The Impact of Islam Read online

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  1

  A Wave of Islamic Influence

  2

  Islam’s Teaching and Attitudes

  3

  Piracy and Slave-Raiding

  4

  Islamic Spain

  5

  The Crusades

  6

  Persecution of the Jews

  7

  The Medieval Theocracy

  8

  The Ottomans and Europe

  9

  Islam and The Age of Discovery

  10

  Conclusion

  Appendix

  The Mysterious Origins of Islam

  Bibliography

  The Impact of

  Islam

  Emmet Scott

  Copyright © Emmet Scott, 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher except by reviewers who may quote brief passages in their reviews.

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  ISBN: 978-0-9884778-8-9

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  To all those writers and public figures who are

  currently striving to keep the flame of truth alive in the face of an encroaching totalitarianism which wishes to silence all freedom of speech.

  Introduction

  The 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 à 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, doesn’t 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 isn’t everything. Stalin’s 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 freq
uency 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 Qur’an 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 Islam’s 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 Qur’an 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.

  The Qur’an, which the Archangel Gabriel is said to have given Muhammad, is of course the fundamental scripture of Islam; yet as a guide to life or anything else it is woefully inadequate. Most of the book makes little sense, and the apparently disconnected and puzzling incidents recounting the life of Muhammad are “filled out” by the Hadith, a collection of the supposed sayings and deeds of Muhammad. Without the Hadith and Ibn Ishaq’s biography (the Sira) of Muhammad the Qur’an would be incomprehensible. It is accepted that most – or all – of the hadiths were written many decades after the lifetime of Muhammad, generally between 700 and 750. The hadiths, as well as Ibn Ishaq’s biography (written around 720) portray the life of a warlord who denied himself few of life’s pleasures.

  The essentially aggressive nature of Islam can only be understood if we pay attention to what is told of Muhammad: He is said to have initiated sixty wars and raids and to have participated in at least twenty-seven of these. Many of these engagements involved massacres of unarmed men and boys. The Prophet of Islam is said to have ordered the killing of all the men and post-pubescent boys in the Jewish settlement of Banu Quraiza, and to have led a series of unprovoked attacks against other Jewish communities in Arabia. During his lifetime, almost all the Jews of Arabia were either killed or forced to convert to Islam. The Prophet is said furthermore to have ordered the assassination of political opponents and encouraged his followers to take up the sword in the propagation of the faith, declaring that a night spent in arms in the cause of Islam carried more merit than a lifetime of fasting, prayer and good works. Before he died, he is reported to have enjoined on his followers to “fight with the peoples” until the whole world should confess that there was no god but Allah.

  That he was most definitely not a man of peace is therefore fairly clear – and underlines a dramatic difference between Christianity and Islam: Whilst early Christianity was pacifist to the core, the early spread of Islam was due entirely to military conquest. No one denies this, and it is even conceded that Islamic law and custom sanctifies warfare in the cause of the faith. Indeed, the waging of jihad or holy war is fundamental to Islamic custom and belief: Since the first flush of victories in the seventh century, conquered infidels have been presented with a simple choice; either convert or pay a poll tax, known as jizya. But the important thing has always been to establish political control. This being the case it is clear that Islam is not a religion at all in the ordinary sense of the word, but a totalitarian political ideology with religious pretensions, a fact noted by Rebecca Bynam in her recent work, Allah is Dead: Why Islam is not a Religion. And this clearly accounts for the “egalitarianism” noted and praised by Bernard Lewis: All revolutionary political ideologies, no matter how totalitarian and oppressive, promise a large degree of equality to their followers, with the implied promise of a share in the spoils once the established order is removed. This is precisely how Islam has operated since its inception.

  In spite of all this, we are continually assured – in modern times at least – that this warfare, or jihad, can also be interpreted as an inner spiritual struggle. In addition, we are informed by scholars such as Bernard Lewis that Islam was always a “tolerant” faith: Once a region or country had been conquered the natives – if they were “people of the Book” (i.e., Jews or Christians) – were permitted to continue with their lives as before, subject of course to the payment of the jizya. The conquered Jews and Christians were then classed as dhimmi “protected,” and safe from any further Muslim attack.

