literate elite, usually male, left behind regarding the geography and ethnography of the world they inhabited.

The geographical culture of these literati had a dual foundation: scriptures (the Bible and the Qur’an) and Greek geographical scholarship. Greek geography had undergone transformations, since medieval Europe received it through the filter of Latin geographical and encyclopedic works, texts dating primarily to the fifth to seventh centuries. In the Umayyad and then the Abbasid caliphates, translations of Greek works were supplemented by Persian and Hindu geographical traditions. For these geographers, there was no hard and fast distinction between physical geography, human geography, and religious explanation: mountains, for example, are sometimes presented as manifestations of divine power, and the excessively cold climate of the northern countries is cited as an explanation for why Slavs and Franks are unable to grasp the superiority of Islam.

SONS OF ISAAC, SONS OF ISHMAEL

Let us first examine the frameworks that the reading of scripture—the Bible and the Qur’an—imposes on geography and ethnography. The tendency is more pronounced in Latin scholarship than in Arabic, and for good reason: the Bible (unlike the Qur’an) provides geographical information that allows Christians to retrace the history of the chosen people from Adam to Jesus (though with a few gaps) and to situate a number of neighboring or enemy peoples within that history. Time is structured in the same way: the chroniclers divided history into six “ages,” punctuated by the lives of the protagonists of divine history: Adam, Noah, Abraham, David, Nebuchadnezzar (the only “enemy” in the series), and then Christ.¹

For Isidore of Seville, a Latin encyclopedist and contemporary of Muhammad, human geography was a consequence of human history: the diversity of peoples, languages, and customs in the world is the direct result of the Fall, the Flood, and the confusion of tongues at Babel. We all descend from Adam and Noah. Our ancestors all spoke the same language, Hebrew, until God destroyed the Tower of Babel. For Isidore, the astonishing diversity of humankind could be rationally explained; at least in theory, it was possible to go back to a unified origin, a common ancestor, in the person of Noah. Although Isidore integrates many details of the classical Roman ethnographic tradition, he places them within a biblical framework, imposing order on chaos.² He presents his vision of historical ethnography in various writings, particularly in book 9 of the Etymologies. The world has seventy-two or seventy-three peoples, each with its own language, and all can be traced back to one of the three sons of Noah: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. That schema allows Isidore and his readers to classify all peoples within an apparently rational and comprehensible framework. He designates various biblical figures as fathers of precise peoples, including a son of Abraham, “Ishmael, from whom arose the Ishmaelites, who are now called, with corruption of the name, Saracens [Saraceni], as if they descended from Sarah, and Hagarenes [Agareni], from Hagar.”³

According to Genesis, Ishmael was Abraham’s firstborn; his mother was Hagar, Sarah’s servant. The angel of the Lord who announced the birth of Hagar’s son told her he would be a “wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren” (Genesis 16:12, King James Version). Then Abraham’s wife, Sarah, bore a son, Isaac. When Isaac was weaned, his parents gave a great feast, and Sarah saw Ishmael mocking his younger brother (Genesis 21:9). She then demanded of Abraham: “Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son” (Genesis 21:10). And God told Abraham to heed Sarah, consoling him by declaring that “also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation.” That is the same message He sends to the desperate Hagar in the desert (Genesis 21:13, 18). Ishmael will live long enough to have twelve sons, “twelve princes according to their nations,” who “dwelt from Haviläh unto Shur, that is before Egypt, as thou goest toward Assyria” (Genesis 25:16–18). Isaac, Abraham’s legitimate son, was his heir; Ishmael was cast out into the desert. But his descendants remained a threat to those of Isaac. From the first century C.E. on, Jewish and Christian authors identified the twelve sons of Ishmael with the twelve Arabian tribes.⁴ In the early fifth century, Jerome claimed that they had usurped the name “Saracens,” “falsely taking the name of Sarah in order to claim to be descendants of a free and sovereign woman.”⁵ These Hagarenes, the descendants of the slave Hagar, claimed to be the sons of Sarah, Abraham’s legitimate wife; they insisted on being called “Saracens.” In fact, no Arab called himself a “Saracen,” a term originating in ancient Greek geography.⁶ But Isidore borrows this passage from Jerome, and many Latin authors will repeat that false etymology, making the Saracens the usurpers of a legitimacy that belongs solely to Sarah’s lineage.⁷

