Islam in Europe

Jack Goody

• Editore: Polity
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745657554
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: History of Religion

This vigorously argued book reveals the central role that Islam has played in European history. Following the movement of people, culture and religion from East to West, Goody breaks down the perceived opposition between Islam and Europe, showing Islam to be a part of Europe's past and present. In an historical analysis of religious warfare and forced migration, Goody examines our understanding of legitimate violence, ethnic cleansing and terrorism. His comparative perspective offers important and illuminating insights into current political problems and conflicts.

Goody traces three routes of Islam into Europe, following the Arab through North Africa, Spain and Mediterranean Europe; the Turk through Greece and the Balkans; and the Mongol through Southern Russia to Poland and Lithuania. Each thrust made its mark on Europe in terms of population and culture. Yet this was not merely a military impact: especially in Spain, but elsewhere too, Europe was substantially modified by this contact. Today it takes the form of some eleven million immigrants, not to speak of the possible incorporation of further millions through Bosnia, Albania and Turkey.

1
Past Encounters

My initial interest in the theme of Islam in Europe goes back to a long-standing inquisitiveness about Islam in the Mediterranean and North Africa and its influence on West Africa, where I lived and worked for many years. More specifically it has roots in a concern with a number of conflicts in Europe and the role of religious affiliation in some serious disputes in the contemporary world, a role that I thought had been played down by many recent discussants. These analysts often came from intellectual circles that had themselves rejected religion as a personal faith and assumed that others had done (or should do) the same. I felt this was true of some important intellectuals who had examined nationalism, for instance, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, who paid little or no attention to religion, which was often treated under the vague blanket term ethnicity, or even identity, terms which I argued had little empirical reference. That neglect of religion was especially associated with uncommitted Jews as well as non-practising Christians, and of course with those many socialists who approved the Soviet constitution of 1917 which announced ‘the abolition of all national and national-religious prejudices and restrictions, and the full development of national minorities and ethnic groups’. Similar aims either of religious freedom or freedom from religion were proclaimed by the English Revolution of 1649, by the American Revolution of 1787 and by the French Revolution (and its Napoleonic successor) of 1789. Nevertheless religion remained a significant factor not simply in assisting national struggles but in formulating them. Its power of resistance is outstanding; as with the Orthodox church in the USSR and its later revival, and as we see from Islamic resistance to that country in Afghanistan and in the current struggle in Chechnya, as well as in the historic divisions and the terrible ‘ethnic cleansings’ in Northern Ireland, in India and Pakistan and in Israel, in all of which cases we have evidence of the persistence of religious affiliation and perhaps to a lesser extent of religious belief in shaping these long-continuing conflict situations. We cannot understand contemporary Palestine nor for that matter what happened in New York on 9/11 simply under the rubric of ‘terrorism’ or ‘ethnicity’ without taking into account the profound religious dimension. Islam impinges directly on all our lives, now as in the past, ever since its establishment in Arabia at the beginning of the seventh century.

I want to say something of that past, but first the present, a topic to which I will return in greater detail. There are today some two million Muslims in Germany (mainly from Turkey), the same number in Britain (mostly from the Indian sub-continent), some six million in France (mostly from North Africa), and some fifteen million in the European Union, even before its projected expansion eastwards; the numbers are in all cases uncertain. These substantial minorities have important social and political implications for the respective societies, especially as the communities are made up of recent immigrants who differ not only in their religion but in other cultural ways, who maintain their distance and distinctiveness (as well as having them maintained) and hence provide fuel for xenophobic and what is often called racist reaction but which has a very strong element of religious prejudice. They provide cultural diversity but also constitute points of divergence from common norms. Bans on immigrants will not affect these numbers. Their size might suggest a substantial influence on the political process, but they are of course dispersed (and many dispossessed) and our type of democracy does not really allow independent representation. Unlike the wealthy Jewish lobby in the USA, these Muslims can do relatively little directly to affect national policies towards the Near East and elsewhere. Nevertheless they are beginning to make an impact. In England Muslims have demonstrated over Kashmir, an act that was interpreted as showing a concern with homeland issues rather than integrating into British politics (an accusation never made against Jewish groups demonstrating about Israel). In terms of direct influence on the political process, they are largely impotent. Partly as a result of this perceived impotence, they provided recruits for the Taliban and al-Qaeda and before that for the Afghan national struggle against occupation by the USSR, where ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’ emerged seamlessly from the national liberation struggle.

