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November 2002
Number One Hundred Thirty-one
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This reversed the conditions of the world Muslims once ruled.
Following Mohammed’s death in 632 A.D., his followers rapidly conquered
much of the formerly Christian world—
Then, abruptly, things changed. Europeans,
after a millennia defending themselves against Islam, took the offensive and
rapidly overwhelmed their oppressors. Incubated
by the Renaissance and Enlightenment, new technologies provided Europeans the
means with which to outmaneuver and overwhelm their foes. Portuguese
and Spanish explorers bequeathed colonies to their monarchs, encircling the
Muslims and disrupting their trade monopolies, funneling gold and silver and
agricultural products into Europe. Whereas
a Muslim army had merely been repulsed at Vienna in 1529, the second siege of
Vienna, in 1683, resulted in a disastrous defeat, followed by a rout.
In the words of an Ottoman chronicler:
“This was a calamitous defeat, so great that there has never been its
like since the first appearance of the Ottoman state” (p. 16).
Further east, Russia’s tsars, recovering lands lost during the Mongol
invasions and occupation, began pushing south and east, challenging Muslim
dominance. By 1696, Peter the Great
had occupied Azov, providing Russia a port on the Black Sea.
For the next three centuries, Muslims struggled to cope with their new,
largely inferior status vis a vis Europe, trying to understand “what
went wrong.” One thing they
learned, Lewis says, was learned on the battlefield.
Once almost omnipotent in battle, Muslims found themselves shocked by
Europe’s military superiority. Technically,
whether considering naval vessels or soldiers’ arms, the West had advanced in
military equipment whereas Muslims still tended to rely upon their swords and
personal valor. By 1798, when
Napoleon and a small corps of French soldiers invaded and occupied Egypt, the
disparity was clear, and during the 20th century most Arab lands were
reduced to the humiliating status of European colonies.
Muslim inferiority was similarly
evident in trade and commerce. During
the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Europeans began to study other languages and
understand other cultures, whereas Muslims (elitists who disdained lesser
cultures) rarely bothered to learn about their Christian foes.
To travel outside Muslim realms, to study under infidels, to acknowledge
the achievements of non-Muslim peoples, was discouraged.
Though certain Western technologies were coveted and appropriated, the
widespread resistance to everything associated with the Christian world
prevented Muslims from assimilating many of the “modern” developments that
transformed the world. Illustrating
the outcome of this process, Lewis says that today:
“the total exports of the Arab world other than fossil fuels amount to
less than those of Finland, a country of five million inhabitants.
Nor is much coming into the region by way of capital investment.
On the contrary, wealthy Middle Easterners prefer to invest their capital
abroad, in the developed world” (p. 47).
Turning to “social and cultural barriers,” Lewis focuses on three
oppressed groups within Islam: unbelievers,
slaves, and women. Though
unbelievers enjoyed a degree of “tolerance,” economic restrictions and
social pressures severely reduced their standing.
While Europeans largely outlawed slavery in the 19th century,
the institution still persists in Muslim circles.
And virtually every Westerner visiting Muslim lands immediately notices
the subordinate status of women under Islam.
Resurgent Islam, directed by radicals like the Ayatollah Khomeini, insist
that “the emancipation of women—specifically, allowing them to reveal their
faces, their arms, and their legs, and to mingle socially in the school or the
workplace with men—is an incitement to immorality and promiscuity, and a
deadly blow to the very heart of Islamic society, the Muslim family and home”
(p. 70).
However embedded in Muslim traditions, such social and cultural factors
contributed to the isolation and progressive impoverishment of their nations.
So they fell victim to European superiority.
Yet while Europeans--and now Americans--flexed their muscles in Arab
countries, an abiding resentment boiled within Arab hearts.
So too, as Israel attained statehood—and developed a flourishing
society in an area long reduced to a desert under Arab rule—a virulent
anti-Semitism boiled to the surface. Prophetically,
writing this book in 1999, Lewis noted:
“If the peoples of the middle East continue on their present path, the
suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no
escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and
oppression, culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination; perhaps
from a new Europe reverting to old ways, perhaps from a resurgent Russia,
perhaps from some new, expanding superpower in the East” (pp. 159-160).
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For anyone interested in a more detailed history, Bernard Lewis’s The
Middle East: A Brief History of the
Last 2,000 Years (New York: Simon
& Schuster, c. 1995) is probably the best available.
Accurate, analytical, up-to-date, readable, it deserves the accolades
such as “masterpiece” routinely given it.
After sketching the pre-Christian societies in the Middle East,
explaining the various peoples living therein, Lewis charts Christianity’s the
effective expansion and establishment—from Ethiopia to Persia, from Macedon to
Arabia--during the first six centuries of the Christian Era.
Then came Mohammed! His
teachings inspired devotees to conquer much of the world in the seventh century.
More importantly, Lewis says: “It
is the Arabization and Islamization of the peoples of the conquered provinces,
rather than the actual military conquest itself, that is the true wonder of the
Arab empire” (p. 58). Amidst the
success of Arab armies, however, the empire developed internal tensions.