The Qur’an gives a very different account of Abraham and Ishmael. Abraham proclaims: “Praise be to God who has given me Ishmael and Isaac in my old age!” (14:39).⁸ Ishmael is the firstborn; it is he who accompanies his father to Mecca, where father and son build the Kaaba together (2:125–27). Several times in the Qur’an, the faithful are entreated to declare that they worship the God of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac; sometimes the names of the prophets are added, especially Moses and Jesus.⁹ Far from being an illegitimate child, Ishmael was “a man of his word, an apostle, and a prophet. He enjoined prayer and almsgiving on his people, and his Lord was pleased with him” (19:54–55). When the Qur’an describes how Abraham made ready to sacrifice his son, it does not specify whether that son was Ishmael or Isaac (37:101–7).

Arab geographers adopted these Qur’anic traditions. For Mas‘

d

in the tenth century, there is a clear hierarchy between the three sons of Noah: at the top, Shem and his descendants (including the Arabs and Hebrews); then Japheth (the ancestor of the Chinese, the Indians, the Franks, the Slavs, and the Turks, among others); and last of all, Ham (from whom the blacks were descended).¹⁰ This is sometimes difficult to fathom: Mas‘

d

also distinguishes between the Y

n

niyy

n (Greeks), descendants of Japheth, and the R

m (Byzantines), stemming from Shem.¹¹ But for Latin and Arab authors, both Christians and Muslims, the scriptural genealogies provide geographical and ethnographical information of the utmost importance.

THE ENDS OF THE EARTH: THE LAND OF THE FRANKS AS SEEN FROM MEDIEVAL BAGHDAD

André Miquel has described in detail the development of geography in the intellectual centers of the Muslim world, especially in Baghdad, the Abbasid capital, but also, as of 972, in Cairo, the new capital of the Fatimid caliphate. The geographers of the early centuries of Islam translated, adapted, and commented on Greek, Persian, and Hindu geographical works, and added to them new knowledge gleaned from travel narratives, dispatches, and government records. In the ninth and tenth centuries, that new science, called “j

ghr

f

a” after the Greek, benefited from masterful encyclopedic works such as those of Mas‘

d

, Ibn Hawqal, and al-Muqaddas

. Geographical knowledge became part of adab, the learned culture that every educated man had to possess.

The Muslim world claimed for itself the choicest part of that geography. Baghdad, a political and cultural capital, was in some sense the center of the world, though at times it shared that position with the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Muslim authors attempted to establish and communicate knowledge of a world under the power of the caliphs by sketching mountainous reliefs, rivers, and trade routes by land and sea. Geographers described the populations of the different regions, their languages, habits, and economy. They drew a portrait of the cities, tallying up the mosques, hammams, and markets for the reader.

The world beyond the d

r al-isl

m fascinated these geographers as well, especially the vast, populated, rich regions of India and China. China in particular inspired open admiration in the Arab geographers. Its administration, justice system, and economy all functioned impeccably, according to many of these authors, and everything seemed devoid of corruption. Beyond China and India, especially in the islands of the sea, geographers situated a fabulous world. Some islands abounded in gold or precious stones, while on others fruit trees grew on their own, sparing men the trouble of working the soil. Other islands were inhabited by cannibals, still others by women whose sexual appetites killed the poor sailors who dropped anchor there. In indulging in such fantasies of wondrous creatures and bizarre societies, Muslim geographers perpetuated the traditions of their ancient Greek predecessors. They populated the edges of the world with monstrous beings: headless men with faces on their chests, others with human bodies and dog’s heads. There was the country of the Waq-Waq, where one tree bore a strange fruit in the shape of a naked woman. When ripe, the fruit opened its mouth, said “Waq Waq!” and fell; upon bursting on the ground, it gave off a nauseating odor.¹²

Unlike China or India, Europe occupied only a very small place within that vision of the world. The Greek word Europa, which in Arabic became Ar

fa, certainly existed among these g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• General Introduction
• Part I: Saracens and Ifranj: Rivalries, Emulation, and Convergences
• Part II: The Great Turk and Europe
• Part III: Europe and the Muslim World in the Contemporary Period
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index