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Today's
Question
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Where did Islam come from?
Part 8
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Sunday
May 20,
2012 |
Where did Islam come from?Part 8(Letter to Charlene Law - continued)
There are quite a number of myths about Islam that are popular in the
West. Let’s talk first about the Crusades. The myth is that the
aggressive West invaded the Islamic world which was minding it’s own
business. Quite the opposite is true. The Crusades were a response to
the Islamic invasion of Europe and the whole Christian world.
In
711, less than a century after the death of Muhammad, Muslim Arabs,
called Saracens at the time, conquered Spain in just a few years. They
continued into France as far as Tours in the north where they were
finally stopped in 732 by the Franks (a Catholic Germanic Tribe then
living in Northern France), led by Charles Martel, the deputy of the
Frankish King. The Muslim invaders established the Caliphate of
Cordoba, which included territory in France around the city of
Narbonne, and were not pushed back into Spain until 759. Charles
Martel’s grandson, Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, finally started
the reconquest of Spain which only ended in 1492, just a few months
before Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a period of 781
years!
Part of the popular myth is that Islamic
Spain was a paradise of tolerance and diversify. Medieval Christians of
what is now Spain and Portugal were constantly under the threat of
Muslim raids. For example, in an attack against Lisbon, in 1189, the
caliph Yaqub al-Mansur captured 3,000 women and children who were
subsequently enslaved and did the same in Silves in 1191, taking 3,000
more Christian slaves. The Almohads, a Muslim dynasty founded in the
12th century, dominated northern Africa and southern Spain. They were
Muslim fundamentalists who believed that Christianity was to be
eliminated by unremitting war. The only choices they gave both Jews and
Christians in southern Spain were death or conversion. Jews and
Christians fled, including Maimonides, the great Jewish physician and
thinker. He and other Jews fled east to Egypt while Christians fled
north to the small Christian kingdoms. It is a pure myth that everyone
got along. When they were tolerated, Jews and Christians had Dhimmi
status. When they were not tolerated they were simply killed or
converted.
The same invasion that had struck Spain,
Portugal and France also struck Italy. In 846, Islamic invaders
plundered St. Peter's Basilica and St. Paul's Outside the Walls, but
were unable to take the whole city of Rome which was still protected by
its ancient walls. The Italians resisted but Sicily, Malta, and parts
of southern Italy were conquered by the Saracens (Muslim Arabs) and
remained part of the Islamic world until 1091 when the (Christian)
Normans finally ousted them and set up their own kingdom.
When
Muhammad died in 632, the Holy Land had been a largely Christian
country for 300 or perhaps 400 years. When the Romans were still pagan
in about 132AD, they had put down the Jewish revolution led by Bar
Kochba and they subsequently killed or exiled much of the Jewish
population. The land became essentially Greek and largely Christian,
especially after the conversion of the Romans to Christianity.
Muslim
invaders arrived in 633, but the majority population of the Holy Land
remained Christian until probably the late 900’s when the Fatimid
Caliph Hakim (called “Hakim the Crazy”) decided that, after 600 years,
it was time to rid the Holy Land of Christians. In 1009, Hakim ordered
the churches of the Holy Land, about 3,000 in number destroyed,
including the church of the Holy Sepulcher, the holiest pilgrimage
shrine in the Christian world.
Can you imagine what would
happen if Christians today even talked about the destruction of the
Kaaba in Mecca? Two Muslim factions, the Fatimids and the Seljuk Turks
were locked in a struggle for control of the Islamic world and
Jerusalem was caught in the middle back and forth between them. In 1056
hundreds of Christians were expelled from Jerusalem and pilgrimage to
Jerusalem was forbidden. In 1077 the Jews and Christians of Jerusalem
were massacred by Emir Atsiz ibn Uvaq, in retaliation for an uprising
against the Seljuk government. Already by 1063, Pope Alexander II had
given his blessing to Spanish Christians in their war against the
Muslims.
When a cry for help came from the Byzantines in
Constantinople who were also threatened by the latest wave of Muslim
invaders, the Seljuk Turks, Pope Urban II sent out the call to rescue
fellow Christians from the invaders and to recover the Christian lands
lost to Muslim aggression since 630 AD.
The closing of
pilgrimage, the slaughter of Christians, the destruction of the
Christian’s holiest shrine and the prospect of continuing Muslim slave
raids, and invasions finally pushed the Christian world over the edge.
The Islamic world was in a weakened state because of the struggle
between the Muslim seljuk Turks and the Muslim Arabs, and they didn’t
at first take the Christian threat seriously. After all, the Byzantine
Christians had fallen easily before Muslim armies and the Latin
Christians in the West were unwashed illiterate barbarians from what
the cultivated Muslims regarded as the western jungles of Europe,
the frozen fringe of the world.
Surprise! After 300
years, the western Christians had begun the push back against the
Muslim invasions of 700AD. Sicily, Malta, southern Italy and half of
Spain were back in Christian hands much to the shock the Islamic world.
They have never quite gotten over that shock. The steady growth of Dar
al Islam met its first setback. A land once ruled by Islam is thought
of as Dar al Islam, the House of Islam, to which others have no right
in the eyes of Allah. The loss of Spain in particular is still a thorn
in the Muslim scheme of things. The expulsion of Islam from Spain
featured prominently in the thinking of Osama bin Laden. Things
like the train bombings in Madrid in March, 2004 that killed 200 people
are retaliation for the expulsion of Muslims 500 years earlier! Bin
Laden was determined to take Spain back for Islam and he is not alone
in that project.
There is another myth that when the
Crusaders finally took Jerusalem back in 1099 that all the Muslim and
Jewish inhabitants were killed by the Crusaders. Those Muslims who were
holed up in the fortress of the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque
were indeed killed, but those in the citadel of David on the opposite
side of town were given a safe conduct, and there is no contemporary
evidence that any Jews were killed. In fact there are contemporary
documents found among Jewish papers in Egypt (from the Cairo Geniza)
indicating that Jews survived the siege of Jerusalem.
It is
often mentioned that Saladin spared the Christians of Jerusalem when he
reconquered the city in 1187. This is not as magnanimous as it might
seem. At first Saladin had no plans to do so. Crusaders threatened to
kill 5,000 Muslim hostages, and to destroy the Dome of the Rock and the
al-Aqsa Mosque. Saladin accepted the terms, on the condition that a
ransom was paid for every Christian of the city, man, woman and
child but Saladin, Patriarch Heraclius, the bishop of Jerusalem paid
the ransoms for about 18,000 of the poorer citizens, but another
15,000, who could not afford ransom were enslaved. So much for the
chivalrous Saladin, despite recent movies.
Another group of
Muslim invaders about 60 years later in 1244, the Khwarezmian Tartars,
sacked Jerusalem, decimated the city's Christian population and drove
out the Jews. Finally in the 1500's the Ottoman Turks took Jerusalem
and a status quo endured until the 20th century in Jerusalem, the City
of Peace.
To be continued......
Rev. Know-It-All
The
Question Was
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Where did Islam come from?
Part 8 |
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