The history of Islam and Europe displays three broad currents of territorial penetration that have affected that continent since the very beginning of the Muslim religion in the seventh century. And Islam in turn was one of the three streams of Near Eastern religion that have affected Europe in the Common Era. In the Roman period there was the dispersion of the Jews (and Carthaginians) throughout the empire, to Italy, to Spain, to France and then more widely. There was Christianity from about the same period, but mainly after the conversion of Constantine in 313 CE, spreading out from its Roman stronghold. And there was the Islamic expansion beginning only three centuries later. The three currents of Islam to which I referred were the Maghribian (the Arab), the Balkan (the Ottoman Turkish) and the Northern European (the Mongol), and their rough dates are the eighth, the fourteenth and again the fourteenth century (as Muslims, after conversion). Each of the three Muslim thrusts made their mark on the thinking of Western Europe. There was the recognition of Islamic learning, its luxuries and its military achievements. The last posed a threat in the minds of people far away from the front line that is still embodied in linguistic usage. Just as the campaigns of earlier conquerors from the East have left their mark on the European vocabulary of devastation, in particular through the Huns and the Vandals, so too the Mongol thrust left its mark on English with ‘he’s a real Tartar’ for a destructive child; the Turkish advance gave us ‘a little Turk’ for the same infant, while the Moors gave rise to ‘street Arab’. Moreover both the Turks and the Moors left their impact on village fêtes that embodied Turks and blackamoors in their performances.¹ According to Primo Levi, the word Musulman came to be used in Nazi concentration camps for inmates who ‘gave up’.

This long and massive penetration has been frequently neglected in the West. Historians have much to answer for as far as this aspect of Europe is concerned. To a large degree that continent is their creation as they have seen it as a boundary-maintaining region, a continent defined by an ancestry reaching back to Greece and Rome, and subsequently by its own religion, Christianity. As a supposed geo-cultural entity, Europe is the major focus of geography and history, which are taught as dominant subjects in schools, that is, when they are not dealing with the purely English, French or German varieties. The continent, like every old, and indeed new, nation, demands its exclusive history and geography, as we see from recent events in Africa where, after independence, the nations into which it was often illogically divided were defined, legitimized, in this very way. So too with Europe.

Right from ancient times, Europe has tended to be encapsulated, seen in opposition to Asia, a continent with its despotisms, its hydraulic civilizations, its inability to achieve capitalism, or even, according to some, to be as inventive as Europeans, who had their Christianity or their Protestant ethic, their entrepreneurship, their capitalism. According to some, it was always inherently backward. All this identification of Europe, Christianity and modernity has led to a neglect, even an implicit rejection, of the role of Islam in Europe. For example, one school of Spanish historians has seen the Muslim influences as being superficial, not touching on the ‘idiosyncratic nature’ of the Iberians (Guichard 1994: 679).

The East, on the other hand, has been less certain of the boundary between the continents. The Levant used the expression Ifranj (Franks) to denote Europeans; only in the mid-nineteenth century did the term Urūbā (Europe) come into use. The term Franks excluded Europeans under Ottoman rule: in other words, it was not basically geographical but political. The more embracing notion of the West (Gharb) could include Russia and certainly the United States (Heyberger 2002: 2).

But Europe is not really even a geographic entity; it is separated from Asia only at one point, the Bosphorus, by a small stretch of water. North of that there is continuity over the Russian steppes, a complete terrestrial flow. I suggest that is also true of culture, and indeed of social organization. Indeed Europe has never been purely isolated, purely Christian.

Instead of a Christian Europe, one has to see the continent as penetrated by the three world religions (that is, written religions) that originated in the Near East and which indeed had a common mythology or sacred text; in order of arrival, these were Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And those religions took over from a set of moral beliefs and practices we designate in a negative, deprecatory, throw-away fashion as ‘pagan’ but which endured, even at a state or elite level, until the fifteenth century in Lithuania, and much later at a popular level – some have claimed throughout the Middle Ages in much of Europe.

