Ah Yes, I Remember It Well

Speaking of coincidences, this 2018 book was recently brought to my attention by the Algorithm, blessed be its name.  I can borrow the e-book through my library, but I have a large backlog so I've put it on my wishlist and will try to look at it eventually.

Sword and Scimitar is on a familiar, clash-of-civilizations theme, "the often-violent conflict between Islam and the West, shedding a revealing light on current hostilities" as the publisher's blurb puts it:

The West and Islam -- the sword and scimitar -- have clashed since the mid-seventh century, when, according to Muslim tradition, the Roman emperor rejected Prophet Muhammad's order to abandon Christianity and convert to Islam, unleashing a centuries-long jihad on Christendom.

Sword and Scimitar chronicles the decisive battles that arose from this ages-old Islamic jihad, beginning with the first major Islamic attack on Christian land in 636, through the Muslim occupation of nearly three-quarters of Christendom which prompted the Crusades, followed by renewed Muslim conquests by Turks and Tatars, to the European colonization of the Muslim world in the 1800s, when Islam largely went on the retreat -- until its reemergence in recent times.

It's true that the conflict between "the West" and Islam began in the mid-seventh century, because Islam didn't exist until then. So the Islamic jihad couldn't have been "ages-old" in 636.  Were West and East good buddies before?  I'd noticed this sort of vague erasure of history before, in Seven Myths of the Crusades, a collection edited by Alfred J. Andrea and Andrew Holt. published by Hackett in 2015.  It's valid as a corrective to the notion that Muslims had inhabited Palestine from time immemorial, and European Christians were blue meanies who opposed and attacked a religion of peace, but it still leaves a lot of history out.  

My own knowledge of Middle Eastern history is spotty, but I already knew that the region had been a battleground long before Muhammad was a gleam in Allah's eye, and East versus West is a sloppy, anachronistic way to look at it.  East was often at odds with East as far back as historical knowledge goes.  There are glimpses of this in the Hebrew Bible, from the numerous regional wars to the Babylonian conquest of Israel in 586 BCE, followed by the Persian conquest of Babylon in 538.  Persia tried to conquer Greece but failed; then Alexander the Great conquered both Persia and Greece, along with Egypt but also as far east as India. But then he died and his empire fell apart.  West, in the form of Rome, swallowed up not only the East but north Africa and western Europe.  All this happened not by sweet reasonableness but by conquest, with gains and losses at every step.

One Eastern threat to Rome was Judea, which rebelled at least twice, in 66-70 and 132-135 CE, necessitating a great deal of expense in life and treasure to put down.  You've heard of Masada?  That was the last gasp of a jihad by Eastern religious fanatics against Western Rome, though it's not usually framed in those terms.  

Soon after the Roman Empire was Christianized, it came under attack by northern tribes who had no connection to Islam (that was still three centuries in the future) and split into western and eastern regions with different empires and capitals.  In the east, they were menaced by the new Sassanid Empire, est. 224 CE.  Both sides suffered internal strife and external attack until the Sassanids fell to Muslim forces in the mid-7th century.  While all this is peripheral to the Crusades four centuries later, it's part of the background and should be borne in mind.  I don't suppose that Raymond Ibrahim, the author of Sword and Scimitar, or the editors of Seven Myths of the Crusades, are ignorant of it, but they rely on the ignorance of their readers.

I found two books useful for filling in the gaps somewhat.  One was Robert Graves's historical novel Count Belisarius, about a hero of the late Roman Empire - or, if you like, the Byzantine Empire.  Graves was a fairly dry novelist, and Count Belisarius often reads like straight history rather than a novel, but it includes some racy stories about the imperial family, and gives an accurate picture of the period and events.  The other was The War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam (Skyhorse, 2014) by Peter Crawford.  Crawford's approach is that of a military historian, and he emphasizes the battles, but he covers the historical background on this key period.  As the subtitle indicates, the conflict was between East and East as much as East and West.

This is not to say that Islam was or is a "religion of peace," only that neither was Roman "paganism" or its Christian successor.  Contrary to some current-day propaganda, Muslim armies didn't put conquered peoples to the sword (or scimitar, whatever) any more than the Romans or other conquering empires did.  (The later English invaders of North America were a different story.)  From what I read, they (either side) would massacre whole populations in cities that refused to surrender, but they needed those populations alive, to produce food and pay tribute.  None of the sides involved in this history comes off well.

Did you notice the reference to "European colonization of the Muslim world in the 1800s"?  European - Christian - conquest and colonization of the Americas, Africa, and non-Muslim Asia may not be directly pertinent to Ibrahim's thesis, but it's not irrelevant and shouldn't be forgotten.  It caused immense loss of life both in crushing initial native resistance and in maintaining imperial control, and it has a lot to do with the Islamist reaction of the twentieth century.  It doesn't justify Islamic violence, but European Christian violence can't be justified either - which won't keep propagandists from trying.

Someone said that all beginnings are political -- meaning, I think, that where you begin a narrative is a decision that shapes what your story will tell.  The same is true of endings, I would think: the Muslims finished off Constantinople's longstanding enemy the Sassanids, but that turned out to be just the beginning of another story. In Ibrahim's case it's easy to see how political his choice of beginning is.  Its ending is yet to come.

Service Advisory

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. 

In a word, Jihad!

I don't know where the guy with the beard was radicalized, but he was certainly a bloodthirsty extremist if anybody was.  Notice also the beard, which he probably began growing in whatever madrassa turned him to the Dark Side.  But there is no question that he used religion to justify a war in which he killed 600,000 of his own people, a war whose consequences we are still living with a century and a half later.

Yes, that war had one positive outcome, in that slavery was ended in the United States.  It was a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.

I've been procrastinating lately because there's so much I think I ought to write about, but I just haven't felt like writing.  Or reading, most of the time.  It happens.  And now I'll be going out of town for the weekend, which will not contribute directly to productivity.  My apologies. But as inadequate recompense, let me refer you to John Scalzi's post today about the Toronto Star's recent decision to turn off comments on their website.  Scalzi then discusses his own comments policy, which led me to reflect again on why I don't enable comments here.  The discussion in comments (which Scalzi moderates) is pretty good -- Whatever is one of the sites where that happens.

One commenter wrote, "It’s amazing how polar opposite a 'comments section' is to what I hear of the current politically correct state of college classrooms with their 'trigger warnings' and such."  Ah, there's a topic I need to write about here.  Instead I replied to him there.

Perhaps you should be more skeptical about what you hear, but even if what you hear is true, imagine a classroom where the discussion was like the comments sections of most newspapers, Youtube, etc.  I avoid them, not because I'm a special snowflake, but because they're useless for learning anything.  There's nothing "politically correct" about not wanting to wade naked in an open sewer. 

Classrooms have never been open spaces like an unmoderated comments section; discussion there has always been moderated by the instructors.  And nobody's as special a snowflake as the legions of reactionaries who are furious that white heterosexual males are no longer given the special status they think they deserve, and feel they must react by verbal and often physical violence. (This is not really new.  In Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, she recounts that male students rioted when it was proposed that female students should be admitted to the elite English universities.  And I don't need, do I, to remind you how American whites reacted to the politically-incorrect presence of free blacks in what they believed was "their" country, thereby triggering terrible anxieties that could only be assuaged by rioting, dismemberment, and lynching of the offenders?)  Again, imagine a classroom where the students yelled death and rape threats at each other, which is the state of too much of the Internet today.  Again, there's nothing "politically correct" about not wanting to be subjected to that.

So.  Back in a few days, I hope.