How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (50 page)

The many claims that the Arabs achieved far more sophisticated medicine than had previous cultures are as mistaken as those regarding “Arabic” numerals.
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“Muslim” or “Arab” medicine was in fact Nestorian Christian medicine; even the leading Muslim and Arab physicians were trained at the enormous Nestorian medical center at Nisibus in Syria. Nisibus offered not only medicine but the full range of advanced education, as did the other institutions of learning the Nestorians established, including the one at Jundishapur in Persia, which the distinguished historian of science George Sarton called “the greatest intellectual center of the time.”
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The scholar Mark Dickens pointed out that the Nestorians “soon acquired a reputation with the Arabs for being excellent accountants, architects, astrologers, bankers, doctors, merchants, philosophers, scientists, scribes and teachers. In fact, prior to the ninth century, nearly all the learned scholars in the [Islamic area] were Nestorian Christians.”
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It was primarily the Nestorian Christian Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-‘Ibadi (known in Latin as Johannitius) who “collected, translated, revised, and supervised the translation of Greek manuscripts, especially those of Hippocrates, Galen, Plato, and Aristotle into Syriac and Arabic,” in the words of William W. Brickman.
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As late as the middle of the eleventh century, the Muslim writer Nasir-i Khrusau reported, “Truly, the scribes here in Syria, as is the case of Egypt, are all Christians … [and] it is most usual for the physicians … to be Christians.”
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In Palestine under Muslim rule, according to the monumental history by Moshe Gil, “the Christians had immense influence and positions of power, chiefly because of the gifted administrators among them who occupied government posts despite the ban in Muslim law against employing Christians [in such positions] or who were part of the intelligentsia of the period owing to the fact that
they were outstanding scientists, mathematicians, physicians and so on.”
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In the late tenth century Abd al-Jabbar also acknowledged the prominence of Christian officials, writing that “kings in Egypt, al-Sham, Iraq, Jazīra, Fāris, and in all their surroundings, rely on Christians in matters of officialdom, the central administration and the handling of funds.”
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Even many of the most partisan Muslim historians, including the famous English convert to Islam and translator of the Qur’an Marmaduke Pickthall,
⁵⁷
agree that sophisticated Muslim culture originated with the conquered populations. What has largely been ignored is that that culture could not keep up with the West because so-called Muslim culture was largely an illusion, resting on a complex mix of dhimmi cultures. As soon the dhimmis were repressed as heretical, that culture would be lost. Hence, when Muslims stamped out nearly all religious nonconformity in the fourteenth century, Muslim backwardness came to the fore.

Islam and Aristotle

Underlying the belief that the Muslims were more learned and sophisticated than the Christian West is the presumption that a society not steeped in Greek philosophy and literature was a society in the dark. Thus, for the past several centuries, many Western writers have stressed the Arab possession of the classical writers, assuming that by having access to the wisdom of the ancients, Islam was the much superior culture. True enough, because of the persistence of Byzantine/Greek culture in most of the conquered Arab societies, the most educated Arabs did have greater knowledge of the work of classical Greek authors such as Plato and Aristotle (although medieval European scholars were more familiar with these works than has been claimed). What is less known is that access to Greek scholarship had a
negative
impact on Arab scholarship.

The works of Plato and Aristotle reached the Arabs via translations into Syrian late in the seventh century and then into Arabic by Syrians in, perhaps, the ninth century. But rather than treating these works as
attempts
by Greek scholars to answer various questions, Muslim intellectuals read them the same way they read the Qur’an—as settled truths to be understood without question or contradiction. The respected Muslim historian Caesar Farah explained: “In Aristotle Muslim thinkers found the great guide; to them he became the ‘first teacher.’ Having accepted this
a priori
, Muslim philosophy as it evolved in subsequent centuries merely chose to
continue
in this vein and to enlarge on Aristotle rather
than to innovate.”
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As such, the twelfth-century scholar Averroes and his followers imposed the position that Aristotle’s physics was complete and infallible, and if actual observations were inconsistent with one of Aristotle’s teachings, those observations were either in error or an illusion.
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Such attitudes prevented Islam from taking up where the Greeks had left off in their pursuit of knowledge. In contrast, knowledge of Aristotle’s work prompted experimentation and discovery among the early Christian Scholastics. Then as now, a scholar enhanced his reputation by disagreeing with received knowledge, by innovation and correction. That motivated Scholastics to find fault with the Greeks—and there were many faults to be found.
⁶⁰

The “Tolerant” Muslims

A common refrain of both scholarly and popular histories is that, in contrast with Christian brutality against Jews and heretics, Islam showed remarkable tolerance for conquered people, treated them with respect, and allowed them to pursue their faiths without interference. Thus, Moorish Spain has been hailed as “a shining example of civilized enlightenment”
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and the “ornament of the world.”
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The truth about life under Muslim rule is quite different.

It is true that the Qur’an forbids forced conversions. But that recedes to an empty legalism given that many subject peoples often were allowed to “choose” conversion as an alternative to death or enslavement. That was the usual choice presented to pagans; Jews and Christians often faced that option, or one only somewhat less extreme.
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In principle, as “People of the Book,” Jews and Christians were supposed to be tolerated and permitted to follow their faiths. But only under quite repressive conditions: death was (and remains) the fate of any Muslim who converted to either faith. No new churches or synagogues could be built. Jews and Christians were prohibited from praying or reading their scriptures aloud, even in their homes or in churches or synagogues, lest Muslims should accidentally hear them. And as Marshall Hodgson pointed out, Muslim authorities went to great lengths to humiliate and punish Jews and Christians who refused to convert to Islam. It was official policy that dhimmis should “feel inferior and to know ‘their place,’” Hodgson wrote. Muslim authorities imposed restrictive laws—“that Christians and Jews should not ride horses, for instance, but at most mules, or even that they should wear certain marks of their religion on their costume when among
Muslims.”
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In some places non-Muslims were prohibited from wearing clothing similar to that of Muslims and from being armed.
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In addition, non-Muslims were invariably severely taxed compared with Muslims.
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And these were the
normal
circumstances of Jewish and Christian subjects of Muslim states. Conditions often were far worse.

