Islam and the West E-Book

Christopher J Walker

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Seitenzahl: 551

Beschreibung

We have rapidly grown used to the idea, particularly since the declaration of a world-wide war on terrorism, that between Islam and the West there exists a deep historical and ideological gulf. Christopher Walker's book turns such accepted views on their head and paints instead a picture of two belief systems which have a history of toleration.

Leseprobe

ISLAM

AND THE

WEST

ISLAM

AND THE

WEST

A DISSONANT HARMONY OF CIVILISATIONS

CHRISTOPHER J. WALKER

First published in 2005

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved © Christopher J. Walker, 2005, 2013

The right of Christopher J. Walker to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9577 4

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1

Sophronius and Omar

2

The Asperity of Religious War

3

Europe’s Loss and Recovery of Knowledge

4

‘Almost Continuall Warres’

5

‘The Magnificence of the Queen his Mistress’

6

Shah Abbas and the Sherley Brothers

7

Stuart Learning and the Improvement of Human Reason

8

Islam and Europe in the Eighteenth Century

9

Ottoman Fortunes: Military Debacle, Diplomatic Rescue

Notes

Bibliography

Preface

Iam grateful to a number of people and institutions for help and inspiration in this task. Thanks are due to the late Dr Lofthouse of Worthing for teaching me some Hebrew while I was still a schoolboy, and leading me to an interest in other Semitic languages and cultures. More recently I owe thanks to David Taylor for answering many questions, and to John Waś for help with translations. Roger Lockyer has been unfailingly helpful. I owe Marius Kociejowski a special debt of gratitude. Judith Curthoys, archivist of Christ Church, Oxford, kindly answered my questions. Simon Curry has challenged ideas. The librarians of the British Library, the London Library, Dr Williams’s Library, Harris-Manchester College (Oxford) and my local Hammersmith and Fulham Public Library are to be thanked too for help and for answering many queries. I cannot omit an expression of thanks to Christopher Feeney, Hilary Walford and Jane Entrican for their patience and forbearance. I am grateful too for sidelong help gained from catalogues of London’s book dealers and auction houses, where one may find descriptions that illuminate details of history, landscape, reason or religion. The final responsibility for the contents of this book is mine alone.

I have avoided diacritical marks on Semitic names, and have preferred the spelling ‘Koran’ to ‘Qur’an’. Likewise, as regards dates, I have kept BC and AD, preferring them to BCE and CE. It seems to me that extraneous complexities, however well intentioned, impede a narrative and obstruct ideas.

Introduction

In the eras of both Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria, England established informal alliances with the Ottoman Empire. The two great monarchs favoured the Muslim empire above other, Christian, empires. Queen Victoria even threatened to abdicate unless her government took a firmer line in support of Turkey. Yet neither of them, separated by three hundred years, has ever been accused of betraying Christendom, or been regarded as a cultural traitor. What does this mean in terms of Islam and the West?

Other instances may lead us to question any fixed categories of East and West. Francis I of France, the Most Christian King, made an alliance with Islamic Turkey to guarantee independence against subjection to Emperor Charles V. Before the battle of Lepanto of 1571 – seen as a display of Christianity, turning the tide against Ottoman Islam – the pope invited the Persian shah to join in. Faith, it seems, could mutate from being the defining issue in war and diplomacy to being just one element among many.

In the current climate, it is probably not necessary to explain the origin or relevance of a book on Islam and the West. But, for the record, this work did not develop from the events of 11 September 2001; it found its origin in the decade which saw the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, east of Delhi, by militant Hindus, a defining event in the modern history of extreme religion. The Balkans, too, witnessed violence shadowed by the rhetoric of faith. Faith worldwide seemed, and still seems, to be going through one of its periodic crises, as it had in Europe during the Crusades, and at the time of the Reformation. So a study of relations between West and East seemed appropriate.

In part, this study is one of the manner in which two systems of belief, often seen as universal but with their own internal fractures, have lived and continue to live – and sometimes failed to live – side by side. Islam was not initially radically different from the Christianity which was its neighbour, and was far from appearing as its shadow-side, on the way to being castigated as paganism. It looked like a cousin of the Christianity of Syria and Mesopotamia. Its unitarian theology was reflected in the writings of some of the early Christian Church Fathers. Even in early modern times, when the advent of rational Christianity compelled a reassessment of Islam, it could be classed, by John Hales for instance, as a Christian heresy.1 Neither Hugo Grotius, the founder of international law, nor John Locke, whose philosophy has shaped the modern world, considered Islam to be alien or ‘other’. These thinkers championed Christianity as true and reasonable; yet both held that Islam constituted a valid way by which the Deity could be approached. Nevertheless, in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, at the time of the Crusades, Western Christianity had erupted into an assertion of itself as something radically different and militant, and this attitude continued selectively until modern times – although there has always been a section of western humanity prepared and able to consider Islam in non-bellicose terms.

