The following lecture was recorded during Providence’s 2017 Christianity and National Security Conference. Paul Marshall discusses the historical relationships between Christendom and ‘Islamdom,’ the cultural and civilizational areas that have been associated with Christianity and Islam throughout time. The following is a transcript of the lecture.
Some of you know I like to use maps and then, with the laser pointer, point to things and say, “See this here.” Now, I’ll have to say see the second diagram. Look down on the right. But anyway, could I have one of those? I don’t have one. I want to look at the relation between Islam and Christianity, or probably, if we could use these terms, the relation between Christendom and—Islamdom. These are not the religions per se, but cultural and civilizational areas shaped by them.
Two background themes here. I look at that history to see what it reveals about current Islamist radicalism and what we might expect in terms of that. Two things I want to encourage you to do in terms of this presentation. As Christians, like most of us are Christians, we take our own beliefs seriously, at least I hope and pray we do. That means we should take other people’s religions and beliefs seriously.
There’s a great tendency in the modern age, among journalists, diplomats, analysts, and others, to always treat religion as superstructural when there’s an issue, when there’s a conflict, when things are going on which seem to be religiously—well, we need to look beneath it, find the real reason. Religion is always treated as an epiphenomenon. Sometimes it may be, of course, but we have a systematic attempt simply not to take it seriously. A lot of people die because we don’t take it seriously.
The other thing we need to take seriously is history and geography. That’s two things. Americans, obviously not all Americans, but for many Americans, there’s a tendency to dismiss history. Not only not to know it, but to dismiss it. Very few cultures would have the American expression “that’s history,” meaning it’s not important. For most people in the world, that would say, “That’s history,” which means it damn well is important. It’s central. It tells how we got here, which means it tells us where we are.
So you would find, from Saddam Hussein or referring to George W. Bush, “Hello, GW.” What would that mean to us? Nothing. If you’re an Iraqi, would the leader of the Mongols who destroyed Baghdad in 1258 and killed more people in 48 hours than the Crusaders had done in two centuries? Or later, bin Laden or what’s going on about Al Andalus, Andalusia, Spain, or al-Baghdadi again referring always to the Caliphate which was something called journalists had used to dismiss.
So full of historical reference which they assume their target audience—they would get the reference and often we don’t. That’s something we, as much as we can, we should change. Ambrose Bierce wrote a piercingly sarcastic book, many of them actually, one is called The Devil’s Dictionary, which I recommend. It was written about 120 years ago. It has various definitions of terms, such as politics: “the use of public resources for private benefit” and under war, The Devil’s Dictionary says, “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” I equate it a little too true to be entirely funny.
I think the same is also with history. I want to go through these maps. If you look at page one, top left, we will go across, down, diagonal down, and usual PowerPoint six. The one with the purple—you will see on this map, you’re all young so I’m assuming we can all read this. I actually can’t, but there are three shades of purple. The dark purple, centered in Arabia, centered around Mecca and Medina. This is the area ruled by the Muslims under Muhammad at the time of Muhammad’s death. I usually put it 632.
A thing to note about Muhammad—he was successful. He died a little young. He founded a new religion, he founded a new state, and ruled it. He was a general, he led armies in battle and won most of them. He is successful in a worldly sense, in a way that, for example, Jesus was not. After he died, most religions often collapse at that point. Islam continued. So you have the medium purple. That’s 661. At less than 30 years after Muhammad’s death, we’re looking at Arab Muslim armies on the Atlantic and moving through Persia, and also right up to the Caspian Sea.
Go to 750, we could even do 730 into Spain and France. Then moving that eastern part there is Western China, the Talaas River, and the big river on the right there is the Indus. That’s in India. So 100 years after Muhammad’s death, Muslim armies are in France, 200 miles south of Paris, and in India and China, and what is now Russia, and control a huge swathe in between. Whatever else can be said about this, it’s quite a stunning achievement.
We say, “Well, this was an imperial expansion.” It was. But if the Byzantines could have done it, they would. It wasn’t like everybody else in the world was a pacifist and these people went around invading other people. Empires invade the places they can. So you have this mammoth expansion from the beginning. It continues. Moving to the right on the map, you’ll see a green line. Those with young and sharp eyes will see a green line going across the Mediterranean, then moving down in Sub-Saharan Africa, then way down the East Coast of Africa to what is now Mozambique.
Then up into India, moving down the Indus Valley into what is now Eastern India and Bangladesh, moving north into what is Central Asia and Turkey. This is the situation in 1100. A continuing expansion. Move one down to the left. A very similar-looking map. We’re looking at 1500. Not too much movement in Africa, but in Asia, now moving down through what is now Malaysia into Indonesia. The map is wrong. It should include the Southern Philippines. But then expansion northwards into Central Asia and what is now Russia.