Stamping Out the “Unbelievers”

The final destruction of the dhimmi communities of eastern Christians occurred in the fourteenth century.
⁶⁷
Although the historical record lacks detail, apparently Muslim mobs in Cairo began destroying Coptic churches in 1321. According to the historian Donald P. Little, these anti-Christian riots “were carefully orchestrated throughout Egypt,” destroying large numbers of churches and monasteries.
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Although the ruling authorities eventually put down the mobs, small-scale anti-Christian attacks, arson, looting, and murder became chronic. In 1354 once again mobs “ran amok, destroying churches … and attacking Christians and Jews in the streets, and throwing them into bonfires if they refused to pronounce the
shadādatayn
” (to acknowledge Allah as the one true God).
⁶⁹
Soon, according to the Egyptian historian Al-Maqrizi (1364–1442), in “all the provinces of Egypt, both north and south, no church remained that had not been razed.… Thus did Islam spread among the Christians of Egypt.”
⁷⁰

The massacres of Christians and the destruction of churches and monasteries were not limited to Egypt. Having converted to Islam, the Mongol rulers of Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Syria took even more draconian measures. When Ghāzān took the Mongol throne of Iran in 1295, in pursuit of increased public support he converted to Islam (he had been raised a Christian and then became a Buddhist) and then, yielding to popular pressure, he began to persecute Christians.
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According to an account written by the Nestorian patriarch Mar Yaballaha III (1245–1317), in keeping with his aim of forcing all Christians and Jews to become Muslims, Ghāzān issued this edict:

The churches shall be uprooted, and the altars overturned, and the celebrations of the Eucharist shall cease, and the hymns of praise, and the sounds of calls to prayer shall be abolished; and the heads of the Christians, and the heads of the congregations of the Jews, and the great men among them, shall be killed.
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Within a year Ghāzān changed his mind and attempted to end the persecutions of Christians, but by now the mobs were out of control. It was widely accepted that (in the words of the historian of Islam Laurence E. Browne) “everyone who did not abandon Christianity and deny his faith should be killed.”
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Meanwhile, in an effort to force Christians into Islam, Mongol Armenia forbade church services and imposed a crushing tax. In addition, local authorities were ordered to seize each Christian man, pluck out his beard, and tattoo a black mark on his shoulder. Still, few Christians defected, leading the Khan to order that all Christian men be castrated and have one eye put out—which caused many deaths in this era before antibiotics but did lead to many conversions.
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Similar atrocities occurred all across the East and North Africa.
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In 1310 there was a massacre in Mesopotamia.
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In 1317 the Syrian city of Amid was the scene of an anti-Christian attack. The bishop was beaten to death; the churches were burned; the Christian men were all murdered; and twelve thousand women and children were sold into slavery.
⁷⁷

Then came Tamerlane.

A Muslim of Turkic-Mongol origins, Tamerlane (also known as Timur) was born near the Persian city of Samarkand in 1336. Seeking to restore the Mongol Empire, he conquered vast areas of Asia. Again and again Tamerlane perpetrated huge massacres—perhaps as many as two hundred thousand captives (men, women, and children) were slaughtered during his march on Delhi
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—and had towering pyramids built from the heads of his victims. So barbaric were his conquests that he earned the sobriquet the “Scourge of God,” as Christopher Marlowe put it in his great play (1587).
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And while Tamerlane killed huge numbers of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, he virtually wiped out the Christians and Jews in the East. In Georgia alone, Samuel H. Moffett reported, Tamerlane “destroyed seven hundred large villages, wiped out the inhabitants, and reduced all the Christian churches … to rubble.”
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Any Christian communities that survived Tamerlane were destroyed by his grandson, Ulugh Beg.
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Christians were the prominent targets of these attacks both because they were the most numerous dhimmi population and because anti-Christian sentiments were fueled by conflict with the West. But all non-believers were persecuted in this era, including Jews. The first massacre of Jews for
being
Jews was committed by Muhammad, who forced members
of the last Jewish community in Mecca to dig a trench, along which from six to nine hundred Jewish men were lined up, beheaded, and pushed in.
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The Jewish women and children were sold into slavery, and Muhammad took one of the Jewish women as a concubine.
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Umar, Muhammad’s second successor, expelled all Jews from the Arabian Peninsula.

As for “enlightened” Moorish Spain, about four thousand Jews were murdered there in 1066 and several thousand more in 1090.
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Much is made of the fact that upon reconquering Moorish Spain, in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered all Jews to convert to Christianity or to leave. But almost nowhere is it mentioned that in doing so they merely repeated a prior Muslim policy: in 1148 all Christians and Jews were ordered to convert to Islam or leave Moorish Spain immediately, on pain of death.
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Consequently, the great Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) pretended to convert to Islam and lived many years in fear of being found out, even after having fled to Egypt.
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By the end of the fourteenth century only tiny remnants of Christianity and Judaism remained scattered in the Middle East and North Africa, having been almost completely destroyed by Muslim persecution. And as the dhimmis disappeared, they took the “advanced” Muslim culture with them. What they left behind was a culture so backward that it couldn’t even copy Western technology but had to buy it and often even had to hire Westerners to use it.