The crusading expeditions had been phenomena driven primarily from northern Europe; Eastern Christianity never developed the language of visions and prophecy with which Western Christianity upheld its right to assault Islam. Southern Europe was often keener on coexistence. Christianity and Islam mingled contentedly in the Sicilian court of the two Rogers and Emperor Frederick II; and in Spain, in the early years of the Reconquest, Islamic learning was held in honour by the Castilian kings, who avoided rhetoric.

It seemed right to end in 1914, on the grounds that the subsequent period has been well covered; the date represents the emergence of the contemporary world, whereas my concern has been to rediscover and I hope illuminate the background, the hinterland, to a perplexing and highly charged issue, capable today of catching the fire of international conflict.

CHAPTER ONE

Sophronius and Omar

Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, first accorded Jerusalem a central place within Roman Christianity, by making a pilgrimage there probably in the year 326. According to the pious historians Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen, she discovered the site of the Holy Sepulchre. At the time of her visit this sacred place was occupied by a temple built by the Emperor Hadrian and dedicated to Astarte. The devout lady pilgrim, granted the title of ‘empress’ by her imperial son, dutifully sought out other sites connected with the life of Jesus, and discovered a holy relic of deep and lasting significance, that of the True Cross. Her devotional travels inaugurated the powerful and lasting tradition of Christian pilgrimage – the process whereby inner spirituality is strengthened and enriched by an outward journey of aspiration, physical hardship, attainment, presence, recollection and meditation.1

Astarte was the local cult-name for Venus, and even in pagan times an aura of sacred suffering and renewal hovered in the darkened grotto. The rites of Syrian Adonis, the annual life-replenishing corn-god, were celebrated here in springtime. A link has been suggested between ‘Adonis’ and ‘Adonai’; the womb which nurtured the fresh-limbed god of springtime became the tomb of the Son of Man. Perhaps we can also find here a continuity of female presence, with Astarte foreshadowing Mary Magdalene and the other women at the empty tomb, who in turn could be linked to the historical figure of Helena. The ambience was in contrast to the robustly male environment of the other great sacred place, the former Jewish Temple, manifestly masculine in its pagan Roman form as the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.

Christianity had evolved from being a faith of the oppressed into a triumphant imperial religion. From being a subversive doctrine challenging the divinity of the emperor and waiting expectantly for the end of the world, it was on the verge of granting legitimacy to imperial rule. The faith was now bound up with temporal power; it was about to become a partner to the political order. The emperor came to be seen not only as the commander-in-chief, judge and legislator, but also the living symbol of the Christian empire, with a status as God’s first servant. He became the object of a cult, which was enacted with reverential ceremonial. His person came to be held as sacred. Here was a great change.

There is a paradox in pilgrimage, especially in a journey to sacred sites undertaken by the emperor’s mother. The Roman Empire took on the aspect of a universal empire; the earthly embodiment of the unbounded spiritual realm. Its universality was limited only by its proximity to another empire of equal power and magnificence, that of the Sasanid Persians. Rome implanted within the minds of the people of the Mediterranean seaboard, of Anatolia and of some of Europe, a notion of world citizenship. Here the idea of Christianity as a universal religion found fertile soil. A universal empire, where the universal gospel could be preached to every creature without distinction, was a harmonious pairing. God could proclaim his universality, his non-totemic lack of a specific locality, by his reflection in universal empire. Yet now Helena, at the moment that Christianity was affirming its universality, was by her pilgrimage subtly undermining the idea of universal empire and faith. Her devotion emphasised the individual localities of the origins of Christian faith. Undoubtedly a pilgrim’s journey can refresh and renew faith. But pilgrimage may also lead to a privatisation of piety. The notion of the universality of Jesus may shade into his being a local sacred figure of Palestine. Pilgrimage can make the inner lamp of the soul shine more brightly; but it can also fetishise a land mass, and imbue a locality with a specific devotion which may diminish the aspects of faith that aspire to worldwide validity. Helena’s own intention would have been sacred recollection, not local idolatry; but for lesser persons than herself, it was a short journey from the pilgrimage of the soul to a cultic reverence for relics of saints, the sacrality of remains, and other totemic detritus of regional superstition. Erasmus would later remind us that, by the sixteenth century, a merchant ship could be built from the fragments of wood said to be relics of the True Cross.2