With the collapse of Constantinople and Constantinople moving into the Balkans. So taking Romania, Hungary, what is the Czech Republic, Austria. Taking over those areas, moving to the map next to it, the one with the red. A simplified version. The red area is places at one time ruled by Muslims. You’ll note that includes, over in land area, over half of Europe. You have this area. So we see from, roughly 632 to almost a thousand years later, there were setbacks along the way, but almost continuous expansion.
And that red area is the center of the world. It’s where the three major continents meet. At this point, the Americas are irrelevant. Militarily more powerful, politically more powerful in many ways, culturally more powerful in terms of philosophy, literature, other things, in terms of wealth, access to foodstuffs. Europe is cold, wet, not particularly powerful. India was controlled largely by Muslims. China kept within its borders. This was the dominant civilization.
If you were a Muslim who believed your religion was the final religion, the final revelation, and would bring success in God’s rule over the earth, then mundane history was congruent with sacred history. Everything would tell you that yours is the true religion, the real religion, the final religion. Why? Because we have brought all of this success. A thousand years of stunning success. But then things change, as we now know.
Things don’t just change on a dime. They take time. You don’t just win everything and start losing everything. You start to lose a few more battles than you used to, then you start losing more than you win, and then you’re losing a lot, and you’re being pushed back. There was this slow turning point over centuries. But if you wanted a symbolic date to mark the high-water mark of much of the Muslim world, the date would be September 11, 1683.
This is when Ottoman armies were camped outside Vienna. On the 12th, they were defeated. They’d lost battles before. They were driven back from Vienna earlier in 1525, but this was a bad defeat, followed by other defeats and then a full-scale retreat. Not a withdrawal. They were chased. After a thousand years of relatively stunning success, the Muslim world started to suffer crippling defeat at the hands of Christendom or the Christians.
We tend to categorize these things in terms of countries. French, British, whatever, discussions at the time. For a group like ISIS or al-Qaeda, those things are irrelevant. It’s Muslims versus infidels, versus Crusaders. They use religious language to describe these things. The response from Christendom can be described broadly, huge generalization, in three waves. The first is after the failure of the siege of Vienna.
These overlap in time, over a period of centuries, the push back of the Ottomans out of Europe, majority Christian territories. The bottom right map of the Ottoman Empire, light brown, is the extent of the Ottoman Empire run out of Istanbul in 1683. The year I’ve just alluded to. Look, and in 1914, it’s the dark brown. Seventy-five percent of the territory gone. By 1918, it’s pretty well disappeared. You have the retaking of Serbia, Romania, Hungary, Austria, large chunks of Russia, the Crimea, what is now Ukraine, and moving on into Central Asia. There’s this push out of Europe, including European Russia.
The second phase, if we turn over again, top left from page 2, same map, is what we usually call colonialism or European maritime imperialism. The Muslim world had this huge chunk from the Atlantic to China. If you wanted to trade with China and other places, it’s quite difficult. People traded with each other. They weren’t just making war and invading each other. But it’s quite expensive to buy something in China and hold it all the way over through a dozen principalities. Each would levy taxes and other things on it. So, you wanted to get around the Muslim world, also seen as something of an enemy.
The Portuguese went one way. They went down and around Africa and sailed east. Columbus went the other way. They were trying to sail around the Islamic world. In both cases, they began trading but also began fighting and taking over lands. The Portuguese were taking over areas in West and East Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian Peninsula, took over Aden. An expedition was mounted to invade Mecca, in 1509, by the Portuguese. But what you mainly had, trade, small levels but growing through the centuries, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the takeover of most of Africa, of the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia. The Dutch took Indonesia, the Spanish had the Philippines, the British had Malaysia, what is now Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and so forth. And then also, a carve-up of Britain, France, Spain, in terms of West Africa and elsewhere.
This colonial expansion: who are they taking over from when the British conquered India in the south or Hindu rulers who were displaced? But from most of India, the powerful rulers were Muslims. Similarly in Pakistan or Bangladesh, similarly in Malaysia, similarly in Indonesia, similarly in West Africa and East Africa. You saw how that expansion went down the side in East Africa. You have Christian infidel powers taking over control from Muslims throughout the world in Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia. They push back in Christian majority areas, then take over places largely under Muslim control, all those peripheral areas. Those are the first two phases. The third is a move into the heartland of Islam, the Arabic-speaking world, the greater Middle East.
Look at the map with the colors on the right. This is a layout of the form of ruled in the Middle East in 1920. The French had invaded North Africa, Morocco, Algeria, the Italians had gone over to Libya, the French had invaded Egypt in 1798, the British took it over from there. A lot of the Middle East was being carved up by the European powers. Because the Ottomans were allied with the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians in the First World War, they were defeated. The remnants of their empire in the Middle East were given over: the British got what is now the Palestinian areas, Israel, Jordan; the French got Syria and Lebanon; the British also got Iraq as some mandates, territories to govern until they could be self-governing. The only areas with Muslim populations actually being run by Muslims were Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Afghanistan is remote. Turkey was being run by Ataturk, who made French secularism look positively religion-friendly. He abolished the headgear, got rid of Arabic script. Women could not wear a head covering in government buildings and other places. Very strong secular push. He was nominally a Muslim, but this didn’t look like Muslim rule. Iran was similar. The only substantial territory with a Muslim population being run by Muslims was the Arabian Peninsula.
