THROUGH "ROSE TINTED GLASSES"

How often have we been been taught and told that looking at history "through rose tinted glasses" is no longer acceptable? Rome, A.D. 150: a good place, but they had lots of poverty among the landless, slaves, the emperors were annoying, and the Roman army were nasty guys. Athens, 435 B.C.: also a good place, but they had slaves, too, and foreigners couldn't vote, and they didn't have equality for women.

Ah, but when it comes to Moorish Spain? To Granada? To Cordoba? Well, now, stop right there! According to the BBC, THOSE were THE DAYS!

The Alhambra Palace is perhaps the finest surviving Muslim palace in the world and its symbolic of an episode that many Muslims believe has been all but written out of the history books by Europe’s Christians; the flowering of Islam culture, philosophy and science, which meant that once the intellectual heart of Europe beat not in Paris, Rome or Athens, but in the great Muslim cities of Granada and Cordoba.

I am not a medievalist. But I know enough of that time that I find such comments highly irritating. And they are typically BBC -- and thus perfect for a blog post. Their inference is this: If you criticize that which produces Islamist backwardness today, it is because you are flippin' ignorant of the fact that in Muslim Spain 1000 years ago, medieval Moors built some beautiful things, and a few of them thought some intelligent and even brilliant thoughts.

Oh, and by the way, only read the full program notes if you want your blood pressure thoroughly raised. You get lines like these:

The impact of that explosion of intellectual energy has been breathtaking - and I certainly had not realised the extent our debt to those early Muslim thinkers.

The working script is full of such asides and pithy comments about a "sophisticated Islam" and how ignorant and stupid "Christians" were.

And just imagine a BBC programme today in which something similar to the following were asserted, not about Christians, but about Muslims:

The Islamic caliphs at that point believed that Christianity was very irrational, because you couldn't really have three gods in one. And to say that Jesus, who was a human being was a god as well was also irrational. And they also, I think to some extent despised the, the early Christians for their rejection of Ancient Greek, pagan intellectual culture. So the 9th century intellectual movement was about reclaiming the Greek past for Islam, and using the rhetorical power, the argumentative power of science and reason, against Christianity. The idea was that Islam would become the most powerful political and religious movement in the world, not just by the force of its armies, or the force of its belief, but by the sheer power of its intellectual arguments as well.

That is way too glib, to the point of bordering on rubbish. "Islam" was no more forward-looking than "Christianity".

Let's look at the promo paragraph, bit by bit:

1) Alhambra Palace is perhaps the finest surviving Muslim palace in the world. . .

The Alhambra Palace is a palace, yes. And it is magnificent, yes. But there is nothing particularly intrinsic about a palace denoting learning or anything else. Other parts of Europe had palaces that were older.

Notice, interestingly, that Alhambra is still standing. In how many other instances were Christian palaces and places of worship allowed to vanish from view, or were even turned into mosques? [UPDATE: But let's not hit this too hard. Both sides regularly turned the other's places of worship into their own places of worship, after they conquered the other's cities.]

2) Its [sic] symbolic. . .

It always is. Interestingly, Muslims breaching the walls of the 1,100 year old "great Christian city" of Constantinople and turning Christianity's first or second city (depending on one's point of view) into the capital of an Islamic empire was symbolic, too.

Should we still be upset by that "symbolism", in 2004?

3) all but written out of the history books by Europe’s Christians

Doesn't seem written out of anything to me. Indeed, one cannot write things out of history books. One can omit them, yes. That they haven't been omitted -- for if they were NO ONE WOULD KNOW ABOUT THEM! -- is glossed over by the Beeb, with the convenient "all but" phrase.

In recent years, given that the media image of Islam is unfortunately increasingly that of dementos blowing themselves up in restaurants, or crashing planes suicidally into buildings while screaming aloud to Allah, it is hardly a surprise that Muslim Spain has been increasingly seized upon by many as representing a gentle, enlightened, "Islamic zenith."

And yes, Muslim Spain was stunning. And everybody needs their "zenith" or "golden age", right? But Muslim Spain was really more of an aberration, than the Islamic rule. It probably falls closer into line with the Italy of the Renaissance -- which was, more often than not, decidedly LESS THAN A WHOLLY "Christian" undertaking -- than with an Islamic scriptural norm. All in all, claiming Muslim Spain is representative of "Islamic thought and culture" overall down the centuries is a lot like asserting current day New York City is representative of global "Christian culture".

And that is the real problem with the "Islamic zenith" stuff. We don't tend to talk of a "Christian intellectual golden age" in the same terms, and never have. Because doing so is comparing apples and oranges.

4)"the flowering of Islam [sic] culture, philosophy and science".

Again, ever heard the term "flowering of Christianity"? Of course not. We don't use it. Because culture, philosophy and science are no more "Christian" than they are "Islamic", or anything else. And as we can see today, all around us, Islam was and is about as friendly to intellectual innovation as Christianity then was, and in some respects still is.

Probably the most famous -- and deservedly so -- Muslim Spanish scholar was Ibn Roschd, or Averroes (1126-1198). The fate of his work was pretty typical of his era, whether Islamic or Christian:

. . . He devoted himself to jurisprudence, medicine, and mathematics, as well as to philosophy and theology. Under the Califs Abu Jacub Jusuf and his son, Jacub Al Mansur, he enjoyed extraordinary favor at court and was entrusted with several important civil offices at Morocco, Seville, and Cordova. Later he fell into disfavor and was banished with other representatives of learning. Shortly before his death, the edict against philosophers was recalled. Many of his works in logic and metaphysics had, however, been consigned to the flames, so that he left no school, and the end of the dominion of the Moors in Spain, which occurred shortly afterwards, turned the current of Averoism completely into Hebrew and Latin channels, through which it influenced the thought of Christian Europe down to the dawn of the modern era. . .