Jerusalem, like other cities in Asia, passed in and out of the control of the later Roman, or Byzantine, Empire. When the Persian Sasanids, in one of their almost annual campaigns, stormed out of their capital Ctesiphon in the year 615, they conquered Anatolia and Syria – the whole of eastern Byzantium.3 They seized the alleged relic of the True Cross, and carried it home in triumph. Palestine was wrecked, and thereafter Jerusalem never regained the opulence it had known during Constantine’s reign. The Persian rage for conquest was said to have resembled that of ‘infuriated beasts and irritated dragons’.4 Two years later the same unappeased invaders hungrily eyed the great city of Constantinople from the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus. But the Emperor Heraclius gave them no quarter, and after campaigns lasting more than ten years drove them from his lands and regained possession of the ‘True Cross’. In the struggle the empires of both Byzantium and Persia drew their inspiration from sword-driven faith. In 629 Heraclius finally earned the laurel wreath of victory. The war had been in part a typical war of imperial rivalry for territories and access; but it also drew some of its force from the urge to regain totems of faith. It showed aspects of holy war. The court poet saw it more in intellectual and metaphysical terms. Celebrating a triumph, George Pisidis wrote an ode to Heraclius: ‘O capable intelligence and most acute nature! Fire of analysis energetically pursuing profundity!’5 Heraclius’ victory was so monumental that it found echo far away, with a report of the sacred struggle reaching Arabia, where it is mentioned in the Koran.6

Few victories have been more filled with irony. For the struggle of empires, the cataclysmic duel between Rome and Persia, the battles fought amid the turbulent rivers, harsh deserts, trackless plains and distant snowy mountains of Asia had exhausted both sides. Winning and losing their empires by the sword had left them prostrate. The future of Syria and Mesopotamia lay neither with east nor west, but with the south. In Edward Gibbon’s words, ‘The rival monarchies at the same instant became the prey of an enemy whom they had been so long accustomed to despise.’7

Islam had been born a few years before Heraclius’ victory, in AD 622. On that date the dedicatedly monotheist prophet Muhammad undertook his flight (hijra) from Mecca to Medina. For a decade he built a state there, based on his prophetic messages. Following his death in 632 his mantle fell to his leading followers – although later it was to be contested in a bitter struggle between them and members of his family, which led to the division of Islam into two branches: Sunni, known as orthodox, and Shiite, from the Arabic word for ‘partisan’, since its followers were the partisans of Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law. The successor to the Prophet, and leader of the community of believers, was known as the caliph (khalifa).

Islam evolved in a milieu which was partly Christian, partly Jewish, partly pagan, but wholly Arab. The Christian influence came, in part, from the southern Syrian hills; here, desert Arabs, traversing great spaces, had been drawn to the play of light radiating from monkish cells. Distant flickering lamps were welcomed as points of illumination amid brooding night; they were visions of hope and longing, starry presences which lifted darkness from the soul.8 The great pre-Islamic poet Imru’ ul Qais, finely combining the sensual with the austere, proclaimed of his beloved that ‘in the evening she brightens the darkness, as if she were the lamp of the cell of a monk devoted to God’.9 We find a similar mixture of hedonism edged with Christian sanctity in the verses of al-A’sha, a contemporary of Muhammad: ‘Many an early cup [glistening] like the eye of a cock have I drunk with trusty youths in its curtained chamber while the church-bells rang – pure wine like saffron and amber, poured in its glass and mixed, spreading a costly perfume in the house, as if the riders had [just] arrived with it from the sea of Darin.’10 (Darin was a port near Bahrain, where musk from India was unloaded.)

The influence of the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia, Ethiopia today, was felt strongly in southern Arabia. At one time part of Arabia was subject to Abyssinia, an event which had occurred in response to the over-ambitious policies of a Jewish king who ruled south Arabia in the sixth century AD. There had been converts to Judaism, and more than one Arabian tribe had embraced Judaism. The Jewish faith, in its sceptical Sadducean form, where observance is minimal and faith is expressed in doing what is naturally good, was also present in Arabia. Its presence promoted the idea that, amidst different faiths vying with each other, an indistinct belief in One God was alone necessary, combined with an aspiration to do what was, on consideration, felt to be right. In the city of Mecca itself the mood was occasionally touched by the monotheistic currents which surrounded it. The rich families of that prosperous trading city remained devoted to pleasure and to polytheism – a polytheism which even here could develop into a kind of quasi-monotheism that has been called henotheism. (Monotheism indicates the idea of God alone, henotheism that of one supreme God among lesser deities, a less rigorous notion.11)

In this ambience the new faith was proclaimed. What Islam uniquely brought was a universal message expressed within the Arab context; that is, it was a profound monotheistic message, using the imagery, social context and above all the rich and resonant language of the Arabs. Islam is not a specifically Arab religion; but its formulation and expression in Arabia gave the faith aspects which only the Arabs could have given it. Islam also unified them at a highly appropriate moment. Its success was due more to practicality than to religious enthusiasm (in the sense of extremism). Muhammad himself was too disciplined to be called a religious enthusiast.12 If read carefully, the Koran reveals not a frenzy of enthusiasm and violence, but gratitude to God for his works and the Prophet’s fondness for his native city of Mecca despite the materialism of its big merchant families.13 The preaching of a new faith gave its propagators a powerful sense of zeal; but it was a zeal circumscribed by the founder’s practicality.

