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Neighboring Faiths

Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today

The University of Chicago Press

Christendom and Islam

Given the great variety of Christian and Muslim cultures in the Middle Ages, it should not be surprising that relations between the two defy synthesis. The relationships to Islam of the many Christians who lived in Muslim lands, for example, were very different from those of Christians living in orthodox Christian Byzantium or Catholic Latin Europe. The word "Christendom" in this chapter's title therefore reflects a sharp but necessary abridgment of the topic, a focus only on those lands that came to think of themselves as "Christendom": that is, Catholic western Europe, from the Iberian to the Hungarian kingdoms. I will ask three interrelated questions. First, what did Christians know about Islam? Second, how did their thinking about Islam affect the formation of the concept of Christendom itself? And third, how did Islam experience Christendom? For throughout our period there were not only numerous Christian incursions into the lands of Islam (via pilgrimage, trade, crusade, and mission) but also many Muslims living within Christendom.

The first two questions, of course, are quite different from the third, for they have less to do with the study of historical contacts and relations between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages and more to do with the study of the role that Christian ideas about Islam play in the formation of Christian conceptualizations of the world and Christianity's place in it. The third question, on the other hand, is about historically specific encounters between Christians and Muslims. I will touch briefly upon the best-known forms of these encounters, namely trade and crusade. But I will give more space to the less well-known phenomenon of the practice of Islam in Christian lands. We tend to think of medieval Catholic Europe as a region largely devoid of Islam, "Muslimrein." Even when we acknowledge the presence of Islam in Christendom, we rarely pause to think about how the Christian context might affect the type of Islam practiced within it. But in fact throughout our period Europe contained Islamic communities whose experience of "being Muslim" was quite different from the experience of Muslims living in more heavily Islamic lands.

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My first question, "What did medieval Christians know about Islam and when did they learn it?" is often asked by scholars, but it is in at least one sense much less interesting than it seems. Christians knew most of what they felt they needed to know about Islam from the moment it began its muscular journey from the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-seventh century: Islam was not Christianity, and it was mighty in war. From a Christian point of view, the victories of these non-Christians could mean only two things. Either Christianity was an incorrect religion that should be abandoned in favor of Islam or Christians were indeed correct in their religious choice but were being punished by an angry God. The first option was taken by the countless Christians who chose to convert to the Islam of their conquerors. Christian writing about Islam, of course, was generally produced by those who opted for theodicy. Preaching on Christmas day 634 in the midst of the invasions, the patriarch of Jerusalem explained to his trembling flock that God had sent "the godless Saracens" as punishment for "countless sins and very serious faults." "Let us correct ourselves," he exhorted. "If we constrain ourselves ... we would see their final destruction."

The actual content of the Saracens' faith was irrelevant to Sophronios, who was interested only in elucidating the Muslims' role in Christian sacred history. Nor did penance's failure to stem the invasions incline him more seriously toward ethnography. As the Caliph 'Umar triumphantly entered Jerusalem, the patriarch is said to have proclaimed, "Verily, this is the abomination of desolation standing in a holy place, as has been spoken through the prophet Daniel." Maximus the Confessor, writing from Alexandria at much the same time, put it more bluntly. The invaders were "wild and untamed beasts who have merely the shape of human form." They were, he added, Jews and followers of the Antichrist. Muslims, in short, were either Christ's scourge for the improvement of Christendom or the shock troops of apocalypse, related one way or another to other enemies of God (such as Jews, idol worshipers and heretics). In either case, contemporaries saw no point in studying their religious beliefs or cultural practices except to condemn them or prove them wrong.

As a very general rule, this one holds true throughout the Middle Ages. From the seventh century to the end of the fifteenth, Christian understanding of Islam was predicated on two basic axioms. First, Islam was a false religion. Second, it was a carnal one, glorying in violence and sexuality. It is striking how early these positions crystallized. Already in 634, for example, a Christian author treated Islam's conquests as a sign of its falsity: "Do prophets come with swords and chariots?" (The same author would, of course, doubtless have interpreted Christian military victories as signs of that religion's truth.) Sexuality too rose immediately to the polemical forefront, with Christians asserting that the religion of Islam had been founded by Muhammad in order to help him satisfy his lusts and that the afterlife he promised to those who died following him was entirely carnal. Increasing familiarity with Islam did not alter the tone of these polemics but only sharpened it. John of Damascus (Yuhanna b. Mansur b. Sarjun), for example, was fluent in Arabic (in fact Greek was for him a second language) and an important financial administrator at the court of the Umayyad caliphs 'Abd al-Malik and Walid I (685–715). His obvious knowledge of Islam did not, however, alter the general lines of the polemic he wrote against it. The Ishmaelites, he wrote, were precursors of the Antichrist. Worshipers of Aphrodite, they were seduced by "a false prophet Mamed ... who, having casually been exposed to the Old and the New Testament, and supposedly encountered an Arian monk, formed a heresy of his own." According to John, Muhammad's motives were primarily sexual: hence he dwelt extensively on the Qur'anic treatment of polygamy and divorce, and on Muhammad's many wives.