But Averroes had virtually NO impact on "Islamic" thought. That's right. None.

Indeed, if it was "Islam" that was what made "Granada" and "Cordoba", it seems curious that such "Islamic innovation" failed to take root much earlier in the Arabian peninsula, where of course Islam had been born, and where it had existed unchallenged for much longer than it did in Spain . . .

But it didn't happen in Arabia because "Islam" wasn't THE reason. Like Averroes, other Muslim scholars, such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) succeeded mostly in spite of the strictures of Islam, not because of them.

No surprise in that, for Christians. Again, as we know, Christianity has always had similar troubles with "new ideas". Thomas Aquinas was not universally admired by the rigidly dogmatic of his day. And probably best known today remain the "problems" that befell a certain fellow named Galileo. ("What, the earth is not the center of the universe? Recant!")

Continuing with our BBC paragraph:

5) "once the intellectual heart of Europe beat not in Paris, Rome or Athens, but in the great Muslim cities of Granada and Cordoba."

True, they were European in geography, as we today understand the term. And those "great Muslim cities" were great cities indeed. However, as this take on Moorish Spain notes:

. . . These Moors, who were religious fanatics, arrived in Spain in the year 711 and thus began a period of history which would shape Iberia differently than the rest of Europe as the land adapted to a new religion, language and culture. Hispania became a part of the caliph of Damascus which was the capital of the Muslim world . . .

So those cities themselves were largely extensions of North Africa. They were not European in the sense of Rome or Constantinople or Venice. By "Europe", then, what was meant was "Christian." Today, with Christianity considered rather quaint and even false, many "Christians" seem to fail to understand the distinction. It wasn't geographical so much as religious. In that era far more had to do with religion than it does today.

Rather than Granada, substitute Christian Constantinople or other smaller cities in Europe, falling to the Muslims, and ask yourself this: Do you think the BBC would report on THOSE the same way as they speak of Granada? Few today give much thought to what might have been lost, when Constantinople was taken violently by Muslim invaders:

. . . The excesses which followed, druing the early hours of the Ottoman victory, are described in detail by eyewitnesses. They were, and unfortunately still are, a common practice, almost a ritual, among all armies capturing enemy strongholds and territory after a prolonged and violent struggle. Thus, bands of soldiers began now looting. Doors were broken, private homes were looted, their tenants were massacred. Shops in the city markets were looted. Monasteries and Convents were broken in. Their tenants were killed, nuns were raped, many, to avoid dishonor, killed themselves. Killing, raping, looting, burning, enslaving, went on and on according to tradition. The troops had to satisfy themselves. The great doors of Saint Sophia were forced open, and crowds of angry soldiers came in and fell upon the unfortunate worshippers. Pillaging and killing in the holy place went on for hours. Similar was the fate of worshippers in most churches in the city. Everything that could be taken from the splendid buildings was taken by the new masters of the Imperial capital. Icons were destroyed, precious manuscripts were lost forever. Thousands of civilians were enslaved, soldiers fought over young boys and young women. Death and enslavement did not distinguish among social classes. Nobles and peasants were treated with equal ruthlessness. . .

Yep, one supposes that "many Christians believe" that conquest, in 1453, has, umm, been "written out" of the history books . . .

I am fully aware that Christians behaved beastly also. (Perhaps most infamously of all, when the Western Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they sacked the place, and put most of the city's Muslims and Jews to the sword.) That is not the point here. The main issue is how the BBC chose to promote this program, and what was said during the program itself -- essentially "Islamic" exceptionalism v. "Christian" ignorance.

And pause for a second and consider this. Forgiving him his dated language, Edward Gibbon wrote over 200 years ago (Vol 5, chapter 52) that when it came to "learning":

. . . the Moslems deprived themselves of the principal benefits of a familiar intercourse with Greece and Rome, the knowledge of antiquity, the purity of taste, the freedom of thought . . . The mythology of Homer would have provoked the abhorrence of those stern fanatics; they possessed in lazy ignorance the colonies of the Macedonians, and the provinces of Carthage and Rome: the heroes of Plutarch and Livy were buried in oblivion; and the history of the world before Mohammed was reduced to a short legend of the patriarchs, the prophets, and the Persian kings. . .

. . .the classics have much to teach, and I believe that the Orientals have much to learn; the temperate dignity of style, the graceful proportions of art, the forms of visible and intellectual beauty, the just delineation of character and passion, the rhetoric of narrative and argument, the regular fabric of epic and dramatic poetry.

And, continuing, he noted what somehow still speaks to us, troublingly, as if it were written by some sharp blogger, maybe a week ago:

The influence of truth and reason is of a less ambiguous complexion. The philosophers of Athens and Rome enjoyed the blessings, and asserted the rights, of civil and religious freedom. Their moral and political writings might have gradually unlocked the fetters of Eastern despotism, diffused a liberal spirit of inquiry and toleration, and encouraged the Arabian sages to suspect that their caliph was a tyrant, and their prophet an impostor. . .

Edward Gibbon: "neo-conservative"?

All kidding aide, what Gibbon meant was that he felt "Islamic" scholars did indeed come to grips with such works of ancient Greece and Rome. But unlike "Christians" who were willing to read those works and alter and even abandon their own doctrinaire faith in order to try to better understand a secular world, far fewer Muslims were willing to do so in a similar fashion.

Worryingly for us: If Gibbon was writing two hundred years ago like THAT about medieval Islam, where does that leave us, today? One can only shudder.

Terrific. Now, I'm really depressed.  ¶ by Robert, Tuesday, July 06, 2004