The Koran should properly be known as the Qur’an; the word is cognate with the Syriac qeryana, ‘reading’, ‘declaiming’, and with the Aramaic qeri, ‘to be read’, a marginal indication of textual corruption found in the Hebrew bible. The language of the Koran is of central significance. Its power and beauty can soften the hearts of the most hardbitten sceptics. As Peter Brown has written: ‘For Muhammad’s followers, this was no Syriac religious ode, a human composition offered by man to God. It was an echo of the voice of God himself, of a God who had never ceased, throughout the ages, to “call out” to mankind.’14 The astonishing power of the language made it easy to believe that Arabic was spoken in paradise, and that any translation of the Koran, if not actually blasphemous, violated its essential spirit.

Muhammad had made no conquests beyond the Arabian peninsula. But in the immediate aftermath of his death the Arab horsemen, imbued with the mission to spread the Prophet’s message, stormed out of the peninsula and within a comparatively short time were in control of vast tracts of land. Besides Asia they conquered westwards: Egypt, North Africa, ultimately Spain. The struggle was hard fought: Alexandria had to be conquered twice (in 641 and 645). But the story of the burning of the library of Alexandria is almost certainly a fake, since much of the library had already been destroyed – by Julius Caesar, by turbulent monks raised to wrath by theological niceties, and by an edict of the Emperor Theodosius dating from about AD 389. The story of the conflagration was first related by Abdullatif al-Baghdadi, who died in 1231, and it was copied by Grigor abul-Faraj, whose Arab history was translated in 1663 and became influential in the developing studies of the East.15

Just as the Persians and the Byzantines had fought tenaciously, so now the new invaders staked a claim to the land of west Asia, with the benefit of being more lightly armed. Their subsequent victory broke down the ‘iron curtain’ of antiquity, the Roman–Persian frontier, and united most of east Rome with Persia, fashioning a new realm which recreated the universality of the Roman Empire, but in a more easterly position.16 The first caliph was an elderly, cautious man of integrity, Abu Bakr. His successor, Omar, saw Islam as a world phenomenon. (Some commentators have likened Omar’s position in the faith to that of St Paul within Christianity.)

The campaign to capture Syria concluded with the battle of the Yarmuk in 636, when Arab forces under Khalid ibn al-Walid defeated Byzantine and mercenary forces led by the brother of Emperor Heraclius. Departing, the emperor memorably declared: ‘Farewell, Syria, and what an excellent country this is for the enemy!’17 The conquest of Syria had been made easier for the conquerors for two reasons. In the first place, Islam had the advantage of its simplicity. Christianity, to those who set their minds to work out its theology, had become very complex. The issue of the Trinity was the most perplexing: it was hard to see how one God could be Three, each of whom was fully God in his own right, while yet there were not three gods but One. (The view that the three persons of the Trinity were three differing aspects of the One God is heretical and Sabellian; the Athanasian view of the Trinity is that each of the three persons is fully God.) The puzzles concerning the nature of Christ were equally complex. Serious divisions had arisen, especially in Syria, concerning the connection between his human and divine natures: whether they commingled or remained separate. If they did commingle, then Christ was of a different substance from mortals. If they were separate, which substance died on the Cross? Then might we be not saved? All these issues were of prime importance at the time. The Syrian Christians had reached their own conclusions, but these were opposed as heretical by Constantinople. Islam allowed them to have the beliefs they wished. Those still puzzled by Christian metaphysics were offered a simple and direct formula: ‘There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.’ The duties of being a Muslim were equally straightforward: belief in God and his prophet, prayer, almsgiving, fasting during Ramadan, and pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in the lifetime.18

In the second place Arabs and Arab kingdoms had had a presence in pre-Islamic Syria. The Nabataeans had enjoyed greatness in the first century AD, and from the sixth century the Ghassanids of the Hawran had acted as Christian auxiliary soldiers to Byzantium, despite their dissident views on the nature of Christ. These kingdoms and linguistic groups felt an affinity with the Arabs of Arabia, a point which was reinforced when the Islamic conquerors allowed the Ghassanids to practise their own beliefs freely. This liberty of belief stood in contrast to the faith forced on them by the heresy-hunters of Byzantium.

