Review
Veertien eeuwen haat
Een boekbespreking
De vijandschap is er altijd geweest. Soms minder, maar meestal meer. Christenen en moslims hebben al veertien eeuwen een ongemakkelijke, vaak bloedige relatie.
Jan Keulen in Trouw, 20 september 2003
De aanslagen van 11 september en de haat tegen het Westen van hedendaagse moslimfundamentalisten staan, historisch gezien, niet op zichzelf. De geschiedenis van de verhouding tussen christenen en moslims blijkt gekenmerkt te worden door een reeks apocalyptische mijlpalen. Ook het christendom heeft zich, met het kruis in de ene en het zwaard in de andere hand, schuldig gemaakt aan extreme wreedheden en barbaars geweld.
De Britse historicus Andrew Wheatcroft gebruikt in zijn verhelderende maar tegelijkertijd angstaanjagende boek ‘Infidels: The Conflict between Christendom and Islam 638-2002’, het woord ‘apocalyptisch’ in de letterlijke betekenis. Er zijn ook vroeger momenten en fases in het conflict geweest die zo overweldigend catastrofaal waren, dat het einde der tijden in aantocht leek en alle verhoudingen op de kop worden gezet.
Veertien eeuwen geleden was de verovering van Jeruzalem door de moslims voor de christenen zo’n apocalyptische, diep traumatische gebeurtenis. De profeet Mohammed was toen, in 638, nog maar zes jaar dood, maar de piepjonge religie was al volop in opmars. Jeruzalem, op dat moment een Byzantijnse, christelijke stad, viel als een rijpe appel in de handen van een gedisciplineerd leger van uiterst gemotiveerde strijders, die vanuit het Arabisch schiereiland naar het westen oprukten.
Toen de aanvoerder van de moslimstrijders, kalief Omar, in het net veroverde Jeruzalem naar de Heilige Grafkerk wandelde, fluisterde de orthodoxe patriarch Sophronius een andere geestelijke in het oor dat dit zonder twijfel de ‘gruwel der verwoesting’ was waarvan de profeet Daniël had gesproken. De goede verstaander wist direct dat Sophronius niet alleen op Daniël uit het Oude Testament doelde, maar ook op de woorden van Jezus uit het Nieuwe Testament, waarin gesproken wordt over ‘valse christussen en valse profeten’ en een ‘periode van grote verdrukking’ (Matteüs 24).
Ook al voor de komst van de islam werden Arabieren uit de oostelijke woestijn als barbaren beschouwd in het Byzantijnse rijk. Maar toen deze ‘roofdieren die eruitzien als mensen’ een heerschappij en een nieuwe orde vestigden in naam van hun nieuwe godsdienst, en een groot deel van het christelijke Midden-Oosten veroverden, was er in de ogen van de orthodoxe geestelijkheid sprake van een dodelijk gevaar.
Vanaf dat prilste begin trokken christelijke opinieleiders ten strijde tegen de islam. ,,Hij die niet gelooft volgens de traditie van de universele kerk is een ongelovige”, vonniste de monnik Johannes van Damascus aan het begin van de 8ste eeuw. Zijn tijdgenoot Nicetas Byzantios deed er nog een schepje bovenop. ,,De islam is een slechte en verderflijke godsdienst” en de profeet Mohammed was, volgens Byzantios, ‘een leugenaar’, sterker nog, hij was ‘de antichrist in eigen persoon’.
De toon was gezet. Een toon die, zo laat Wheatcroft overtuigend zien, van islamitische kant in de loop der eeuwen beantwoord werd met even venijnige retoriek. Hij citeert bijvoorbeeld een 15de-eeuwse moslimgeleerde die zijn geloofsgenoten, die onder christelijk bestuur in Spanje leefden, waarschuwt voor ‘de voortdurende vuiligheid, de obsceniteiten en de religieuze corruptie’ waaraan ze door de christenen werden blootgesteld.
Christenen en moslims waren in elkaars ogen ongelovigen, inferieure wezens, of – zoals de Spaanse inquisitie moslims omschreef: – malas hierbas, onkruid, dat te vuur en te zwaard bestreden moest worden.