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These are among the earliest Christian accounts of Islam. They predate our period and are from outside the borders of the region with which we are concerned. But they do not differ substantially from what Christians said about Islam centuries later and further west. All of these themes, from heretical monks to idol worship and rampant sexuality, can be found in Christian writings of every century from the eleventh to the sixteenth. (Even today, these tropes are often deployed in anti-Muslim polemics.) This is not to say that available knowledge about Islam in the West was unchanging. On the contrary, if twelfth-century vernacular poets (like the author of the Song of Roland) and Latinate clerics (like the canon lawyers of the Decretals) alike continued to present Muslims as worshipers of Apollo or Aphrodite, it was not for lack of sources that knew better. But even in the best-informed sources, new learning was only intended to give well-worn polemics a sharper edge. For instance, the author of the Liber denudationis, a work written in Arabic by an Iberian Christian in the twelfth century, knew a great deal about Islam and was clearly familiar with Arabic commentaries on the Qur'an. But he read these sources in order to solidify rather than challenge his prejudices, mining them for evidence to support the ancient topoi of Muslim materialism and hypersexuality. Thus he trumpeted with great glee a marginal and esoteric (not to say fantastic) Islamic tradition that in paradise each virtuous Muslim believer will be rewarded by the growth of his penis to such a length that he will need seventy Christians and seventy Jews to carry it before him.

Engagement with Islamic texts did not alter Christian understandings of Islam because—like Islamic engagement with Christian and Jewish texts or Jewish engagement with Islamic and Christian texts—this engagement was largely structured by polemic. Of course "largely" does not mean "completely," and there were exceptions in all three faiths. In the twelfth century, for example, the Jewish sage Maimonides insisted that "by no means are Muslims idolaters ... they recognize God's unity. Just because they falsely accuse us ... we cannot also lie by saying that they are idolaters.... If someone were to argue that the House [in Mecca] where they praise Him is an idolatrous temple that conceals inside the idol their ancestors worshipped [the Kaaba], [they should know that] those who bow to him now have only God in mind. The rabbis have already explained in Sanhedrin that if one bows in an idolatrous temple but believes it is a synagogue, his heart is dedicated to God."

Such exceptions are attractive to us as historians because they seem to suggest that with greater historical knowledge comes greater understanding and even tolerance. But it is just as important to realize that medieval efforts to study the religions of others were more often oriented toward providing more solid footings for the batteries of polemic. The marginal notes in medieval translations of the Qur'an, for example, told Christian readers exactly what they should be taking from it, as in this example: "Note that he everywhere promises a paradise of earthly delights, as other heresies had done before." Indeed these translations were undertaken not to increase knowledge of Islam but simply to reaffirm what every Christian already knew. Peter the Venerable of Cluny, the most powerful churchman of his age and the organizer in the mid-twelfth century of the first translation of the Qur'an and a number of other Arabic texts into Latin, put the point simply in his anti-Islamic manifesto: "I translated from Arabic into Latin the whole of this sect, along with the execrable life of its evil inventor, and exposed it to scrutiny of our people, so that it be known what a filthy and frivolous heresy it is."

Modern historians often stress the importance of subtle differences in medieval Christian characterizations of Islam and are very much on the lookout for evidence of real knowledge about Islamic practice, which they often valorize positively as a sign of cultural engagement and exchange. For the modern critic it makes a great deal of difference whether a medieval Christian author characterized the Muslims as idol worshipers, as Judaizers, or as monotheistic heretics. (In fact most medieval commentators on Islam presented it as a blend of paganism, Judaism, and Christian heresies such as Arianism.) But these subtle distinctions miss a basic point: the vast majority of medieval Christians (at least of those whose opinions have reached us) were certain that Islam was a false and dangerous belief, and, with very few exceptions, their study of it was aimed entirely at its condemnation and defeat.