Mohammed’s immediate successors, the “caliphs,” quarreled among
themselves. Indeed, during the
“golden age” of Islam three of the four caliphs were assassinated.
Mohammed’s blood relatives struggled against those who claimed to
better represent the prophet. So
factions developed-- Shi’ite battling and Sunni—that still divide the Muslim
world.
Despite internal turmoil, however, the Arab Empire prevailed, dominating
much of the globe for 1,000 years. Providing
accurate information, without getting buried in the details, Lewis gives a
cogent overview of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate, then charts the “steppe
people’s” invasions from the north and east, including the conquests of
Jenghiz Khan’s Mongol warriors. First
absorbing the blows of the invaders, then slowly converting them to Islam,
Muslims preserved the essential character of Islam, though the center of power
constantly as the dominance of one group (i.e. Egypt or Persia) dictated its
trajectory.
Following a chronological overview, Lewis discusses various aspects of
Muslim culture, explaining such things as the politics, economics, the elites,
religion and law. To Muslims, he
explains, there is no clear distinction between politics and religion.
In accord with Mohammed’s teaching and example, “the choice between
God and Caesar, that snare in which not Christ but so many Christians were to be
entangled, did not arise. In Muslim
teaching and experience, there was no Caesar.
God was the head of the state, and Muhammad his Prophet taught and ruled
on his behalf” (p. 138). Since
Muhammad himself was a trader and warrior, and his Arab followers were nomadic
herdsmen and warriors, they tended to have little interest in agriculture.
Consequently, as the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun noted in the 14th
century, under Islam “’ruin and devastation prevail’ in North Africa,
where in the past there was ‘a flourishing civilization, as the remains of
buildings and statues, and the ruins of towns and villages attest’” (p.
166). Warriors from the Arabian
desert generally made deserts wherever they settled!
Lewis clearly explains Islam’s core elements, such as its “five
pillars.” Given the current world
scene, his discussion of “jihad” (holy war) clarifies the perennially
militant stance Muslims assume, for they embrace a sacred obligation to conquer
the world and bring all peoples into submission to Islamic law (and thence,
encourage conversion to the Islamic faith).
Consequently, “the Christian crusade, often compared with the Muslim jihad,
was itself a delayed and limited response to the jihad and in part also
an imitation. But unlike the jihad
it was concerned primarily with the defense or re-conquest of threatened or lost
Christian territory” (p. 233). Muslims,
Lewis shows, were preoccupied with internal controversies and paid little
attention to the Christian crusades. And
they certainly did not condemn them as do modern Westerners who wield the
Crusades as a bludgeon with which batter Christianity.
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Far more critical of Islam, Bat
Ye’or, an Egyptian-born scholar living in France, recounts what Christians
suffered under Muslim rule in The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under
Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude
(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University
Presses, c. 1996). In an
enlightening foreword to the book, Jacques Ellul notes that there exists in the
West a “current of favorable predispositions to Islam,” notably evident in
the many euphemistic discussions of jihad.
By setting forth the historical facts, Bat Ye’or dares to contradict
the prevailing assumptions regarding Islam.
“Historians,” Bat Ye’or says, “professionally or economically
connected to the Arab-Muslim world, published historical interpretations
relating to the dhimmis, which were either tendentious or combined with
facts with apologetics and fantasy. After
World War II, the predominance of a left-wing intelligentsia and the emergence
of Arab regimes which were “socialist’ or allied to Moscow consolidated an
Arabophile revolutionary internationalism” that remains strong is much of the
contemporary world (pp. 212-213).
Jihad, in fact, helps
constitute Islam, Ellul says, for it is a sacred duty for the faithful.
Indeed “it is Islam’s normal path to expansion.”
Unlike the “spiritual” combat imagined by some pro-Islamic writers, jihad
advocates “a real military war
of conquest” followed by an iron-handed “dhimmitude,” the reduction of
conquered peoples to Islamic law (p. 19). Muslims
divide the world into two—and only two--realms:
the “domain of Islam” and “the domain of war” (p. 19).
At times, strategy dictates tactical concessions and “peaceful”
interludes. But ultimately, Muslims
are committed to conquer and control as much of the globe as possible.
Ellul stresses this “because there is so much talk nowadays of the
tolerance and fundamental pacifism of Islam that it is necessary to recall its
nature, which is fundamentally warlike!” (p. 20).
Writing presciently, in 1991, Ellul declared:
“Hostage-taking, terrorism, the destruction of Lebanese Christianity,
the weakening of the Eastern Churches (not to mention the wish to destroy
Israel) . . . all this recalls precisely the resurgence of the traditional
policy of Islam” (p. 21).
Turning from Ellul’s remarks to
Bat Ye’or’s treatise, we enter into a carefully crafted description of what
happened to non-Muslim peoples under the yoke of Islam in the Mediterranean
basin, Turkey, Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Iran, a subject heretofore
distinguished by a paucity of reliable studies.
She meticulously defines jihad, noting that it may be waged
through both overt war and more covert means:
“proselytism, propaganda, and corruption” (p. 40).
