“This penetrating and nuanced study by three French scholars should finally lay to rest simplistic and superficial notions about an age-old ‘clash of civilizations’ between the Islamic and Western worlds. For all the ways that clerics on opposite sides tried to uphold Manichaean distinctions between believers and infidels, the real story is a much more complex one of shared human values, vigorous commercial trading, invented or reinvented traditions, and mutual cultural penetration within a mosaic of political rivalries, with religious rhetoric used both to legitimize power and mobilize resistance. This important book, which sets the scene for urgent contemporary issues, should be necessary reading for anyone seriously interested in global affairs.”–Malise Ruthven, author of Islam in the World

“Europe and the Islamic World makes for an interesting and sometimes provocative volume. In this erudite book, three distinguished scholars give their unique perspectives on Muslim-European political encounters, cultural exchanges, representations, and interactions. Their argument is that these encounters have been many, diverse, and ongoing. Europe and the Islamic World informs–and large parts of it entertain.”–Virginia H. Aksan, author of Ottomans and Europeans: Contacts and Conflicts

“Many Americans and Europeans take it for granted that the West and Islam are at war and always have been. Tolan, Veinstein, and Laurens argue that we are part of the same civilization, for all the violence and conflict over the centuries. Europe and the Islamic World is a book of great learning and great passion.”–Mark Gregory Pegg, author of The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246

John Tolan is professor of history at the Universite de Nantes. His books include Saracens and Saint Francis and the Sultan. Gilles Veinstein (1945-2013) was professor of history at the College de France. His books include Merchants in the Ottoman Empire. Henry Laurens is professor of history at the College de France. He is the author of L’empire et ses ennemis: La question imperiale dans l’histoire.

Europe and the Islamic World

A HISTORYBy John Tolan Gilles Veinstein Henry Laurens

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14705-5

Contents

Foreword by John L. Esposito………………………………………………………………………viiGeneral Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..11. The Geographers’ World: From Arabia Felix to the Balad al-Ifranj (Land of the Franks)…………………112. Conquest and Its Justifications: Jihad, Crusade, Reconquista……………………………………….273. The Social Inferiority of Religious Minorities: Dhimmis and Mudejars………………………………..494. In Search of Egyptian Gold: Traders in the Mediterranean…………………………………………..705. On the Shoulders of Giants: Transmission and Exchange of Knowledge………………………………….87Introduction to Part II: Continuity and Change in Geopolitics…………………………………………1116. The Ottoman Conquest in Europe………………………………………………………………….1207. Ottoman Europe: An Ancient Fracture……………………………………………………………..1498. Antagonistic Figures…………………………………………………………………………..1639. The Islamic-Christian Border in Europe…………………………………………………………..18610. Breaches in the Conflict………………………………………………………………………206Introduction to Part III………………………………………………………………………….25711. The Eighteenth Century as Turning Point…………………………………………………………25912. Civilization or Conquest?……………………………………………………………………..27713. The Age of Reform…………………………………………………………………………….29514. The Age of Empire…………………………………………………………………………….32215. The First Blows to European Domination………………………………………………………….33816. The Great War and the Beginning of Emancipation………………………………………………….36017. Contemporary Issues…………………………………………………………………………..387Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………..405Selected Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….439Index…………………………………………………………………………………………..445

Chapter One

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.

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. 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.”

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. 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.” 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. 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.

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). 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. 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’udi 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). This is sometimes difficult to fathom: Mas’udi also distinguishes between the Yunaniyyun (Greeks), descendants of Japheth, and the Rum (Byzantines), stemming from Shem. 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 “jughrafia” after the Greek, benefited from masterful encyclopedic works such as those of Mas’udi, Ibn Hawqal, and al-Muqaddasi. 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 dar al-islam 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.

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 Arufa, certainly existed among these geographers: it is found in the tenth century, for example, in Hamdani and Ibn Khurdadhbih, for whom the term designates the northwest quadrant of the habitable world. But, as André Miquel points out, “except for these old recollections, the concept of Europe is nonexistent.” Arab scholars instead divided the world into climates (iqlim): horizontal bands, normally seven of them but sometimes three or five, generally distributed between the equator and the arctic. Each climate had its own characteristics (humidity, heat, and so forth) that determined the nature and behavior of its flora, fauna, and human inhabitants. Like the Greeks before them, the Arab geographers claimed that the climates most propitious for human habitation were those where they themselves lived. In these “central” climates, man could practice agriculture, build cities, and benefit from a physical and mental balance that allowed for intellectual reflection, erudition, and adherence to the true religion.