Turning specifically to Islam, its advent should not be seen simply as usurping Christian Europe any more than the latter can be considered simply as the destroyer of the pagan or the scourge of the Jews. All have equal entitlements to be present, and in this general (’objective’) sense none can be considered only as the Other; they are part of Europe, part of our heritage.

However, for Christian Europe, Islam was always the most formidable Other, ever since the eighth century. It is true that the other Other, the Jews, were physically nearer, since they lived dispersed as merchants and as refugees. As such they constituted a moral, a commercial, but never a politico-military threat, whereas Islam was not only the Other, but one that was apparently as powerful as the West in every sense. They had begun by invading Spain, reaching beyond the Pyrenees. Militarily they were as strong. Culturally too, constructing as they did the great Alhambra at Granada and the superb mosque at Cordoba and creating many other magnificent buildings on the soil of Europe. They brought with them important developments of the classical tradition which had been neglected in the West, in particular translations of the works of Aristotle, as well as advances that the Muslims themselves had made in the medieval sciences and in hygiene. Under Christianity, Roman baths fell into desuetude, as did their systems of water supply; indeed baths were at first often adversely associated with the ritual bathing of Judaism and the daily ablutions of Islam, as inimical to the Christian religion.

Part of those terrestrial flows have been represented in a constant movement of peoples, largely but not exclusively in an East-West direction. That has been so from prehistoric times, and historic ones too have been marked by the migration of Indo-Europeans, of Celts, of Ural-Altaic-speaking peoples such as the Finns, the Hungarians, and of course the Huns and others.

Culture too has often moved in the same way, first from the Near East to Europe, then in the reverse direction, but even where there has been no physical movement the boundaries have been open, so that much of culture has been shared. Culture has in fact moved both ways, as has conquest. Russia expanded in a swathe of territory stretching from the Black Sea to the Pacific; European culture (’modernization’) and imperial rule have spread in the same direction. But earlier the movement was generally from East to West.

Of no sphere has this been clearer than religion, where the three main written creeds of the Near East, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have pushed westwards (as well as eastwards) along both shores of the Mediterranean, so that Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, is not simply a foreign religion but has long been established within Europe and has had a great influence not only on its politics but on its culture more generally. It is partly against the Jewish (and before that Phoenician) and Islamic elements that Europe, Western Europe, has defined itself as Christian. So that, in thinking of the role of Islam, we need to see it against the background of the transcontinental components in the history of East and West, and of their role in defining the latter, that is, of the Huns who operated in both regions, the Mongols who attacked China and the West at the same time, the Turks too, of whom Mao Tse-tung wrote in one of his Long March poems:

Our forest of rifles darts ahead

like the ancient Flying General

who flew out of heaven to chase Turkish tribesmen

out of Mongolia.²

The Orient, from which these world religions came, has always been of political interest to Europeans. The Greeks and then the Romans created major empires there, as did the Egyptians and the Persians. But with the advent of Christianity, the Orient, specifically Palestine, became the original source of the religion and an early centre of pilgrimage, just as Jerusalem and Mecca were to Jews and Muslims. Not only did people make arduous journeys to visit the Holy Land but there was early investment there. Access was rendered more difficult after the rise of Islam in the seventh century, and later attempts to ‘free’ the holy places, which the Muslims thought they had already ‘freed’, were of course one of the main, religiously inspired, motives of the Crusades, in which warriors were urged to their overseas duty by the popes and by the ecclesiastical establishment.

What I want to do is to consider firstly the extent, historically, of Islam’s changing presence; it was always there as a point against which conceptually to define Christian identity in the East itself, as is very clear in the course of the Crusades, which constituted armed European invasions of Muslim territory. Secondly, I want to point to the major social and intellectual influences of Islam on Christian Europe, including the artistic impact. I touch upon its significance for Christian Europe’s definition of itself, and more specifically the areas of confrontation or of difference. And finally, I look briefly at the role of Islam in contemporary Europe, especially its migrants from North Africa, the Near East and the Indian sub-continent.

