Detail of Carl von Steuben’s depiction of the Battle of Poitiers, fought in 732, the year Muslim armies crossed the Pyrenees.

A Better Place

What if the Muslim armies hadn’t been stopped at the French border?

by Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, February 4, 2008

In 610 A.D., Muhammad ibn Abdallah, a forty-year-old man from a prosperous merchant family in Mecca, repaired to a cave on nearby Mt. Hira to meditate—a retreat he had made many times. That year, though, his experience was different. An angel appeared and seized him, speaking to him the words of God. Muhammad fell to his knees and crawled home to his wife. “Wrap me up!” he cried. He feared for his sanity. But, as the voice revisited him, he came to believe that it truly issued from God. It called on him to reform his society. Poor people were to be given charity; slaves were to be treated justly; usury was to be outlawed. Muhammad’s tribesmen, the Quraysh, were polytheists, like most people in the Arabian Peninsula at that time, but this God, Allah, proclaimed that he was the only God. He was the same deity that the Jews and the Christians worshipped. Jesus Christ wasn’t his son, though. Christ was just a prophet, like the prophets of the Old Testament. Their word was now superseded by Muhammad’s, as their creeds were supplanted by this new one, Islam.

When Muhammad started preaching in Mecca, people saw him as a harmless crank, but as he gained followers he began to be regarded as a menace. Mecca was an important trading hub, with rich merchants. Muhammad’s God forbade all ostentation. Furthermore, if, as he instructed, the pagan idols were to be discarded, that would mean no more revenue from their shrines. In 622, Muhammad and his followers were driven out of Mecca. They fled to Yathrib, which became known as Medina, and from there they warred with their native city. In the beginning, Muhammad’s treatment of his fellow-monotheists the Jews and the Christians was conciliatory, but new religions do not normally establish themselves with the help of older religions. The local Jewish tribes conspired against him. After a decisive battle in 627, Muhammad had seven hundred Jews beheaded in Medina’s central market. In 630, he and his men took Mecca. Muhammad ordered the destruction of the three hundred and sixty idols around the city’s great temple, the Kabah. He proclaimed the supremacy of Islam, and reportedly sent messengers to the rulers of Persia, Byzantium, Yemen, and Ethiopia bidding them to convert. According to his biographer Karen Armstrong, he spent his few remaining years trying to establish peace, sometimes over the objections of his lieutenants.

Soon after Muhammad’s death, in 632, the record of what God had said to him was collected in the Koran, and his contemporaries’ testimonies about his life were gathered in the Hadith. At the same time, Islam expanded, with a speed unique in history. One of the obligations imposed on the faithful by the Koran was jihad, or struggle. This has been translated as “holy war,” and there are passages in the Koran to support such a reading, notably the recommendation that Muslims kill enemies of the faith: “Fight against them until idolatry is no more and Allah’s religion reigns supreme.” But just a few paragraphs later the Koran makes the opposite decree: “There shall be no compulsion in religion.” Some interpreters of the Koran—particularly in recent years, when holy war has become a matter of public alarm—have argued that “jihad” actually means spiritual combat, every Muslim’s fight within himself against the temptations of evil. I don’t know why a book that was collected, rather than composed, should have to be internally consistent, or why a religious document that originated within a nomadic society in the seventh century and includes such things as the moon splitting in two should be asked to conform to post-Enlightenment thought. The Bible also contradicts itself, and has water turning into wine. Such matters are a problem only for literalists. As for slaying one’s enemies, this is enthusiastically recommended in Psalms (“Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones”), as it is in many premodern writings.

In any case, however much Muhammad’s immediate successors may have struggled with their souls, they also, in the eighty-some years following his death, conquered Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Anatolia, Iraq, and Persia. By the beginning of the eighth century, Muslim forces stood at the northwest corner of Africa. There, only the Strait of Gibraltar, nine miles wide, separated them from the Iberian Peninsula. Iberia at that time was ruled by the Visigoths, a Christian people who did their best to wipe out other religions within their territory—Judaism, for example. There is some evidence that the Iberian Jews invited the Muslims to invade. In 711, they did so. The state that they established in Iberia, and maintained for almost four centuries, is the subject of David Levering Lewis’s “God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215” (Norton; $29.95).

This book has to be understood in context, or, actually, two contexts. The first is post-colonialism, the effort on the part of scholars from the nineteen-seventies onward to correct the biases that accompanied and justified the colonization of eighty-five per cent of the earth by European powers between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. In that period, according to Edward Said’s 1978 “Orientalism”—the founding document of post-colonial thought—history-writing about the Near East and the Middle East was an arm of empire. Its goal was to make non-Western peoples seem uncivilized, so that European control would appear a boon. Since Said, much writing on Europe’s former colonies has been an effort to redress that injustice.

The other context in which Lewis’s book must be read is, of course, the history of terrorism, since the late nineteen-seventies, on the part of people claiming to be instructed by the Koran. When this started, most Westerners had little idea of what the Muslim world was. Harems, hookahs, carpets—that was about it. Nor, after the terrorist attacks, was it easy to catch up in any proper way, for, while there has been an outpouring of books on Islam in the past two decades, many of them were for or against it. A number of prominent intellectuals have denounced Islam. Other people have protested that the vast majority of Muslims do not support terrorism. Some historians have condemned not just the demonization of Islam but the West’s ignorance of the Muslim world—a failure now seen as political folly, not to speak of arrogance. Scholars went to their desks to testify to the glories of Islamic cultures. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, in the foreword to her magnificent anthology “The Legacy of Muslim Spain” (1992)—a collection of forty-nine essays describing not just the politics and the religion of Muslim Iberia but its cities, architecture, music, poetry, calligraphy, and cooking—calls the omission of Islam from the West’s story of civilization a “historical crime.”

Lewis’s book is part of that revision. The Muslims came to Europe, he writes, as “the forward wave of civilization that was, by comparison with that of its enemies, an organic marvel of coordinated kingdoms, cultures, and technologies in service of a politico-cultural agenda incomparably superior” to that of the primitive people they encountered there. They did Europe a favor by invading. This is not a new idea, but Lewis takes it further: he clearly regrets that the Arabs did not go on to conquer the rest of Europe. The halting of their advance was instrumental, he writes, in creating “an economically retarded, balkanized, and fratricidal Europe that . . . made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism, and perpetual war.” It was “one of the most significant losses in world history and certainly the most consequential since the fall of the Roman Empire.” This is a bold hypothesis.

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