The Undivided Past (6 page)

There is also ample evidence of peaceful coexistence between Christians and Muslims extending far beyond the official business of diplomatic alliances and international statecraft. In the immediate aftermath of the first phase of Arab conquests following the death of
Muhammad, cooperation with the “people of the book” was both essential and widespread, for otherwise such vast and recently acquired dominions could never have been effectively taxed, governed, and administered. Many centuries later, the Ottoman emperors were also famously accommodating to people of different religions: once Constantinople had been taken, the Orthodox Christian patriarch was restored; professionals, military leaders, and civil servants were recruited from among Christians and
Jews; and later Ottoman emperors were often themselves the result of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christian princesses.
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These interconnections in bureaucracy and government reflected the wider contacts that Muslims and Christians (and Jews) forged in business, commerce, and
trade across and around the Mediterranean.
Pace Pirenne, such activities never died out after the fall of the Western Empire, and the half millennium from 1000 CE witnessed an unprecedented mercantile flowering, as luxury products from the East such as silk
and spices were exchanged for raw materials from the West such as skins and wood. Such interactions were also more localized, in places often mistakenly seen as being solely areas of conflict: in the twelfth-century Levant, the inhabitants of the
Crusader states and the neighboring Muslim emirates energetically traded and not infrequently intermarried. Thus were people on both sides of the confessional divide “more than willing to consort with their opposite numbers, their religious allegiance less important than the business of life.”
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The result, according to the French historian
Fernand Braudel (with whom we shall be engaging at greater length in the next chapter), was a common experience shared by those many people who lived, traded, did business, and prospered across and around the Mediterranean, their myriad day-to-day contacts and encounters proclaiming a broader
human community, rather than the fundamental religious division, of that increasingly interconnected maritime world.
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Moreover, this burgeoning commerce in material goods was paralleled by a growing exchange of culture and ideas, which was equally indifferent to religious barriers, and which further contradicted and undermined the negative stereotypes of each other that Christians and Muslims created, namely of infidel enemies as being scarcely human and thus incapable of any sophisticated interest in the higher concerns of life. During the eighth and ninth centuries, most of the greatest authors of ancient
Greece, including
Aristotle,
Plato, Euclid, Galen, and Hippocrates, were translated into Arabic. But it was not until the eleventh century that these Arab texts were in turn translated into Latin, in which form medieval European scholars first encountered many of the greatest works on medicine, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and philosophy that had been produced by their classical forebears. Here was cultural borrowing and intermingling across the boundaries of religion on a spectacular scale, for it transformed Europe’s intellectual landscape and made possible its twelfth-century Renaissance.
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Even at times of heightened confrontation between Christians and Muslims, these transreligious encounters and cultural interactions continued as a feature of life in many parts of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. They were often associated
with particular places or regimes, characterized by what William Dalrymple has called “a kind of pluralist equilibrium,” which espoused a “culture of tolerance” whereby people of different faiths coexisted and commingled, and to which the epithet “convivencia” has been attached.
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During the ninth century, the Abbasid rulers of Baghdad tolerated Christians and
Jews, and presided over a golden age of learning, which drew on the mathematics, philosophy, medicine, theology, and literature of ancient
Greece, Persia, and
India. At the other end of the Mediterranean, the Umayyad caliphate of Córdoba witnessed an equally remarkable cultural flowering, which found its most significant expression in the city’s libraries, then the greatest in Europe, housing many of the recent Arab translations of ancient Greek texts.
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In twelfth-century Sicily, under the Norman rulers who had recently conquered the island, Muslim scholars were retained at court, and in the city of Palermo Arabs lived in relative amity and harmony with Christians and Jews. It was an arrangement mirrored and even exceeded, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, in cosmopolitan cities and multifaith communities of the Ottoman Empire, such as Alexandria, Aleppo, Jaffa, Beirut, Smyrna, and Salonika.
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In the same way, many medieval and early modern Italian cities maintained and expanded a profitable commerce with Muslim traders and merchants, which resulted in (for instance) a profound Islamic influence on Venetian architecture, painting, town planning, jewelry, and speech; this helps explain how and why across the whole of
Italy there was a serious regard for and knowledge of many aspects of Arabic learning.
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After the Ottoman Turks captured
Constantinople in 1453, these contacts widened and deepened far beyond Italy. In 1536,
King Francis I of France negotiated a mercantile and military
treaty with the sultan
Suleyman the Magnificent, giving the French direct access to trade with Ottoman ports, and half a century later
Queen Elizabeth of England would sign similar agreements with Suleyman’s successor. And the enthusiasm went both ways: from the late fifteenth century onward, Ottoman sultans were eager to establish links with the great courts of western Europe, concerning such matters as artistic patronage and trade agreements (in addition to political
alliances). In 1479 the
sultan Mehmed II was painted by the Venetian artist
Gentile Bellini, and
Suleyman would later welcome to his court printmakers, artists, and jewelers from across Europe. The result was that Ottoman sultans were increasingly portrayed in the “Western” style, and at the same time, highborn Muslim travelers visited Europe in increasing numbers, where they were fascinated by Western science, literature, music, politics, and opera.
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Across the centuries, and across the Mediterranean, what have been termed the “practices of Christian-Muslim complicity” took place at many levels and in many modes, encompassing rulers and aristocrats, clerics and men of affairs, scholars and translators, merchants and traders, many of whom journeyed far and wide making connections and doing business.
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One such sixteenth-century wanderer was
Leo Africanus, who moved easily across the regions and the religions of the Christian-Islamic Mediterranean. Born in Granada of Muslim parents during the late 1480s or early 1490s, he fled to Morocco when the last Islamic outpost in Spain fell to the Christians; he subsequently journeyed across North Africa to the
Middle East; he was later captured by pirates before escaping and settling in
Rome, where he converted to Christianity and translated the
Koran into Latin; and he may thereafter have returned to Africa and to Islam.
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There is much concerning Leo’s life that is unknown (including even his full name), but he moved across the supposedly impermeable boundaries of religious identity with remarkable ease and frequency: from Spain to Morocco, from Europe to Africa, and from Christianity to Islam—and back again. And he was not alone: as it was before and would continue being, the early-sixteenth-century Mediterranean was continually being navigated by merchants, embassies, pirate ships, travelers, scholars, and refugees, to whom it was more a highway than a barrier. In certain quarters and at specific times, there may have been intensified consciousness of religious and cultural differences, but it was balanced by increasing migration, trade, travel, and contact.
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None of this is to deny that the
Battle of Poitiers, or the
Crusades, or the sieges of Vienna took place, or that hatred and intolerance, demonization and negative
stereotyping, violence and
conflict were among the ways in which Christians and Muslims interacted across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries, or that convivencia was often “fraught and fragile,” and that cultures of intolerance often lay just below the surface of “cultures of tolerance.” But focusing only on such conflicts is rather like ignoring every other page while reading a book: the resulting account isn’t just incomplete, but is misleading to the point of incoherence.
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For while Christianity and Islam often clashed and collided, they also coexisted, conversed, and collaborated across these supposedly impermeable barriers and impenetrable boundaries of confessional identity, and they did so in many places, in many forms, and in a long sequence of interaction and fusion.
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According to the historian
Richard Fletcher, having observed the full range and complexity of the Christian-Islam interconnection and interaction during this period, “wherever and whenever we direct our gaze, we find a diversity in the type or the temperature of the encounter.”
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And it was such diversity of behavior on the part of Christians and Muslims, as they encountered and engaged with each other at levels that were more usually individual (and accommodating) than collective (and conflictual), and on many matters that often had little if anything to do with faith, that constantly counsels against depicting their relations as a perpetual Manichean confrontation, in which religious identities trump and transcend all others.