Meanwhile, Ataturk abolishes the Caliphate, the nominal ruler of all Muslims in the world from the Philippines to the Atlantic. The Caliph had never really run this thing, but there was always the idea that there was somehow a Muslim ruler, a commonality of beliefs. Ataturk gets rid of this. This is the low point in Muslim rule. Let me quote Osama bin Laden. He looks back on this in a video on November 3, 2001, his first major broadcast after September 11. He said: “Following World War One, which ended more than 83 years ago, the whole Islamic world fell under the crusader banner under the British, French, and Italian governments. They divided the whole world.” This remark is generally accurate.
The Muslim world has come from that red map, second page, middle left, of those areas being ruled, to a little fragment in the Middle East, the only self-governing Muslim area in the Arabian Peninsula. The rest was substantially under the control of infidels. Things changed even in Arabia in the First Gulf War, when American soldiers appeared. “Hello, we’re from America, we’re here to help.” Bin Laden called this “the latest and greatest aggression.” Infidels walk on the land where Mohammed was born, where the Quran was revealed. The only place in the Muslim world where this hadn’t happened. Yet now they’re here. Look at this history: a thousand years of success, 300 years of grinding failure. The walls closing in. They’re taking over everything. If American troops: “We came in there. The Saudis asked us to, because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Saudi was next, so they helped.”
If you’re looking at long-term historical patterns, you don’t have to be paranoid to say, look where they are now. Understanding this history is important in understanding many Muslims, not just radicals, not just terrorists, but this cycle of a thousand years of success, 300 years of failure—why What Went Wrong, the title of Bernard Lewis’s book—what went wrong? Many answers are offered, but to simplify, there are two major ones. One is we’ve been left behind, we’ve been superstitious, we haven’t thought, we haven’t learned from others, we thought we knew everything, and we were right and final, and slowly we’ve fallen behind in terms of science, governance, democracy, human rights, literature. We need to learn from others and be open to the modern world.
The other answer is the diametrically opposite. When we were good Muslims, when we were strict, when we followed Islamic Sharia law, then we were successful. When we turned away from it and started chasing after Western or other ideas, like the emancipation of women, human rights, democracy, or any of these infidel ideas, then we failed and were crushed. What do we do? We need to get back to what we were. At heart, many of these movements—terrorist per se, but groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizmet Tahrir, and others—believe we need to get back to a pure Islam. It’s a revivalist movement within the Muslim world, which can have strict elements and violent elements because many Muslims refuse to be revived in the way groups like ISIS want. They might want other ways, so coercion is used on Muslims in the Middle East to get them with the program. In the case of Al-Qaeda, the analysis is our coercion isn’t working because places like Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia are backed by America, the infidels, the far enemy. So we must attack America to break its alliances with these powers in the Middle East. When that is done, we can take over the places we want in the Middle East and renew Islam.
For ISIS, that’s too slow, too cumbersome. They say, “We lost the Caliphate.” The solution is to regain the Caliphate. For Baghdadi, who we now believe is still alive, the solution is to go straight to the Islamic State. He says: “The Islamic State, after they conquered areas in northern Syria, northern Iraq, by God’s bounty, we possess all the constituent elements of the Caliphate which Muslims have been sinning for failure to establish. There is no impediment or legal excuse to absolve the Islamic State of the sin of its delay. There’s no excuse for not establishing the Caliphate, the Islamic State.” So you go straight to it, and the idea is we control this territory, call believing Muslims to join us and fight, and continue to expand. Compare that to the red map on the right. They’re substantially the same except for some reason they leave out Southeast Asia and India, but the goal is restoration. They want to restore that red area.
These ideas underpin a lot of terrorism and non-terrorist forms of Islam. To understand them, it has to be against this history, a religious history, a religious grievance. There are many local Muslim terrorists who fight about Kashmir or Israel. But global movements have a global strategy, and they fight in all these areas. In August, terrorist attacks occurred in Barcelona, Paris, and elsewhere. But remember, in August, in Finland, Burkina Faso, and other areas. This is very global. ISIS controls a substantial city in the southern Philippines, which they have taken over, and the Philippine military has not dislodged them. This is global.
We must be careful about projecting Western categories of foreign policy on what is happening. In conclusion, as Christians, we need to take our own beliefs seriously. That also means we need to take Muslims, of all kinds, but particularly radical Muslims, seriously and not project our categories upon them. Lastly, we need to take history seriously. Most Americans are unaware of this history. These three exercises I commend to you as students and professors. I will now be open for questions. Thank you.