Wheatcroft is goed in literaire beschrijvingen van dat ‘te vuur en te zwaard’. Zijn boek begint met een magistrale beschrijving, als men tenminste van het genre houdt, van de zeeslag bij Lepanto (1571), voor de kust van Griekenland. Hier bracht de christelijke vloot van de Habsburgers de islamitische vloot van de oprukkende Ottomanen een verpletterende nederlaag toe.
Daarna beschrijft Wheatcroft de interactie tussen christendom en islam in drie regio’s, waar beide religies eeuwenlang in nauw contact met elkaar stonden, soms vreedzaam coëxisterend, vaker op gespannen voet: Spanje, de Levant (het huidige Syrië, Libanon, Israël en Palestina) en de Balkan.
Al-Andalus, het islamitische Spanje, werd in zeven eeuwen strijd ‘heroverd’ en etnisch gezuiverd door de christenen. Alle moslims en joden die niet waren afgeslacht, moesten uiteindelijk vertrekken. In het Midden-Oosten probeerden christenen uit onze West-Europese contreien van de 11de tot de 15de eeuw Palestina en vooral Jeruzalem te ‘bevrijden’.
De kruistochten, zoals deze in retrospectief krankzinnige expedities werden genoemd, gingen gepaard met onbeschrijflijke wreedheden. Met veel gevoel voor detail verhaalt Wheatcroft hoe de kruisvaarders bij de verovering van Jeruzalem in 1099 een waar bloedbad aanrichtten onder de islamitische en joodse bewoners van de stad. Veertigduizend ‘ongelovigen’ werden afgeslacht.
In de Balkan liggen de wreedheden tussen christenen en moslims nog vers in het geheugen. Wheatcroft beschrijft hoe, vanaf de 14de eeuw, slachtpartijen over en weer een spoor van bloed en vijandschap hebben achtergelaten. De reeks begint met de slag bij Kosovo Polje (het Merelveld) in 1389. De Servische troepen werden er in de pan gehakt door de Ottomaanse sultan Murad de Eerste. Dit relaas eindigt met de gevechten in Bosnië en Kosovo in de jaren negentig van de 20ste eeuw.
Haat is niet aangeboren. Haten moet je leren. Maar het leert snel. Uiteraard werd de relatie tussen de kruisvaarders en de lokale moslimbevolking in het Midden-Oosten en die tussen de islamitische Oemajaden in Al-Andalus en de christelijke reconquistadores uit Noord-Spanje voor een groot deel bepaald door sociale, politieke en militaire factoren, door machtsverhoudingen en door economie.
Maar Wheatcroft is vooral geïnteresseerd in de discours van de haat, in de voorstelling die men had van de ander. Hij toont aan dat ‘woorden van haat’ en ‘beelden die afschuw moesten opwekken’ werkelijk gevaarlijk waren. Zíj zijn onmenselijk, wíj zijn mensen met hoogstaande normen en waarden. Zíj – de christenen – zijn ‘de zonen van apen en varkens’ of zíj – de moslims ten tijde van de inquisitie – hebben ‘onzuiver bloed’. Het doel is de ander, de vijand, tot demon uit te roepen, iets niet menselijks, dat geen recht heeft op een menselijke behandeling.
Wheatcroft, die van huis uit gespecialiseerd is in de geschiedenis van islamitisch Spanje, was op 11 september 2001 al meer dan tien jaar bezig met zijn ambitieuze boek – hij beschrijft tenslotte veertien eeuwen conflict. De discussie over de ‘botsing der culturen’, die al in volle gang was, raakte in een stroomversnelling. Waarschijnlijk was Wheatcrofts’ uitgever blij op de actuele discussie te kunnen inhaken met een boek dat, alleen al door zijn omvang en eruditie, een definitief antwoord pretendeert te geven op de vele vragen rond de relatie christendom-islam.