The frequent neglect of the role of Islam in Europe (see López-Baralt 1994: 518; Guichard 1977; Torres and Macias 1998: 10), the emphasis on Christianity, in opposition to the Near East (’the Orient’), could be regarded as an aspect of the Orientalism which Edward Said, in his book of that name (1978), defines (outside the ‘academic tradition’) as ‘a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological definition made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”’ (1978: 2). Of course conceptually, as we have seen, that had long been the case ever since the Greeks opposed Europe and Asia, seeing the first as democratic, the second as autocratic, and differentiating them not only geographically but in other broad cultural terms. But there was another more concrete way in which the later Orient (by which Said means the Arab Near East) was inevitably not only differentiated from but dominated by the Occident economically, politically and militarily, though in earlier centuries the balance of power, culturally as well as politically, often went the other way.

In his introduction to Orientalism, Said wrote: ‘The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, its source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other’ (1978: 1). In addition, he notes, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West). The Eurasian landmass was divided on a lateral axis, East being distinguished from West and vice versa. However, Islam was not only a feature of the Orient in a geographical sense; it came to Europe very early in its existence, with further profound implications for that continent. The Other in this sense was among us, not geographically separate, connected not only with European colonization, as Said suggests, but with the Islamic penetration (’colonization’) of Europe. Islam was not only about what was happening in Damascus and Baghdad but, depending on the historical moment, in Barcelona, in Palermo, in Tirana, in Athens, in Budapest, in the Crimea and in Kiev and the Ukraine, as well as in Chechnya and Kosovo, to provide modern reminders of its extent.

Islam impinged upon Europe almost from its very beginning, in 622 CE, which was the year of the Hijrah (’the emigration’, the ‘severing of kinship ties’), when the faithful of Islam (’the surrender [to the will of God]’), that is the Muslims (’those who have surrendered’), followed Mohammed in leaving Mecca. There they had felt persecuted, and so established themselves in Medina, where a Jewish clan controlled the important market. From that base the prophet built up an alliance of clans which, from the early seventh century, were able to raid the rich caravans running between the Yemen, Mecca and Syria (Damascus and Gaza), trading in oriental goods from India and Ethiopia to the Mediterranean.³ Both Mecca and Medina were major trading centres, the former having more political control, and were used by both Jewish and Christian merchants. Mohammed’s first wife, for whom he had worked, was a trader, Khadijah, whose cousin Waraqah was a Christian.

Mohammed was in touch with both Judaism and Christianity, ‘the people of the book’ whose achievements were recognized, but under Islam they were nevertheless taxed (through the jizya, attempts to evade which encouraged conversion). But expansion from Arabia soon led to conflict with the Byzantine Empire, centred in the Eastern Christian capital of Constantinople. Islam had always had an important military side, being involved from the beginning in raids on the desert caravans. When Arabia was united under the Muslims, as a result of a series of alliances, towards the end of Mohammed’s life (632 CE), by which time he was the strongest man in the country, the Muslim community, which had already raided Syria in 630, set out on a series of conquests, encouraged by the defeat of the Persian Empire by the Byzantine (627-8).

The expansion of that empire was phenomenal. Forty-six years after the flight of Mohammed from Mecca, his followers were under the walls of Constantinople. They attacked for seven summers but were defeated by the garrison using Greek fire and eventually retreated, with the loss, according to Gibbon, of some 30,000 men. A second siege (716–18) by way of the European side failed again through the fire-ships of the Greeks, although the making of such fire was said to have been invented by a Syrian engineer in the seventh century. In fact the fall of Constantinople had to wait seven centuries, until the coming of the Turks.

This move to the north, then to the west, to Spain by way of North Africa, later gave rise to the Crusades in the eastward direction, attempting to take back the Holy Land that Islam had conquered from the Byzantines. The second impact was of the Turks attacking that same Byzantine Empire to the north and moving into the Balkans before finally capturing its capital Constantinople, the Rome of the East, in 1453. Thirdly, yet farther to the north, were the invasions of the Mongol Tartars into Russia and Central Europe, beginning in 1237 with southern Russia, entering Poland and Hungary in 1241 in a two-pronged attack, but withdrawing on the death of the Great Khan.

The southern thrust

Unable to make headway against the Byzantine Empire, the Muslims thrust westwards. They arrived in North Africa well after the Jews and Christians, but...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Past Encounters
• 2 Bitter Icons and Ethnic Cleansing
• 3 Islam and Terrorism
• 4 The Taliban, the Bamiyan and Us – the Islamic Other
• Notes
• References and Bibliography
• Index
• Back Page