Not all of the initial Arab conquests of the extensive lands of Eastern Christianity were straightforward, or occurred in the manner of liberation from theological tyranny. Much of the warfare was violent, harsh and inhumane. In seventh-century Armenia a part of the Christian population which had taken refuge in its churches was burnt alive by forces commanded by Abd ur-Rahman.19 But even here there was only occasional pressure to convert the people to Islam, and Armenians reached high office as Christians.20 As a European Islamicist of the seventeenth century was to write of the Islamic conquests in general, ‘I own that violence had some place here, but persuasion had more.’21

Jerusalem had already established a place within Islam, since Muhammad had initially instructed his followers to pray in its direction, in the years before it became obligatory for them to address their prayers towards Mecca. Jerusalem was also, possibly, the site of the Prophet’s journey into heaven, according to a text in which the term ‘the Further mosque’ appears.22 ‘The Further mosque’ is a translation of ‘al-Aqsa mosque’; however, confusingly, this is not the site of the present-day Aqsa mosque, but that of the Dome of the Rock. (An added complication is that the term may have been intended as a reference to a place in heaven.) But early tradition, which always counts for much in religious matters, held that the sanctuary in Jerusalem – the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as al-Haram ash-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary – was, alongside Mecca and Medina, a most sacred place, appropriate for deeply devotional prayer.23

Christian chronicles and prophetic discourses of this time treat the coming of Islam and the Arabs for the most part as a matter of little contention. Theophanes, the Byzantine chronicler, did not see Islam as a radically new phenomenon. (Gibbon crisply comments, ‘The Greeks, so loquacious in controversy, have not been anxious to celebrate the triumphs of their enemies.’24) Occasionally from a Christian source one finds a fierce polemic; but such things were exceptional. ‘The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius’, a seventh-century Syriac document, treats the emergence of the new faith as a judgement on the wicked ways of the Christians, and a presage of the end of time.25 When the Christian Syrian historian Dionysius of Tel-Mahre wrote about the Arab invasion some 180 years after the events, he gave a reasonably objective summary of Muslim beliefs, free from extreme language. He believed that God had nodded in assent while the Arab empire waxed in power.26 A Syriac chronicle of AD 724 calls Muhammad the ‘messenger of God’ (rasulo d-alloho).27 The patriarch of the Christians of the East, or Nestorians, writing during his patriarchate of AD 650–60 to the archbishop of Persia, said, ‘The Arabs, to whom God at this time has given the empire of this world – behold, they are among you, as you know well, and yet they attack not the Christian faith, but, on the contrary, they favour our religion, do honour to our priests and the saints of the Lord, and confer benefits on churches and monasteries.’28

The Armenian history attributed to Sebeos – who may have been a bishop in eastern Armenia – also contains an unvarnished description of the coming of Islam. The narrative (perhaps dating from 660 or 661) sets out starkly, in its earlier sections, the unrelenting conflict between Rome and Persia which preceded Islam, a struggle described by a modern commentator as ‘total war’. Sebeos, the chronicler, goes on to note the appearance among the ‘sons of Ismael’ of a man whose name was Mahmet, ‘a merchant’. His presence had been manifested, the author declares, ‘as if by God’s command . . . as a preacher and the path of truth. He taught them [the Arabs] to recognise the God of Abraham. . . . Abandoning their vain cults they turned to the living God who had appeared to their father Abraham. So Mahmet legislated for them . . .’ Sebeos held that the expansion of Islam had occurred in response to divine command; it constituted the accomplishment of God’s will; though later, when the Arab caliphate had grown powerful and was fighting bitter battles against Christian Byzantium, he castigated it as wicked.29

In the West, the Venerable Bede noted the coming of the Saracens without rancour, despite the fact that their conquests had been halted in the south of France. The battle of Poitiers, and the Arab presence on the world stage, made no great impact on his consciousness. Bede was more interested in the Biblical genealogy of the Saracens, and their descent from Hagar and Ishmael.30

Two years after the battle of the Yarmuk, the Arab armies were encamped at Jabiya near the Jawlan (or Golan) Heights, which was the former capital city of the Christian Ghassanid Arabs. From this base they captured Jerusalem and thus completed the occupation of Syria. Their commander was Abu Obaidah. Different traditions have survived concerning the circumstances of the city’s capitulation. What is known is that the caliph, Omar, came to Jerusalem in order to play a defining part in the settlement which followed its Islamic conquest. In one of the traditions Abu Obaidah summoned Omar to Jabiya to discuss the future of Jerusalem, since the population of that city, led by the elderly and saintly patriarch Sophronius, refused to capitulate without the presence of the highest Muslim dignitary. In another version, Omar came to the Muslim headquarters of his own free will, and after a short campaign, the terms of Islamic Jerusalem were agreed.31