Toch roept ook ‘Infidels’ vragen op. Het boek is in extreme mate cultuur-relativistisch. Is er dan geen enkel verschil tussen christendom en islam? Is het extremisme aan de christelijke kant inderdaad een afspiegeling van de heethoofdigheid aan moslimkant en vice versa? Was de islam vanaf het begin geen militante godsdienst, in tegenstelling tot het christendom? Is het niet demagogisch en onhistorisch paus Urbanus, die duizend jaar geleden opriep tot de kruistochten met pure hate talk over dat ‘vervloekte ras van de Saracenen’, te vergelijken met president Bush die, na 11 september, sprak over een ‘kruistocht….eh, een oorlog tegen het terrorisme’?
Wellicht ligt het aan de hectiek van de periode na 11 september, toen Wheatcroft zijn laatste hoofdstuk en voorwoord schreef, dat ‘Infidels’ enigszins pamflettistisch eindigt. Hij probeert zijn op zichzelf grandioze geschiedverhaal een alomvattend theoretisch kader mee te geven en en passant de huidige Amerikaanse regering nog een flinke veeg uit de pan te geven. Jammer, want daarmee is ‘Infidels’ wel heel leesbaar, kleurrijk en opgeluisterd met fantastische details, maar niet het definitieve boek over de eeuwenoude complexe verhouding tussen moslims en christenen.
The Chinese through Abbasid eyes
A recent translation of a 1100-year-old report by an Arab adventurer allows us to see Tang Dynasty China through 9th century Arab eyes
By Jan KeulenPublished date: 9 June 2015 15:20 UTC
They were keen and curious observers. More than a millennium ago merchant-informants and officials at the service of the Abbasid caliph, from Baghdad or Basra, put to paper eyewitness accounts of North Europeans (Vikings), Indians, Chinese and people from today’s Cambodia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. The Abbasid Caliphate ruled all of West Asia and North Africa from 750 AD until about 1000, when it began to weaken.
“Baghdad was one of the biggest cities in the world,” says Dr Maaike van Berkel, associate professor in Medieval History at Amsterdam University. Van Berkel, a specialist in the Abbasids’ empire, recalls that the City of Peace, as it was called, had probably around half a million inhabitants. “But that’s still gigantic and beyond compare to the towns and cities at the time in Europe. Baghdad was an important economic and trade centre. There were commercial contacts with Charlemagne’s empire in Europe but even more with China, India and Central Asia.”
“From all over the Middle East people came to Baghdad; it was the most important religious, intellectual and scientific centre of that part of the world,” Van Berkel says. “Geographers knew in detail about the Dar al Islam (home or abode of Islam), a vast area that extended from what is now Spain to Pakistan and Afghanistan. They mapped the roads and rivers, the cities, the natural environment, the administration, the people…. They were also pretty knowledgeable about India but much less so about Europe.”
The recently translated Accounts of China and India by Abu Zayd al-Sirafi and other chroniclers gives a fascinating insight into the interconnectedness and mobility of the Abbasid era. For today’s readers, removed in time and place, some of the writers’ observations may seem bizarre and implausible. But in most of their akhbār – credible reports of what they saw and heard – one can easily recognise modern Indians and Chinese.
Journalism of its day
Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who translated Accounts of China and India into English and who himself is an accomplished travel book writer, compares akhbārwith today’s journalism and its style reminds him of an “online, interactive travel website”.
Abu Zayd wants to drive home that the Accounts do not describe a fantasy world, but are merely a portrayal of the truth as they percieved it. He claims to have “avoided relating any of the sort of accounts in which sailors exercise their powers of invention but whose credibility would not stand up to scrutiny in other men’s minds”. His motto is “the shorter the better”, reminding us of today’s journalism’s slogan KISS: “keep it short and simple”.
Abu Zayd’s travel accounts reflect the Arab-Islamic drive under the early Abbasid dynasty to explore eastward and especially to connect to China. In the Accounts’ introduction, the second Abbasid caliph and builder of Baghdad, Al-Mansour, standing at the bank of the river, is quoted as saying: “Here is the Tigris, and nothing bars the way between it and China!” Arab ships would sail eastward one season, when the winds blew that way, and back west when the mawsim – the Arabic word that in English became “monsoon” – caused winds to take the Arab vessels back home.