According to these geographers, things were very different for the unfortunate souls who lived in too hot or too cold a climate. Their agriculture was more rudimentary, their constructions were flimsily made of wood or straw, and the fragility of their health could be clearly discerned by the color of their skin—too dark for those who lived in excessively hot climates, too light for those who lived in the cold countries. The damaging effects of the climate also prevented them from reasoning clearly, depriving them of the benefits of philosophy, science, and the true religion. It was not at all astonishing that so few of them were Muslims!

Of course, the damaging effects of a frigid climate affected peoples other than those of Europe: the Turks especially, whose military feats the geographers admired but whom they portrayed as half-savages. The cold impelled them toward nomadism and war, but it reduced their sexual appetites. The same effects were also found among the Slavs and Franks (Ifranj), peoples who inhabited the extreme northwest of the inhabited world. That portrait of barbarians from the north corresponded to that of antiquity, whether Herodotus’s Scythians or Tacitus’s Germans. Hamdani (d. 945) based that view on Ptolemy’s astronomy. He enumerated the regions of the northwest quadrant of the world: Britain, Galatia, Germania, Italy, Gaul, Puglia, Sicily, the land of the Celts, Hispania, and the land of the Slavs, among others. The inhabitants of these regions are “little inclined to submission, love freedom, weapons, and fatigue, are hostile to peoples of law and order, and given to grand designs.” These traits are the effect of the distance from the sun but also of the greater influence of the planets Jupiter and Mars.

Other geographers went even further. Consider, for example, what the great encyclopedist Mas’udi (d. 956–957) says in his Book of Notification and of Verification:

The inhabitants of the northern quadrant are those for whom the sun is far from the zenith—increasingly far the farther north they go—such as the Slavs, the Franks, and other nearby nations. Since, because of its distance, the sun has only a weak power over these regions, cold and humidity prevail, and snow and ice rarely disappear from them. The humors have little ardor there; the men are tall in stature, fierce, with crude manners, dull intelligence, halting speech; their complexion is so white that it turns from white to bluish; their skin is thin, their flesh thick; their eyes are also blue, matching the tone of their complexion; their hair is flowing and rust-colored, because of the water vapor. Their religious beliefs are without solidity, because of the nature of the cold and for lack of heat. Those who live farthest to the north are the coarsest, the stupidest, and the most brutish. These characteristics grow more prominent as they move farther away, in a northerly direction, as can be seen among the Turkish tribes that move deep into the northernmost regions. Being very far from the trajectory described by the sun as it rises and sets, they have abundant snow; cold and humidity invade their homes. Their bodies become soft and thick; the vertebrae of their backs and the bones in their necks are so flexible that they can fire their arrows while twisting their torsos backward as they flee. They are so fleshy that dimples form at the joints; their eyes are small in round faces; the heat rises to their faces when the cold takes hold of their bodies. The cold humors, in fact, produce a great deal of blood and color the complexion, because the cold gathers up the heat and makes it appear on the outside. The men who live sixty some miles above that latitude are the tribes of Gog and Magog. They belong to the sixth climate and are counted among the beasts.

Wherein lay the interest of that description for the Baghdad scholar and his reading public? No doubt it confirmed his sense of religious and cultural superiority: heavenly bodies themselves, especially the sun, procure significant benefits for those who have the good fortune to live in the central climates of the “ecumene,” the inhabited world. Lack of heat is the cause of Northerners’ peculiar characteristics: blue eyes, red hair, stupidity, and coarseness, and even of the Turks’ ability to shoot arrows while turning backward in their saddles. Such is the sad fate that the Arabs escaped by being born in the center of the world. To be sure, it is not possible to speak of a vision of “Europe” here, only of the vision of a vague and vast north, with the borders between Franks, Slavs, and Turks remaining unclear. For Mas’udi, these peoples were the neighbors of Gog and Magog, savage nations who, according to the Bible and the Qur’an, would devastate the civilized world at the end of time. We have the impression that these ferocious men of the north are in some sense midway between “normal” men, those who inhabit the central climates, and the monstrous beings—Gog, Magog, cannibals, Waq-Waq—that haunt the periphery of the world. Nevertheless, the remote peoples elicit amazement: Ibn Rusteh, in his Book of Precious Things (903), describes whaling activity among the Irish and evokes islands inhabited by geese who feed solely on the flesh of shipwrecked sailors.

(Continues…)

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