Whatever means necessary for Muslims to conquer and control lands and
non-Muslim peoples find justification as jihad.
Thus motivated, Muslims established an enormous empire by the time of
Charlemagne (ca. 800 A.D.), though in truth Muslim warriors were often brutal
and booty-hungry pillagers, driven more by greed than holy zeal.
So too, when Muslims ruled a
region, reducing all non-Muslims to dhimmitude, they exploited and
oppressed (especially through onerous, discriminatory taxation) their subjects.
Forcibly occupying highly-civilized realms such as Egypt, Muslim rulers
slowly and surely reduced them to wastelands, economically and culturally
depressed shadows of ancient glory. Everywhere
the Muslims went, there resulted “the agricultural decline, the abandonment of
villages and fields, and the gradual desertification of provinces—densely
populated and fertile during the pre-Islamic period” (p. 102).
All the land under Muslim rule was “administered by Islamic law for the
benefit of Muslims and their descendents” (p. 70).
More systematically and thoroughly than Europeans appropriating American
Indian lands, the Muslims impoverished conquered peoples.
Even the much-vaunted “Islamic civilization” was derived, sucked out
of dying corpses, not created. “Islamic
literature, science, art, philosophy, and jurisprudence,” Bat Ye’or says,
“were born and developed not in Arabia, within an exclusively Arab and Muslim
population, but in the midst of conquered peoples, feeding off their vigor and
on the dying, bloodless body of dhimmitude” (p. 128).
Theoretically,
Jews and Christians had religious freedom, but in fact “at no period in
history was it respected” (p. 88). Theoretically,
conversions to Islam were to be voluntary. In
fact, massacres, torture, slavery and intimidation punctuated the process.
In Spain, two centuries after occupation, “in 891 Seville and its
surrounding areas were drenched in blood by the massacre of thousands of
Spaniards—Christian and muwallads. At
Granada in 1066, the whole Jewish community, numbering about three thousand, was
annihilated” (p. 89). To
understand the much-maligned Christian Crusades, one must see them as defensive,
just wars designed to relieve the suffering of oppressed and enslaved believers.
Centuries later, the 1915 “the genocide of the Armenians was a
combination of massacres, deportations, and enslavement.
In the central regions of Armenia, the male population over the age of
twelve was wiped out en masse: shot,
drowned, thrown over precipices, or subjected to other forms of torture and
execution” (p. 196).
In short, Bat Ye’or says,
“irrefutable historical and archaeological sources confirm” that the
“process of Islamization” in conquered lands, “was perhaps the greatest
plundering enterprise in history” (p. 101).
Reading this book certainly sobers one!
She supports her presentation with extensive footnotes and 175 pages of
illustrative documents and finds little admirable in Islamic rule.
The weight of the evidence, the factual refutation of Arabophile
histories, persuades one that the terrorists operating in the world today are
hardly an aberration of Islam!
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For a brief, handy overview of the
subject, James L. Garlow’s A Christian’s Response to Islam (Tulsa:
RiverOak Publishing, c. 2002) sets forth a pastor’s response to 9/11,
including a clear critique of the gushy universalism that “referred to every
deceased person as ‘being in Heaven’” (p. 83).
Such sentimentality was further evident when a “United Church of Christ
fellowship announced it would substitute readings from the Koran for Bible
readings for eight consecutive Sundays. The
pastor of one of the nation’s largest Methodist churches declared in a
magazine article that God is the same one worshipped in ‘mosques, synagogues,
and churches’” (p. 72). Against
such Garlow protests, for his concern is not so much with fully understanding
Islam as with rightly responding as committed Christians to the contemporary
scene. The book began as a series of
ever-expanding e-mailings to friends following the terrorists’ attacks, and,
without pretending to be the definitive study of Islam or to provide a scholarly
appraisal of its history, “it has one agenda:
to increase love and boldness for Christ with the result that we more
effectively share Him with all (including Muslims), rather than simply
‘blending in with our multireligious culture” (p. 6).
Garlow roots his presentation in
the ancient biblical account of Ishmael and Isaac, then explains how Mohammed
and the Muslims, following the Koran’s message, have impacted the world.
In response, Christians must avoid either “Muslim-bashing” or “the
knee-jerk reaction of platforming Muslims in Christian churches, thus implying
that ‘We all worship the same God’ or buying into the politically correct
line that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’” (p. 85).
There is, for example, a distinctive difference between Jehovah, revealed
in the Old Testament, and Allah, highlighted in the Koran.
Jesus, to the Muslim, is merely one of 25 prophets, with Mohammed the
last the most important. To
Christians, of course, He is the Eternal Son of God.
Consequently, Christians should take the opportunity to proclaim ever
more vigorously that Jesus is the name above all names, the sole Savior of all
mankind! Without compromising their
faith, Christians must also extend the hand of friendship to Muslims, building
good relationships with them, learning the truth about their faith and their
culture. Having established a
position of trust, dealing with them in very personal ways, Christians can bear
witness to the faith that is within them, especially emphasizing the centrality
of Christ.
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