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Western
Perceptions of Islam
The
Middle Ages: From Theological Rivalry to the Creation of “the
Other”
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Ibrahim
Kalin
George Washington University
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14/04/2003
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From
the moment it emerged as a universal religion, Islam became a major
challenge for Christianity: it was a new dispensation from Heaven
that claimed to have completed the cycle of Abrahamic revelations.
The references to Jewish and Christian themes in the Qur’an and
Prophetic traditions (hadith), sometimes concurring with and
sometimes diverging from the Biblical accounts, contributed to the
Christians’ sense of both consternation and insecurity on the one
hand, and to the urgency of responding to the Islamic claims of
authenticity and family relation to monotheism, on the other.
The
earliest polemics between Muslim scholars and Christian theologians
that took place in the Islamic world attest to the zeal of the two
communities to defend their faiths against one another. Baghdad and
Damascus from the 8th through the 10th
centuries were the two main centers of intellectual exchange and
theological polemics between Muslims and Christians. Even though
theological rivalry is an invariable of this period, many ideas were
exchanged in the fields of philosophy, logic, and theology - taking
the mode of interaction beyond theological bickering. In fact,
Christian theologians posed a double challenge to their Muslim
counterparts because they were a step ahead in cultivating a
full-fledged theological vocabulary by using the lore of ancient
Greek and Hellenistic culture.
No
one single figure can illustrate this situation better than St. John
of Damascus (c. 675-749) known in Arabic as Yahya Al-Dimashqi
and in Latin as Johannes Damascenus. A court official of the Umayyad
caliphate in Syria like his father Ibn Mansur, St. John was a
crucial figure not only for the formation of Orthodox theology and
the fight against the iconoclast movement of the 8th
century, but also for the history of Christian polemics against
“Saracens” – a pejorative name used for Muslims in most of the
anti-Islamic polemics whose origins go back in all likelihood to St.
John himself.
St.
John’s polemics, together with his contemporary Bede (d. 735) and,
a generation later, Theodore Abu-Qurrah (d. 820 or 830), against
Islam - as an essentially ‘Christian heresy’ or, to use St.
John’s own words, as the “heresy of the Ishmaelites” - set the
tone for the perceptions of Islam and continued to be an operative
factor until the end of the Renaissance. In fact, most of the
theological depictions concerning Islam as a ‘deceptive
superstition of the Ishmaelites’ and a ‘forerunner of the
Antichrist’ go back to St. John, who had no intentions for an
interfaith understanding vis-à-vis Muslims. What is curious about
St. John’s impact on his coreligionists in Western Europe is that
he had a direct knowledge of the language and ideas of Muslims,
which was radically absent among his followers in the West. R.
W. Southern has rightly called this the “historical problem of
Christianity” vis-à-vis Islam in the middle ages, viz., lack of
first-hand knowledge of Islamic beliefs and practices as a
precaution or deliberate choice to dissuade and prevent Christians
from contaminating themselves with a heretic offshoot of
Christianity.
The
absence of direct contact and reliable sources of knowledge led to a
long history of spurious scholarship against Islam and the Prophet
Muhammad in Western Christianity, and as a result, Islam remained as
an eerie foe in the European consciousness for a good part of the
Middle Ages. The problem was further compounded by the Byzantine
opposition to Islam and the decidedly inimical literature produced
by Byzantine theologians between the 8th and the 10th
centuries on mostly theological grounds. Even though the
anti-Islamic Byzantine literature displays considerable first-hand
knowledge of Islamic faith and practices, including specific
criticisms of some verses of the Qur’an, the perception of Islam
as a theological rival and heresy was the leitmotif of this type of
literature and provided a solid historical and theological basis for
the later critiques of Islam.
If
deliberate ignorance was the cherished strategy of the period, the
out-and-out rejection of Islam as a theological challenge was no
less significant. The Qur’anic assertion of Divine unity without
the Trinity, countenance of Jesus Christ as God’s prophet divested
of divinity, and sustaining a religious community without the clergy
and a church-like authority were some of the challenges that did not
go unnoticed in the Western Christendom. Unlike Eastern Christianity
that had a presence in the midst of the Muslim world and better
access to the Muslim faith, the image of Islam in the West was
relegated to an unqualified heresy par excellence and
regarded as no different than paganism or Manichaenism from which
St. Augustine had his historical conversion to Christianity.
In
contrast to Spain in a later period where the three Abrahamic faiths
had a remarkable period of intellectual and cultural exchange, the
vacuum created by the spatial and intellectual confinement of
Western Christianity was filled in by folk tales about Islam and
Muslims, paving the way for the new store of images, ideas, stories
and myths that were brought in by the stories and fantasies of
Crusaders. Paradoxically, the Crusades did not bring any new or more
reliable knowledge about Islam but reinforced its image as paganism
and idolatry.
There
was, however, one very important consequence of the Crusades as far
as the perceptions of Islam are concerned. The Crusaders, it is to
be noted, were the first Western Christians to go into the Islamdom
and witness Islamic culture with its cities, roads, bazaars,
mosques, palaces, and, most importantly, its inhabitants. With the
Crusader came not only the legend of Saladin (Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi),
the conqueror of Jerusalem, but also the stories of Muslim life, its
promiscuity, its wealth and luxury, and a number of goods such as
silk and paper. Combined with popular imagery, these stories and
imported goods - presenting a world picture immersed in the luscious
joys and luxuries of worldly life - confirmed the wicked nature of
the heresy of the Ishmaelites. Even though the subdued sense of
admiration tacit in these stories did very little in ameliorating
the image of Islam, it opened a new door of perception for Islam and
Muslims as a culture and civilization. In this way, Islam, vilified
on purely religious and theological grounds, became something of a
neutral value - if not possessing any importance in itself.