  The myth of Islamic tolerance is in fact one of the most pernicious to have gained currency in Western belief over the past century. In fact, Jews and Christians were anything but “protected” under the aegis of Islam. The dhimmi communities, as Bat Ye’or has shown in great detail in her excellent series of books on the subject, was subject to a whole raft of humiliating and degrading laws which rendered their lives almost intolerable: One of these was the compulsory wearing of distinctive clothing – an endearing feature copied by the Nazis in their persecution of the Jews during the twentieth century. Worst of all however was the fact that dhimmi Christians and Jews did not enjoy equality before the law: The word of a Muslim always trumped that of a dhimmi. One consequence of this was a petty tyranny exercised in perpetuity by ordinary Muslims over their Christian or Jewish neighbors. Should any dispute arise, the dhimmi had to give way immediately. Failure to do so could result in the Muslim accusing his infidel neighbor of blaspheming Muhammad or the Qur’an – a charge which carried the death penalty. Two other Muslim witnesses were needed to substantiate the claim but, at Bat Ye’or remarked, these were always forthcoming and the dhimmi condemned to death. No Christian or Jewish communities could possibly prosper under such a pernicious system; and there are very good grounds for believing that it was this very system which turned vast areas of formerly fertile agricultural land in the Middle East and North Africa into semi-desert within a few decades during the late seventh century: Incoming Arab nomads grazed their goats and camels on the cultivated fields of the conquered Christians and Jews, and these dared not complain.

  A fundamental precept of Islamic law – again, underlining its political nature – is that Muslims occupy a privileged position and have a right to live off the labor of infidels – whether they be dhimmis living under Islam or unconquered infidels living outside the House of Islam’s borders. As may be imagined, such a teaching could only breed a parasitical and lawless attitude which positively encouraged robbery and piracy. Furthermore, the idea – sanctified again by the example of Muhammad – that a Muslim was entitled to take female captives as concubines, as well as to possess male slaves, could only further inflame the passion for banditry. And this is what we find throughout Islamic history.

  The position of women in particular was (and is) pitiful in Islamic societies. The absolute property of some man, either a father, brother, or husband, they could be used, abused and put to death without any real protection from the law.

  The result was the development of a society in which the abuse of some human beings – especially non-Muslims, slaves, and women (and also boys) – by others, namely adult Muslim men, was written into the law and sanctified by holy writ. The abusers, in addition, had a sense of entitlement which prevented them seeking useful employment and tended to encourage the practice of banditry and other forms of violence. This attitude extended itself through the whole of Muslim society, where the great and the p
owerful would routinely despoil those lesser (whether Muslim or not) than themselves. Private property was never secure, and the Muslim household tended to have a drab or even decrepit exterior facing the street and any wealth or luxury hidden at the back of the house – all the better to avoid notice. Since an attractive women too could be confiscated by any great man who took a fancy to her (if she was already married her husband could easily be compelled to draw up a writ of divorce), it became de rigeur to conceal the attractions of the female sex behind an all-encompassing shroud.

  Little wonder that the House of Islam sank into grinding poverty and backwardness as the Middle Ages progressed. Yet it was not always thus: In the middle of the tenth century Islam was one of the wealthiest and most technically advanced civilizations on earth. Europe at the time was an underpopulated and backward outpost of late Roman culture: Most of the continent was under the control of illiterate barbarians and even those regions which had formed part of the Roman Empire – including Italy – had reverted to a mainly rural and barter economy, supporting virtually no towns of more than 30,000 people. The House of Islam by contrast possessed great urban centers, such as Baghdad, Samarra, Damascus and Alexandria, with upward of 500,000 inhabitants, a populousness and prosperity it had inherited from the great civilizations of the Middle East it had absorbed in the seventh century. It is no surprise then that historians and archaeologists have noted a massive Islamic impact upon Europe at this very time; an impact that was economic, political, philosophical, technological, and religious. It was, in addition, both passive and active. Above all, historians speak of a massive wave of new technologies and ideas originating in the Islamic world. These included: paper-making, the compass, the decimal numbers system, algebra, alcohol distillation, clock-making, and a host of other things. New philosophical and theological ideas also arrived. The Arabs, it seems, were in possession of many texts of the Greek philosophers which had been lost in the West.