The main Abbasid terminal of the monsoon trade was Siraf in the Gulf, birthplace of Abu Zayd al-Sirafi, in what is now Iran. From Siraf ships crossed the Gulf to call at the Omani ports of Suhar or Muscat and continue to India, China, the Malay Peninsula, Java or even further. The main Chinese port was Khanfu, nowadays the megapolis of Guangzhou. While the Abbasid explorers discovered China, the Chinese were discovering the “West”, and their chroniclers described the maritime route to Iraq and to Bangda, as they called Baghdad.
Tang Dynasty ‘socialism’
The apogee of the Abbasid caliphate coincides with the heydays of the Tang Dynasty in China (619-907). In the Accounts imperial China is painted as a highly organised and regulated society. The government cares for the wellbeing of its citizens. If a sick person is poor, “he is given the cost of his medicine from the public treasury”.
The citizens pay a fair poll tax when they reach the age of 18. Old people do not have to pay taxes but receive a pension. Every city has a school and a teacher and the children of the poor are fed from the public treasury. “The Chinese, whether poor or rich, young or old, all learn to form letters and to write.” It sounds like socialism avant la lettre.
Abu Zayd lauds the “admirable governance” of the Chinese. They have rule of law. Right is done “wherever it is due” and no blind eye is turned to “the misdeeds of those of high status”. A eunuch chief of finance controls the state finances. The state’s income consists of the poll tax and the exclusive rights of the ruler to sell salt and tea. The Arabs didn’t know tea before travelling to China. In the Accounts Abu Zayd describes tea as “a plant that they drink with hot water and that is sold in every city for large sums of money. To prepare it, water is boiled, then the leaves are sprinkled on it, and it serves them as an antidote to all ailments.”
The Arab travellers were amazed by how industrious the Chinese were. “Of all God’s creation, the Chinese are among the most dexterous at engraving and manufacturing and at every kind of craft. Indeed, no one from any nation has the edge on them in this respect.”
Clash of hygiene habits
But not everything was admirable in Arab eyes. They were horrified by the lack of hygiene of the Chinese. The Chinese use “only paper, not water, to clean their backsides after defecating” and do not clean their teeth and hands before eating. The Arab chroniclers were disgusted by some of the sexual practices of the non-Muslims. They couldn’t approve of the Chinese habit to have sexual intercourse with their women even when they were menstruating and of their highly organised prostitution. “The Chinese sodomise boys who are provided for that purpose and are of the same order as temple prostitutes.”
In some ways the Arab explorers lived in a better world than ours. While nowadays the rhinoceros is considered in India as a vulnerable species due to excessive hunting; the Arab chronicler reports that they are found “in large numbers in all Indian kingdoms”. He reports having eaten the flesh of the rhinoceros because “it is permissible for Muslims.” He is impressed by the strength of the rhinoceros. “No other animal equals it in strength. An elephant will run away in fear from a rhinoceros.”
Like in our times, political stability and trade never last forever. In the last quarter of the 9th century a rebellion weakened the Tang dynasty. Thousands of the foreign merchants in Khanfu/Guangzhou were massacred and direct Arab-Chinese trade came to a halt. However, indirect trade continued with Arab merchants buying, for example, Chinese porcelain in India.
A few decades after the Chinese rebellion and the massacre of Khanfu, the grip of the Abbasid caliph on the empire loosened. Van Berkel explains that the outer regions recognised the caliph only formally. It was exactly in this period of decline that a fellow traveller from Iraq, Abu Fadlan, undertook his voyage to the land of the Volga-Bulghars. He wrote about his encounters with new cultures, among them the Vikings, in his Mission to the Volga.
People like us
The akhbar arouse our fantasies and dreams about people in a bygone era who show an uncanny resemblance with humans in the 21stcentury. Ibn Fadlan’s Mission to the Volga inspired Michael Crichton’s novel Eaters of the Dead and the film The Thirteenth Warrior.
