The Gray Monk

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March 19, 2004

The modern myth of Christian aggression.

There is a seriously biased view of the conflict between Christianity and Islam now being peddled by the media and those elements of academia and politics who choose to reinterpret history to promote their own vision of an "if only" future. This bias is, in part, what is also likely to lead to an increase in attacks on Western (Christian (?)) culture, and no amount of breast beating, finger pointing, or posturing by those who are behind this is likely to change the attitude and the politics now embedded in the minds of those in the "Islam is superior but victimised" camp.

It's worth just taking a moment to look at the history of the spread of Islam from the moment the Prophet kicked it off. Firstly, during the lifetime of Mohammed, many Christian Churches (More properly Basilicas [Should that be Basilicii?]) actually made provision for those of the Islamic faith to have a side room or chapel for their worship. Islam was recognised by the Christian leaders of the day as a new manifestation of the heretical Docetism vision of the Gospel. Mohammed himself actually described the Christians and Jews as "people of the Book" and urged that they were to be left to follow their own faiths. This began to change toward the end of his life as his more militant followers began, effectively, a conquest of the Arabian Peninsula and the lower fringes (Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, and modern Turkey) of the Byzantine Empire - in the name of Allah. At first they followed Mohammed's stricture regarding Christians and Jews, but then things began to change.

Christians became the target of forced conversions. Churches were forcibly taken over and converted to mosques, or simply destroyed, and congregations who refused to convert were killed. The situation became even worse in 632 AD when Mohammed died, never having set foot in Jerusalem. Seven years later Jerusalem had been taken from the Christian Byzantines and the Al Aqsa mosque was being constructed on the site of the Temple. At first, at least in Jerusalem, an uneasy truce was preserved, partly, possibly, because the Islamic army was still busy "liberating" and converting the provinces North of there. A Caliphate was established, and the first Caliph was a moderate, but he was replaced by a near lunatic who surrounded himself with fanatics. Less than fifty years after the death of Mohammed, the Christians were driven out of Jerusalem, killed, forced to convert, and their shrines destroyed. The great church of the Holy Sepulchre was the first to be destroyed, and it is thought that the tomb survived only because it remained buried in the rubble.

In North Africa, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya, Algeria, Morrocco were all overwhelmed in quick succession, and again Christians forced to convert, their churches plundered and seized, and their children sold as slaves or forced to serve in the various armies. This led them into Spain and Portugal, the invasion of Europe stopped in the Pyrenees by a last ditch defence by a handfull of French and Spanish knights. Such is the background to the spread of Islam, a religion spread by fire and the sword far more zealously than the Christian leaders had ever contemplated. It was this assault that led to the Crusades, and to the 700 years of bitter fighting in Spain to clear the "Moors" from Spanish and Portugese territory. Those who think it was all done in a bloodless campaign of love and persuasion are deluding themselves and seriously perverting reality.

The Christian response was unco-ordinated and fairly weak at first. The Western Branch of Christianity did not see the threat to the Eastern Church as affecting them until pilgrims to the Holy Land began to be murdered, robbed, seized as slaves, and generally abused. Then came a series of military campaigns we now call the Crusades. Like most such military ventures the motives were not as pure and holy as the leaders of the Church would have liked to suppose. Many were no more than brigand mobs and some turned pirate as soon as they saw opportunity. That said, Jerusalem was recaptured in 1099, and a shortlived Kingdom was established.

To the shame of all who took part in it, Jew and Muslim were attacked and massacred when Jerusalem fell to the Christian army. It is easy to sit here now and point a finger, but we lose sight of the fact that this campaign was a response to the ongoing murder and abuse of Christians, the destruction of Christian churches and shrines, and the denial of access to any non-Muslim. Passions must, after almost three hundred years, have been runnning pretty high, and would have been made worse by the sight of Chrsitian pilgrims who had been starved and beaten and imprisoned or enslaved as they stormed into the city.

After this inauspicious start we should not be surprised that the Crusaders were themselves ejected again within three hundred years, with the Knights of Malta being the last to leave in around 1529.

It is a fact that across the Middle East there are still very large numbers of Christians, significantly in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and the Lebanon. Egypt and North Africa also have significant Christian communities, but in almost all of them, Christians are barred from public office, barred from proselytising for converts, and allowed to worship only in their churches on sufferance. Much is made of the dwindling numbers of Christians resident in Palestine (Israel and the West Bank) but the truth of that is again they have been driven out by militant Islam. In the Sudan, the Christian South lives in poverty while the Muslim North takes all the oil revenues and plows nothing back to the Southern Region where it is drilled. Worse still, women and children from the South are seized and sold into slavery in the North.

One of the problems in trying to balance the events of history and to see what lessons can be learned from them is that since the Mongol invasions of the Indian Sub-continent, the Russian steppes, Eastern Europe, and the Middle and near East between 1250 and 1500, the heart of Islam has gone from being a flowering of art and science to an inward looking fundamentalism, while Christianity and Christian Europe experienced, possibly as a result of the destruction of so many institutions of church and state, a renaissance which has created the world we live in today.

Those who insist on seeing only the failures of fundamentalist Christianity are failing to see the whole picture which is very different from that they prefer to depict. Fundamentalism in any religous context is a dangerous force, fundamentalism in the politics of religion, and world conquest is an altogether lethal animal, one which must be stopped in its tracks immediately before it engulfs us all in anarchy and the collapse of civilisation.

I rarely agree with anything Mr Blair says, but I have to agree with him on the point that Al Qaeda will not be satisfied with anything less than the total destruction of Western Society. This is not a threat to any one nation, it is a threat to every nation, Muslim and Christian.

Ask yourself this question, why is it that Muslims are allowed the freedom of worship, access to organs of state, and all the rights and freedoms of the democracies of this world when their brother Christians are denied this in their "model" and "Godly" world?

I am a great believer in respect for another man's cultural activities, beliefs and "freedoms", but I insist that he shows the same respect for mine. I am perfectly content to live in a multicultural society, but it cannot be a state of "No Culture" or even of "Plural" culture; there will always be a bias towards one dominant culture. The fundamentalists of Islam and Al Qaeda will accept nothing less than their own vision of a world dominated by their version of Islam.

Would the Prophet approve? I doubt it very much indeed.

Posted by The Gray Monk at March 19, 2004 03:38 PM

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» Crusader? Victim? from Ministry of Minor Perfidy
By way of Dodgeblogium and Momma Bear at One Hand Clapping, we find this essay by the Gray Monk. The Monk is talking about the history underlying our current difficulties in the Middle East, and makes several valid points. Islam, the religion of pe... [Read More]

Tracked on March 22, 2004 10:21 PM

Comments

Posted by: Alan at March 19, 2004 05:36 PM

Posted by: matthew at March 20, 2004 03:56 AM