This essay is based on a presentation to FPRI's 2003 History
Institute for Teachers on "The American Encounter with
Islam," May 3-4, 2003. Forty teachers from fourteen states
participated in the conference, which featured lectures by
seven distinguished scholars, among them Jeremy Black,
Professor of History, University of Exeter (United Kingdom)
and Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Especially for our teachers, we asked Prof. Black to include
a few key bibliographic references to which the reader can
turn for more information on selected topics.
ISLAM AND THE WEST: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
by Jeremy Black
The use of historical evidence to provide rapid support for
policy advice is all too easy in a crisis. At the same
time, it is valuable to offer a historical resonance to
current problems. This has certainly been the case over the
last two years. A flood of works has appeared on the
history of terrorism, Afghanistan, Iraq, and relations
between Islam and the West. Some of the work has been of
high quality but much has been superficial. This is
understandable. Commercial opportunity plays a major role.
There are also serious analytical problems.
CENTRALITY OF THE CONFLICT WITH THE WEST? NOT SO.
One of the most important relates to the need to distinguish
between long-term perceptions of Islamic power and more
short-term (but still pressing) developments. In
particular, there has been a tendency to exaggerate the
centrality of conflict, still more relations, with the
Western world in Islamic history. This is at the expense of
three different tendencies, first, the need for Islam to
confront other societies, secondly the importance of
divisions within the Islamic world itself, and, thirdly, the
variety of links between Islam and the West. The last point
can be related, more generally, to modern revisionism on the
multiple nature of Western imperialism, a theme I have
probed in my "Europe and the World 1650-1830" (New York:
Routledge, 2002).
To turn to the first point, throughout its history, Islam
has interacted not only with Christendom but also with other
cultural areas. Our own concerns on the relationship
between Christendom and Islam appear to be underlined by the
map with its depiction of an Islamic world stretching into
the Balkans and the Western Mediterranean. However, if the
conventional map - an equal-area cartogram - is replaced by
an equal-population cartogram (see my "Maps and Politics,"
Chicago University Press, 1997), then a very different
perception of Islam emerges. It becomes a religion not
primarily of the Arab world but of South Asia: Indonesia,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Iran. In some respects
there is a parallel with Christendom, which is now more
prominent in the Americas and (increasingly) Africa than in
Europe.
This geographical reconceptualization is linked to a focus
on different challenges than those from Christianity. In
particular, the clash between Islam and Hinduism proved a
major aspect of political tension in South Asia and this
became more pronounced after the end of British imperial
rule. Thus, Kashmir is a major faultline for many Muslims,
while there is considerable concern about increasing Hindu
militancy in India and the difficulties the Congress Party
faces in maintaining a secular approach. In Central Asia,
the challenge came as much from Chinese as from Russian
expansion. Furthermore, like the Christians, for example in
Amazonia, Islam competes with tribal beliefs, particularly
in Indonesia. The importance of the eastern world of Islam
is such that areas of conflict with the "West," at least in
the shape of Christendom, include the Philippines and Timor.
To turn back to Islamic history is to be reminded of the
persistence of conflict with non-Christian peoples and,
indeed, its prominence for much of Islamic history. It is,
for example, all too easy to present the medieval period in
terms of the Christian Crusades, a theme that has recently
been pushed back into prominence, and to suggest, as some
Islamic polemicists have done, that modern Western pressures
sit in this tradition. However, aside from the fact that
the Crusades were also directed against "heathens" (in
Eastern Europe), heretical Christians (such as Albigensians,
Hussites) and opponents of the Papacy, when Saddam Hussein
wished to emphasize the idea of a terrible foreign threat to
Baghdad he referred not to earlier Christian attacks on
Islam (nor to the British who seized the city in both World
Wars), but to the Mongols. When Baghdad fell in 1258, to a
Mongol army under Hulegu, reputedly hundreds of thousands
were slaughtered. The Mongols indeed were far more
important to the history of the thirteenth-century Islamic
world than conflict with Crusaders in that period. Persia
and Anatolia had already been overrun by the Mongols and in
1260 Hulegu captured Damascus. Thereafter, however, the
Mongols were to be stopped in the Near East by the Islamic
Egyptian-based Mamluks (see my "War. An Illustrated World
History," Sutton Publishing, 2003).
WHAT MODEL OF WAR?
The sweeping initial successes of the Mongols demonstrated
another point that is important to bear in mind when
considering military relations between Christendom and the
West, namely the danger of assuming that a Western model of
warfare in the shape of Western forces, and later infantry
focused on volley firepower, was dominant. In many
respects, this is an anachronistic reading back of more
modern conflict. South Asia provides a good example of
this. The emphasis, in Western works, is on how Europeans
sailed round Africa, arrived in Indian waters at the start
of the sixteenth century, and then used infantry firepower
to subjugate opponents (both Muslim and non-Muslim), with
the British victory under Robert Clive over the Nawab of
Bengal at Plassey in 1757 taking pride of place.