Viking-expert Nelleke Ijssennagger finds it ironic that some in Europe compare the Vikings to the fighters of the Islamic State or vice versa: the cruelty, the medieval savagery… “I think this is because they have no real idea about the Vikings, or about the Islamic State. Originally the Vikings had a very bad press. They raided some regions in Northern Europe, destroyed everything, and burned villages. Their bad reputation hides the fact that they were a well-organised people, in many ways very sophisticated.”
“Trade contacts in the early Middle Ages are still very much underestimated,” says historian Dr Karl Heidecker of Groningen University. “Numerous objects from the Middle East, Africa and even Afghanistan were encountered in Viking sites. Things circulated.” Heidecker stresses that this does not mean that North Europeans were in direct contact with the Afghans or the Chinese. Often things ended up in a certain place after a long journey, having passed through many hands
One of the biggest surprises of the Arab travel accounts is the sophistication of Vikings, Turks, Chinese, Indians and the Abbasids, more than a millennium ago. The Accounts paint an interconnected world, but also the transience of political might and relativity of human progress.
[1] Abu Zayd al-Sirafi, Accounts of China and India and Ahmed Ibn Fadlan, Mission to the Volga, in Two Arabic Travel Books (New York/London: New York University Press), 2014
Vikings and Abbasids: Worlds apart but interconnected
A ring found in Sweden with a ‘for/to Allah’ inscription proves that North Europeans and Arabs were in direct contact, more than 1,000 years ago
By Jan KeulenPublished date: 27 May 2015 13:10 UTC
Who she was, nobody knows. She was buried almost 1200 years ago in Birka, 25 kilometres west of modern-day Stockholm. Birka, on the strategic Björkö Island, was an important trading centre during the Viking Age. Many archeological finds have been made there, among them “grave 515”. The mystery woman was found laying in a rectangular wooden coffin. Though the skeleton was completely decomposed, the clothes, jewelry, brooches and a ring indicate she was a female.
It is unknown if she was a Viking woman or if she belonged to a different ethnic group. Was she perhaps an Arab woman? It is equally unknown if she prayed to the Viking gods or if she was a (converted) Muslim. But her ring, with the inscription for/to Allah, is exciting and unique material evidence of direct contact between Viking Age Northern Europe and the Islamic world.
In fact the ring had been found at the end of the 19th century and was kept in the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm, among other finds from the Viking Age. When researchers last year used a scanning electron microscope, they discovered, as they describe in the journal Scanning, that the silver ring had a stone of coloured glass. It is the only ring found in Scandinavia with a Kufic Arabic inscription on it.
According to research by Swedish biophysicist Sebastian Wärmländer, the ring had rarely been worn, and was “likely passed from the silversmith to the woman buried at Birka with few owners in between”. For Wärmländer and his colleagues the ring suggests direct contact between Viking society and the Abbaside Caliphate that ruled over most of the Middle East at the time. The ring’s owner, or someone close to her, may have visited the Caliphate or its surrounding regions.
Nelleke Ijssennagger, a specialist in medieval history at Groningen University in the Netherlands and expert on the Viking period (793-1050), confirms that the Vikings were well organised and sophisticated explorers, colonisers and tradesmen. “I imagine they were practical people. They were excellent boatmen and navigators. They travelled far and must have been open-minded concerning the customs and cultures of other peoples. Rune stone inscriptions on Viking graves mention if an important person had travelled to the West, or to the East. Their fame, good name and reputation were crucial to the Vikings and in that sense their explorations in far lands were very important to them.”
“The term ‘Viking’ is a bit confusing,” Ijssennagger says. “Originally those Scandinavians who went to raid and plunder were called Vikings. Pirates. The local farmers who stayed home, the craftsmen or the merchants were not called Vikings. Some of them may have been part-time Vikings: farmers who went on the rampage from time to time. Later on the term Viking came into more common usage, including by scientists, to designate all the people from the North.
“We know very little about the Viking travels to the West, to what is now England, the Netherlands and Germany. They went as far as France (Normandy), Italy and Spain. Vikings from Denmark and Norway mostly undertook these westward travels. But we have only written sources about this period from the 12th or 13th century, often written by monks or priests who painted those heathens in the darkest colours. Those accounts were obviously not very objective. Unfortunately there are no written records from the Vikings themselves.”