This did not stop them from developing a body of knowledge, a "science of Islam" involving a great deal of gathering and translation of information. The science they developed remained standard into the early modern period and even transmitted a little of its ideological content to the "Orientalist" learning of French and British scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet the truth value of this science was measured by the extent to which it conformed to and reinforced Christian theology, not by its consonance with the historical and religious experience of Muslims. When a medieval chronicler like Otto of Friesing points out that Muslims revere Muhammad as a prophet, not as a god, he is trying to show how well read he is, not trying to educate his readers about Islam or soften their antipathy toward it. There is no real point, he and his contemporaries would have agreed, in worrying too much about details when writing the history of an error. As Gautier de Compiègne put it in his twelfth-century life of Muhammad, "One may safely speak ill of a man whose malignity transcends and surpasses whatever evil can be said about him."

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The sharp increase in the information about Islam available in Latin Europe across the period from 1000 to 1500 did not substantially redirect the polemical channels through which that knowledge flowed. One reason for this is the increasing importance of the work to which these channels were put over the course of the Middle Ages. Curiously enough, that importance is inversely proportional to the military threat posed by Islam to Latin Europe itself. Before the eleventh century, when the military reach of Islam was longest (the Muslims sacked Genoa as late as 993, for example, and captured Abbot Maiolus of Cluny in the Alps in 972), the polemic with Islam remained relatively unimportant in the core areas of western Europe. After the year 1000, at precisely the point that Latin Christian power began to extend itself once more into the Mediterranean, that polemic began to become ideologically central. We can see one important example of this centrality in the new role assigned to Islam in Christian thinking about violence and war. The same decades that saw the Christian conquest of southern Italy, Sardinia, and Sicily, and of large parts of Muslim al-Andalus, produced the proclamation of Pope Alexander II that, although the shedding of human blood is forbidden to the Christian, it was "just to fight" against the Saracens, "who persecute Christians and expel them from their towns and dwelling places." This is not a coincidence: in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, ideas about Islam played an important role in the creation of a muscular version of European Christianity, one that increasingly saw itself as united by a common destiny to conquer a wider world imagined as Muslim.

What we today call the crusades are, of course, the most famous example of this process. Though western warriors, merchants, and pilgrims had long been present in the eastern Mediterranean, the unruly progress of French, Norman, Occitan, German, and Italian crusaders on their long march to Jerusalem during the First Crusade in 1096 struck observers as something new. The Byzantine princess Anna Comnena described it as the northern forests suddenly emptying themselves into the Mediterranean. For Muslim rulers in the East, the entry of the crusading armies into their domains was indeed the first significant intrusion of western Europe into their political consciousness, and the shape of that first impression is interesting. Muslim rulers did not think of the first few crusades as part of a coherent and ongoing Christian attack on Islam: that consciousness took more than a century to emerge. But they did think of the heterogeneous crusading armies as a unified people, and this from the very beginning. Muslims would for centuries call all the members of these armies "firandj," "Franks," regardless of their actual provenance. The term came to signify "European" in Arabic, Chinese, and a good many other languages of Asia and its subcontinent well into the modern age. If the people Columbus famously mistook for "Indians" in 1492 had in fact been that, they would have doubtless called this Genoese sailing under the flag of Castile a "Frank."

Though entirely the product of too crude an ethnography, the Muslim homogenization of crusading Europe did parallel an explicit goal of the crusade's organizers themselves. For Pope Urban II, the first crusade was as much about establishing peace and unity in the West as it was about giving aid to Byzantium or conquering Jerusalem from Islam. Every report we have of his preaching stresses the same thing: war against Muslims was an antidote to civil war amongst Christians. The summary of Baldric of Bourgueil, archbishop of Dol, is representative:

Listen and understand. You have strapped on the belt of soldiery and strut around with pride in your eye. You butcher your brothers and create factions amongst yourselves. This, which scatters the sheepfold of the Redeemer, is not the army of Christ.... You must either cast off as quickly as possible the belt of this sort of soldiery or go forward boldly as soldiers of Christ, hurrying swiftly to defend the Eastern Church.... You may restrain your murderous hands from the destruction of your brothers, and on behalf of your relatives in the faith oppose yourself to the Gentiles.... You should shudder, brethren, you should shudder at raising a violent hand against Christians; it is less wicked to brandish your sword against Saracens. It is the only warfare that is righteous.

Robert the Monk assigned to Urban slightly different words but the same argument:

This land which you inhabit is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely enough food for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder one another, that you wage war, and that frequently you perish by mutual wounds.... Let therefore hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulcher, wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves.

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Excerpted from Neighboring Faiths by David Nirenberg. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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