Such, at least, are the measured and evenhanded conclusions reached by the most careful scholars and thoughtful historians who in the aftermath of the events of
September 11, 2001, have studied the many and varied encounters between Christianity and Islam, for they have roundly rejected the historical claim of unbroken animosity and perpetual conflict between these two religious faiths extending all the way back to the
Crusades (and before) and all the way up to the present (and beyond).
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On the contrary, the evidence is clear that Christians and Muslims have often lived together constructively and amicably, that they have taught one another much about how to live, and that they have learned a great deal from each other. When looked at as a whole, the “Islamo-Christian world” has much more in
common and binding it together than it has forcing it apart.
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Throughout history, its inhabitants have traded, studied, negotiated, and eaten, imbibed, and loved across what have often been the porous frontiers of their religious differences. According to the global historian
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “a true history of Muslim-Christian relations would encourage tolerance and convince us that collaboration is normal.… For most of history, in most places, Muslims and Christians have been at peace and have lived in mutual respect.”
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That may be overstating the case, but not by much, and it remains a case that needs making (and a perspective that deserves expression) ever more insistently and repeatedly in our post-9/11 world.

One of the prime reasons why these interfaith relations between paganism and Christianity, and Christianity and Islam, were so complex, ambiguous, localized, nuanced, and individualized was the invariable tendency of these ostensibly
monolithic religious
beliefs and confessional identities to fracture and fragment, and this was something of which
Gibbon was very well aware.
The Decline and Fall
is full of discussion (and on occasion derision) of the fissures and the schisms that characterized the Christian church almost from the very beginning, and although Gibbon was less well informed about this matter in the case of Islam, one of his original and lasting insights was to suggest that conflicts within the
same
religious identity were in practice more bitter and more divisive than confrontations between
different
creeds: “all that history has recorded,” he noted, was “that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissentions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other, than they have experienced from the zeal of infidels.”
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Using a rather different mode of approach and analysis,
Sigmund Freud would subsequently make the same point, when he explored what he termed “the narcissism of minor differences”: “it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well,” he argued, “who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other.”
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The major consequences of such “minor differences” generating
“constant feuds” within ostensibly unified communities were devastatingly displayed between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries, even as the encounters between “
Christianity” and “
Islam” continued. Across this hundred-year span, the Protestant Reformation and its rejoinder, the Catholic or Counter-Reformation, led religious persecution and conflict on a scale Europe had not witnessed before and would not since. Switzerland was the site of the first such faith confrontations, between 1529 and 1531. The next occurred in the
Holy
Roman Empire, where the
Schmalkaldic War erupted in 1546, to be followed by the so-called
Princes’ War, which would not end definitively until 1555 with the
Peace of Augsburg. But these were mere skirmishes compared to the French
Wars of Religion and the Dutch Revolt against Catholic
Spain, which took place during the second half of the sixteenth century, and these would be followed by the
British Civil Wars, the Polish Deluge, and the
Thirty Years War during the first half of the seventeenth.
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The result was widespread material devastation, economic ruin, and a terrible loss of life. From the time of
Martin Luther’s first protests in 1517 until the negotiation of the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648, Europe was increasingly a divided continent: torn between those who espoused Catholic Christianity and those who embraced the Protestant alternative, the two sides seemingly locked in what
Thomas Hobbes would call “the war of every man against every man.”
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