About the Viking travels to the East however there are detailed accounts. The “Eastern Vikings” came, like our ring woman, from what is now Sweden. They established trading centres at Kiev and Novgorod and reached the land of the Turkic Khazars and Bulghars in the Caucasian steppe and what is today Azerbaijan and northern Iran. They carried on active trade with Arabs, Persians and Greeks.
Arab chroniclers like Ibn Khurradadhbih (9th century AD ), Ibn Rustah, al-Mus’udi, al-Mukaddasi (all 10th century AD) and others wrote extensively about the Rusiyyah or Rus as they called the eastern Vikings. The most detailed eyewitness account comes from Ahmed ibn Fadlan, whose Risala has been translated into English and other European languages. In 2014 a new edition of Mission to the Volga was published[i], edited and translated by James Montgomery.
Abu Fadlan was the secretary of a delegation sent by the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir in 921/922 AD to the king of the Volga Bulghars. He was a faqih, an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, but also an adventurer and in his writing he had a keen eye for the human detail. His travel book reads like a journalistic account, more than 1000 years old, written with humour while trying to be objective and unprejudiced. As Tim Mackintosh-Smith, a contemporary travel book writer, puts it, Abu Fadlan “peers through the lens of Islam”.
It is in the land of the Volga Bulghars, recently converted to Islam and looking for Abbasid protection against their enemies, the Khazars, that Abu Fadlan meets the Rusiyyah. “They had come to trade and had disembarked at the Itil river,” Abu Fadlan writes. “I have never seen bodies as nearly perfect as theirs. As tall as palm trees, fair and reddish…” He describes in detail their clothes, their strange eating and drinking habits, their sexuality, their religious ceremonies and how they burn their dead.
Abu Fadlan and the other chroniclers played a significant role in Abbasid society. “The Abbasid Empire and Baghdad in particular had a culture of writing and books,” says Dr Maaike van Berkel, associate professor in Medieval History at Amsterdam University. Van Berkel who specialises in the Abbasids’ Empire, recalls that paper was introduced in Baghdad from China in the 8th century. “The state maintained an extensive administrative system. Everything was registered and written documents were carefully archived. Taxes, laws, measurements, population censuses, all kinds of knowledge and science: everything was documented in writing. Maybe Baghdad was the first city in human history where people could make a living by copying books. Apparently there was a market for books. There was an entire neighbourhood in Baghdad with copyists and writers.”
The Arab readers of the time must have been glued to Abu Fadlan’s account of the Rusiyyah as “the filthiest of all God’s creatures”. “They have no modesty when it comes to defecating or urinating and do not wash themselves when intercourse puts them in a state of ritual impurity. They do not even wash their hand after eating. Indeed, they are like roaming asses.” Other details the 10th century readers must have been interested in is the unfettered sexuality of the Rusiyyah. “They have intercourse with their female slaves in full view of their companions.”
The Abbasids’ economy was money driven. The caliphs minted their own dirhams, a silver coin that had been in use for centuries by the Persians. It was the silver dirham that lured the Scandinavians eastward. The Vikings used silver, sometimes coins hewn into smaller pieces or melted into jewellery, as a means of transactions. In the country of the Bulghars and elsewhere they exchanged fur, amber, swords and slaves against the much-coveted dirhams.
Dr Van Berkel points to the many dirhams and other objects from the Middle East and North Africa found in graves and other archaeological sites of Northern Europe, as “proof that intercontinental trade continued in the early Middle Ages.” The ring found in Birka is another sign of a world already more interconnected than previously thought. Is there proof that some Vikings converted to Islam? “The find of the ring does not mean the owner was a Muslim. On the other hand it’s not impossible. The Vikings interacted with the Volga Bulghars who had become Muslims and with the Arabs. It may well be that some of them converted.”
[i] Ahmed Ibn Fadlan, Mission to the Volga, in Two Arabic Travel Books (New York/London: New York University Press), 2014
Focus on Media Freedom 