Both the caliph and his general approached Jerusalem. To the patriarch the Muslims’ appearance seems to have called forth a mood of deep gloom: Omar’s arrival indicated ‘the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place’.32 How are we to take the elderly patriarch’s utterance? The city’s capitulation was a loss, a cause of great sorrow to an old man; maybe it seemed like the end of, if not the world, at least his world. Perhaps Sophronius saw domination by Arabs, despite their monotheism, as little different from the occupations which had followed the victories of the pagan Sasanid Persians; he might have recalled the ferocious and unqualified demand of the Persian emperor Chosroes (Khusrau) II: ‘I shall not spare you until you renounce the Crucified One, whom you call God, and worship the sun.’33

But the commonest currency of opinion is that Sophronius was disturbed – affronted even – by the casual clothing worn by the conquering Muslims. Their style was too much at ease. The historian Theophanes describes Omar approaching clad in ‘filthy garments of camel-hair’;34 another writer has him wearing a coarse cotton shirt and a sheepskin jacket. Abu Obaidah is reported as approaching in a similar non-triumphalist manner. The casual garb, redolent of equality, was a matter of comment. The people of eastern empires were used to something smarter. Sophronius’ tradition held that conquerors should be gorgeously robed. The Persians themselves had shown a correct imperial bearing: in 622 the Sasanid general Shahrvaraz (in Greek, Sarbaros) had, in defeat, handed over ‘his golden shield, his sword, lance, gold belt set with precious stones, and boots’.35

The Muslims to whom Sophronius was signing away control of his city cared little for gold belts or precious stones. They were almost certainly making a point by wearing everyday clothes, shunning the splendour to which the patriarch, as a ritual perfomer of the greatest act of the greatest empire, was accustomed. To a Muslim, the wearing of fine robes was an act of arrogance in the sight of God. It was almost as if there were a divine message of classlessness. This view could hardly be further from that of the Orthodox Christian liturgy, where religion was the mystical partner of empire. The celebrant officiated in the unique mystery whereby the people could partake of that greater realm of Christ of which the emperor’s was a reflection, or a rehearsal. So the patriarch expected that those who came as representatives of another faith should appear wearing clothes fitting to an office similar to his own. Clothing to him was an indicator of religious and social position. Casual clothes were deemed incorrect, in a context where rich robes indicated proximity to God.

The Muslim ethos, though monotheist, was markedly different from that of Byzantium. In Sunni Islam there is no intermediary between God and man. Robed priests, and the sacrament of the eucharist, with its solemn internal processional drama, its ritual moves from penitence to absolution and adoration, are alien to it. The unitary God of Islam is compassionate, but distant. There is no question of incarnation, of spiritual intimacy, or of the freedom of access granted by the sacrament. The idea that there might be a Holy Family, or that Mary might be Mother of God, is unacceptable. Belief in the Trinity is almost indistinguishable from polytheism. To the philosophical problem of the otherness of God (the puzzle of reconciling the absoluteness of God with the possibility of his caring for humanity), Islam has maintained that God remains far off, virtually an abstract idea, intelligible only through faith, devotional practice, deeds and intellect. ‘The rest is not our business.’ There are no sacred mysteries. The humility of man before God was appropriate and important; but there is little personal closeness or intimacy. God could not suffer and die on a cross, nor was he such that he could ever share a meal with human beings. Nevertheless the Koran holds that Jesus – Isa – was a unique person, and a very great prophet sent by God; in some places he is declared to be the awaited one. But not the actual son; and certainly not sharing (as Athanasius demanded) the same metaphysical substance as God.

Following the city’s capitulation, Omar agreed the terms for its citizens: that the city’s Christian inhabitants would be granted security for their lives, property, churches and crucifixes, that the Jews were not to live among them, that churches were not to be used as living accommodation, and not dismantled or reduced in size. Christians thus retained their religious liberties. (Theophanes the historian speaks of ‘a promise of immunity for the whole of Palestine’.36) In return they had to pay a poll tax (jizya), and to assist in defence against the armies of Byzantium.37

The time for prayer had arrived. Omar and Sophronius found themselves on the steps of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But Omar refused to pray. In Gibbon’s words: ‘“Had I yielded,” said Omar, “to your request, the Moslems of a future age would have infringed the treaty under colour of imitating my example.”’38 Omar would appear to be quietly pointing out that, in the context of a universal deity, true devotion can be shown by being cautious about zeal; that prayer can be at its most profound by delaying or refusing to pray. His unique and generous act of sacred diplomacy, a repudiation of local fetishism, did not prevent the subsequent violent abuse of faith.