The
significance of this shift in perception cannot be overemphasized.
After the 14th century when Christianity began to loose
its grip on the Western world, many lay people, who did not bother
themselves with Christian criticisms of Islam or any other culture
and religion for that matter, were more than happy to refer to
Islamic culture as a world outside the theological and geographical
confinements of Christianity. In a rather curious way, Islamic
civilization, to the extent to which it was known in Western Europe,
was pitted against Christianity to reject its exclusive claim to
truth and universality. This explains, to a considerable extent, the
double attitude of the Renaissance towards Islam; the Renaissance
Europe hated Islam as a religion but admired its civilization.
During
the passionate and bloody campaign of the Crusades, a most important
and unexpected development took place for the written literature on
Islam in the Middle Ages, and this was the translation of the
Qur’an for the first time into Latin under the auspices of Peter
the Venerable (d.c. 1156). The translation was done by the English
scholar Robert of Ketton who completed his rather free and
incomplete rendition in July 1143. As expected, the motive for this
translation was not to gain a better understanding of Islam by
reading its sacred scripture but to know the enemy better.
Regardless of the intention behind it, the translation of the
Qur’an was a momentous event since it shaped the scope and
direction of the study of Islam in the middle ages and provided the
critics of Islamic religion with a text on which they can build much
of their anticipated criticisms.
Parallel
with this was an event that proved to be even more persistent and
alarming to Europe. The extant literature on the life of the Prophet
of Islam in Latin is by far more extensive and elaborate as well as
ornate in depicting a picture of Prophet Muhammad that was to last
up to our own day. And although St. John of Damascus was the first
to call the Prophet of Islam a ‘false prophet’ before the 12th
century there are hardly any references to ‘Mahomet’ as the
Prophet Muhammad was known to the Latins, and he does not appear to
have any significance for the formation of Christian polemics
against Muslims. With the induction of the Prophet into the picture,
however, a new and eschatological dimension was added to the
preordained case of Islam as a villain faith because the Prophet of
Islam could now be identified as the anti-Christ heralding the end
of the times.
The
picturing of the Prophet of Islam suffered from the same historical
problem of medieval Europe to which we have referred, namely the
lack of the study of Islam based on original sources, texts,
first-hand accounts, or histories. The notorious fact that there was
not a single scholar among the Latin critics of Islam until the end
of the 13th century who knew Arabic resurfaced as a major
catalyst for the spurious depictions of the Prophet of Islam. The
first work ever to appear on the Prophet Muhammad in Latin was
Embrico of Mainz’s (d. 1077) Vita Mahumeti, culled mostly
from Byzantine sources and embellished with profligate details about
the personal and social life of the Prophet. The picture that
emerges out of such works largely corroborated the apocalyptic
framework within which the Prophet of Islam and his discomforting
success in spreading the new faith was seen as fulfilling the
Biblical promise of the anti-Christ. The theological concerns of the
time simply shun any appeal to reliable scholarship for the next one
or two centuries to come and laid the ideological foundations of the
image of the Prophet.
Almost
all of the Latin works that have survived on the life of the Prophet
had one solid goal: to show the impossibility of such a man as
Muhammad to be God’s messenger. This is exceedingly clear in the
picture with which we are presented. The prophet’s
‘this-worldly’ qualities as compared to the ‘other-worldly’
nature of Jesus Christ were a constant theme. The Prophet was given
to sex and political power, both of which he used, the Latins
reasoned, to destroy Christianity. He was merciless towards his
enemies, especially towards Jews and Christians, and took pleasure
in having his opponents tortured and killed. The only reasonable
explanation for the enormous success of Muhammad in religious and
political fields was something as malicious as heresy, viz., that he
was a magician and used magical powers to convince and convert
people. The focus on the psychological states of the Prophet was so
persuasive, so it seemed to the Latins, and so persistent that as
late as in the 19th century William Muir (1819-1905), a
British official in India and later the Principal of Edinburgh
University, joined his ‘medireview’ predecessors by calling the
Prophet a ‘psychopath’ in his extremely polemical Life of
Mohammed. There are many other details that can be mentioned
here such as the Christian background of the Prophet, his dead body
being eaten and desecrated by pigs or that he was baptized secretly
just before his death as a last attempt to save his soul. These
details are truly interesting and reveal various facets of the
spirit of the age in which the picture of the Prophet was drawn in
an exceedingly hostile, polemical, shallow yet steady manner.
The
foregoing image of the Prophet of Islam was an extension of the
erstwhile rejection of the Qur’an as authentic revelation. In
fact, with the Prophet in the picture as a possessed and
hallucinatory spirit, it was much more convincing in the eyes of the
opponents to attribute the Qur’an to such a man as Muhammad.
Having said that, there was also a deeper theological reason for
focusing on the figure of the Prophet. Since Christianity is
essentially a ‘Christic’ religion and Jesus Christ embodies the
word of God, the Latin critics of Islam presumed a parallel paradigm
for Islam according to which Muhammad was accorded a similar role in
the religious universe of Islam. At any rate, the rejection of the
Qur’an as the word of God and the representation of the Prophet of
Islam as a possessed spirit and magician immersed in the lusts of
the inferior world stayed with the Western perceptions of Islam
until the modern period.
Perhaps
the most important outcome of the medireview Christian repudiation
of Islam has been the exclusion of Islam from the family of
monotheistic religions. Even in the modern period where the
interfaith trialogue between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has
come a long way, we are still far from speaking with confidence of a
Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition by which Islam can be seen as
belonging to the same religious universe as the other Abrahamic
religions. It goes without saying that the absence of such a
discourse does nothing short of reinforcing the medireview
perceptions of Islam as a heretic and pagan faith, thwarting the
likelihood of generating a more inclusive picture of Islam on
predominantly religious grounds.
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