The arrival of, first, the Portuguese, and then other
Europeans, in the Indian Ocean and linked waters, especially
the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, did, indeed, greatly
expand the extent of contact between Christendom and Islam,
but the extent of the challenge should not be exaggerated.
The Islamic world was able to mount a robust response: the
Portuguese were repelled from the Red Sea and Aden in the
early sixteenth century and driven from Muscat (1650) and
Mombassa (1698) by the Omani Arabs. In India itself,
assaults from across Afghanistan were for long more
important than European moves to military history and
political developments, particularly the Mughal conquest of
the Sultanate of Delhi in the 1520s, the Persian invasion in
the 1730s, at the expense of the Mughal empire, and that of
the Afghans in the 1750s, culminating in the victory over
the (Hindu) Marathas at Panipat in 1761 (see my "War and the
World. Military Power and the Fate of Continents 1450-
2000," Yale University Press, 1998).
This battle looked back to a long series of conflicts
between cavalry armies that had a crucial impact on the
Islamic world, for example the campaigns of Timur the Lame,
which included the capture of Delhi (1398), Damascus (1401)
and Baghdad (1401), and the defeat of the Ottoman Turks at
Ankara (1402). This was a politics of force: Timur was
brutal towards those who resisted, most vividly by erecting
pyramids from the skulls of the slaughtered: possibly 70,000
when a rising at Isfahan was suppressed in 1388. Again, in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the crucial fault-
lines in the Islamic world divided the Ottomans from the
Safavids of Persia and the latter from the Mughals of India.
Their struggles were more important than those with
Christendom. Thus, the Safavids were more concerned about
Ottomans, Mughals, and Uzbeks (and finally succumbed in 1722
to Afghan attack), than the Portuguese, who were driven from
Hormuz in 1622. Even along the traditional frontier with
Christendom, there was little sign of Islamic failure until
the loss of Hungary to the Austrian Habsburgs in the 1680s
and 1690s. Thus, the Portuguese challenge in Morocco was
crushed at Alcazarquivir in 1578, and European pressure
there did not subsequently become serious again until the
French advanced in 1844 from their new base in Algeria.
For the eighteenth and nineteenth century, it is possible to
point to Christian advances, especially by the Russians in
the Balkans and Central Asia, but it is necessary not to
pre-date these. If the French conquered Algeria from 1830,
the Spaniards had failed at Algiers in 1775 and 1784. If
the British conquered Egypt in 1882, they had failed there
in 1807 and, in the meanwhile, Egypt had been a dynamic
power, expanding into Arabia (where the Wahhabis were
defeated), the Near East, Sudan and the Horn of Africa:
Egyptian forces took Equatoria (southern Sudan) in 1871,
Darfur (western Sudan) in 1874, and Harrar (later British
Somaliland), also in 1874. These dates are a reminder of
the brevity of the period of Western dominance and the
relatively recent period in which it began: Sudan was only
conquered by the British in the late 1890s, with the crucial
battle being fought at Omdurman in 1898. The continued
importance of Ottoman-Persian rivalry into the nineteenth
century also requires attention.
WHICH MATTERED MORE:
TENSIONS WITH THE WEST OR WITHIN ISLAM?
Thus, the political, as much as the religious tensions
within the Islamic world can be discussed as much more
historically significant to Muslims themselves than the
relatively recent Western ascendancy. And even this has its
exceptions. If the war over the last half-century in which
the most Muslims died, the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, was
waged between Muslim powers, the situation has generally
been also thus during Islamic history. Furthermore, there
have frequently been alliances across confessional divides.
Suleyman the Magnificent co-operated with the French against
the Habsburgs in the 1530s. When the Portuguese were driven
from Hormuz, Abbas I benefited from English co-operation.
As imperialists, both the British, in India and Nigeria, and
the Russians, in Central Asia, co-operated with some Muslim
rulers and interests at the same time as they fought others.
This is part of a more general process by which links
between Muslim and Western polities - particularly political
and economic - co-existed with rivalry. There is no reason
why this should cease, although the nature of Islamic
societies, with rapidly-growing, youthful populations,
centerd on volatile urban communities, poses particular
problems. Past experience suggests the need for political
engagement as much as military strength. A good example of
an authoritarian Islamic state that moved from political
rivalry to co-operation is provided by Turkey, which refused
to accept a peace settlement after World War One that
included Greek rule over the Aegean coast and European
troops in Constantinople. Under Kemal Ataturk, the Turks
were able to impose their will after defeating the Greeks in
1922 and facing down the British the same year. This was
the background to a long-term improvement in relations with
the Western world, which also helped to contain continued
Greek-Turkish animosity.
A robust and pro-active approach to terrorism is necessary,
but destroying bin Laden will only profit us so much if
other radical, anti-Western Islamic organizations arise and
flourish. To understand the challenge, it is necessary to
offer informed judgment of the Islamic worlds, and to avoid
simplistic claims of immutable cultural clashes. The
history and the reality are far more complex, and let it be
said far more hopeful.
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