Omar looked elsewhere for a place to pray, and observing that the sacred area of the Jewish Temple, unoccupied and ignored for 600 years was covered in filth – it seems to have served as the city’s septic tank – demanded that the area be cleaned, and that it be made a place of prayer. The caliph himself assisted in the clean-up by shovelling up some of the septic material.39

Sophronius had taken Omar’s at-ease dress as a sign of ‘devilish pretence’,40 but there is no evidence that Omar was insincere. So far as is known, the details of the treaty were adhered to, and Christians in Jerusalem did not suffer unduly following the first encounter of substance between Christianity and Islam. The treaty was lenient for a conquered people, more a matter of reinforcing former privileges than of compelling a new and drastic way of life. It was a largely sensible, rational and non-triumphalist treaty; maybe it was hard on the Jews, but they had been supportive of the Persians, and Jews and Christians at this date had not yet achieved a modus vivendi. Over the next 500 years they were to find their way back to the holy city.

Jerusalem continued to be accessible to Christian pilgrims; the Gaulish bishop Arculf visited the holy places in 670 or thereabouts. On his return he was shipwrecked off the Hebrides. Here he recounted his experiences to Adamnus, Abbot of Iona. He described the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as being supported by ‘twelve stone columns of marvellous size’. He also mentioned a rectangular ‘house of prayer’ which the Muslims had built on the reclaimed site of the Temple.41 Arculf’s spirit had been touched and elevated by his pilgrimage. Christian visitors were well treated under the new dispensation.

The lands of Islam still took on the nature and aspect of a universal realm; but despite the breaking-down of the former iron curtain between Persia and Rome, a new barrier descended within the faith at this time – not of iron, being more gauzy and permeable, but of deep and ineluctable significance. The fourth caliph, Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali, had been challenged by the governor of Syria, Mu’awiyah, who was proclaimed caliph in 660. He was the very able leader of the Umayyad clan, which became the dynasty forever linked with opposition of the ‘partisans of Ali’, or Shia. On Mu’awiyah’s death this opposition blew into a revolt, focused around Husain, the son of Ali and Fatima, and grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. He set out for Iraq to raise a revolt, claiming that the Prophet’s family had a superior right to the caliphate. In 680 Umayyad forces confronted a small escort (of only about 200 followers) gathered around Husain. A desperate and tragic battle was fought at Kerbela, in which the overwhelming forces of the new caliph Yazid, which he had raised in the city of Kufa, attempted to encircle Husain, his family and followers,42 and to parch them with a terrible thirst as the rival armies stood motionless. In the words of R.A. Nicholson, ‘All the harrowing details invented by grief and passion can scarcely heighten the tragedy of the closing scene.’43 Gibbon describes it thus:

The enemy advanced with reluctance, and one of their chiefs deserted, with thirty followers, to claim the partnership of inevitable death. In every close onset, or single combat, the despair of the Fatimites was invincible; but the surrounding multitudes galled them from a distance with a cloud of arrows, and the horses and men were successively slain: a truce was allowed on both sides for the hour of prayer; and the battle at length expired by the death of the last of the companions of Hosein. Alone, weary and wounded, he seated himself at the door of his tent. As he tasted a drop of water, he was pierced in the mouth with a dart; and his son and nephew, two beautiful youths, were killed in his arms. He lifted his hands to heaven – they were full of blood – and he uttered the funeral prayer for the living and the dead. In a transport of despair his sister issued from the tent, and adjured the general of the Cufians that he would not suffer Hosein to be murdered before his eyes: a tear trickled down his venerable beard; and the boldest of his soldiers fell back on every side as the dying hero threw himself among them. The remorseless Shamer, a name detested by the faithful, reproached their cowardice; and the grandson of Mohammed was slain with three-and-thirty strokes of lances and swords.44

In some respects the passion of Husain came to be as emblematic and as filled with inner sanctity as the passion of Christ is for Christians. Every year, on the tenth day of the Islamic month of Muharram, the Shia recall, with deeds of anguished devotion, the sacrifice of Husain at Kerbela, not far from the Euphrates.

Within the Islamic empire Christians continued to live in their native cities. The early caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty had no desire to convert them, since they were a source of handsome tribute; besides, the Damascus caliphs liked their city, and were too busy living a metropolitan life to resort to religious zealotry. The early Umayyad rulers took on some of the appearance of late-Roman emperors; a visitor to the Umayyad ruins at Ainjar (or Anjar) in Lebanon today, who is shown round by the Armenian guide (who hales from the nearby refugee camp, set up near the site in the years before the Second World War), may wonder: are these elegant ruins of the east or the west? Do they not have more in common with Rome or Ravenna than Baghdad or Iran? R.A. Nicholson summed up the best of the Umayyad rulers as ‘strong and singularly capable rulers, bad Muslims and good men of the world, seldom cruel, plain livers if not high thinkers’.45 One of the leading Christians of Umayyad Syria was St John of Damascus, the last of the Church Fathers. He had been a friend of the caliph Yazid in his youth and, following his father and grandfather, he became a servant in the household of the Umayyad caliphs; his father was head of the revenue department. The family lived a freely Christian life at the Islamic court. The son seemed destined for the same high civil service position as his father, but he received the calling to monkhood, and left the civilised pleasures of the city to take vows at the monastery of St Saba, in Palestine.46

At this wildly desolate monastery in the Judaean hills, together with his spiritual brother Cosmas of Maiuma (a town close to modern Gaza), he wrote hymns, and tracts against the iconoclasts, who were then in the ascendant in Byzantium. His arguments in favour of icons were imbued with the spirit of Christian Neoplatonism. St John of Damascus understood the world itself as an icon of God’s thought; and if the Deity could have an icon, why should not man, his creature, do likewise? As regards Islam, he was no polemicist, but was concerned rather to refute its ‘errors’. To John, Islam was a Christian heresy. He acknowledged that both Christians and Muslims worshipped the same one God. He criticised Islam for not accepting the divinity and crucifixion of Jesus; as a result he could not accept either the prophecy of Muhammad, or its corollaries, the notions that the prophet of Islam was the ‘seal’ of the prophets – that his revelation was the last and fullest revelation – and that the Koran was literally divine. Perhaps the most important points about St John of Damascus were the courtesy and scholarly manner in which he conducted his disputes with Islam and the ordinariness of his Christian devotional life under that faith. Occasionally his monkish superiors would make him return to Damascus, where he would be sent to hawk baskets in the city streets for the good of his soul.

The Umayyads were overthrown in 750, to be followed by Abbasid rule from Baghdad. Tolerance and accessibility continued for Christian pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. Within the caliphate weaknesses appeared after about 840, when the rulers ceased to be concerned with government and farmed out power and administration to slaves.

The shift of the caliphate to Baghdad had a significant effect on the worldwide spread of Christianity. The Eastern Christians, or Nestorians, had been held in great esteem by early Islam, partly because of the legend that Muhammad had developed his sense of spiritual mission through the agency of a Nestorian monk he had met on a journey, and partly because they were the educated class in the east. With the establishment of the caliphate in the east, and with now-monotheist Islamic protection, Nestorian preachers were able to set out across Central Asia into China, in perhaps the greatest Christian missionary enterprise ever undertaken. Their presence among the Turkish tribes, and the respect that was felt towards them, is signified by the likely derivation of the word çelebi, a Turkish word, meaning ‘gentleman’, brought from Central Asia into Anatolia in Seljuk times. Almost certainly it is derived from the Arabic salib, meaning cross or crucifix, and had originally been applied to the Nestorian missionaries and clergy proselytising in Central Asia. The unequivocal evidence for the vast enterprise of Nestorian Christian mission work undertaken from Islamic lands is the tablet of Si-ngan-fu, a town in Shensi province. On this stone there is an inscription in Chinese and Syriac, which records the excellent qualities of the Christian religion and its widespread propagation in the Middle Kingdom. The date on the column is 1092 of the Seleucid era: that is, AD 781.47

If Islam had broken down the barrier between east Rome and Persia, and allowed Christian missionaries to carry their scriptures into China, it had (so it has been claimed) erected a tough barrier in Europe. The theory, set forth by Henri Pirenne in 1925 and elaborated in 1937, is that ‘without Islam, the Frankish Empire would probably never have existed, and Charlemagne, without Muhammad, would be inconceivable’.48 The new Islamic order in the Mediterranean and southern Europe broke down the north–south social unity within Europe, blocking off northern Europe and forcing it into itself, from which it emerged in the person of Charlemagne and in the condition of medieval feudalism. The theory is alluring, and will be debated for decades.

It is hard to deny the likely truth of its basic outlines. Nevertheless, the northern-European kingdom was not hermetically sealed. Its isolation was less than total. Coins of the Abbasid caliphs have been discovered in Orkney, and Saxon coins, probably Danegeld, dug up in the Middle East. Offa, king of Mercia in the eighth century, adopted the gold dinar of Baghdad as his currency. A fine example of this coin exists in an Edinburgh museum, with the inscription in Arabic ‘God is most great’ surrounding the name ‘OFFA’.49

Although Charlemagne’s empire lasted for not much more than 100 years, that time was imbued with a quality of grandeur and magnificence which haunted Europe for a millennium, and which found a moment of splendour around 790–800, when the Frankish (that is, Germanic) emperor Charlemagne (correctly ‘Charles the Great’) sent ambassadors, one of whom was Isaac the Jew, to the court of caliph Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad. The caliph reciprocated with gifts: an elephant – the only one he possessed, named Abu ’l Abbas, which would find its way into northern-European manuscript illuminations – as well as ivory, incense and a water-clock (or klepsydra). In return Charles sent white and green robes to the caliph, and a pack of his best hounds. The spirit was akin to that later displayed by Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold: a generous and lavish show put on by rulers at the peak of their power, who understood the political impact of the gift of gorgeous artefacts. An establishment, part hostel and part hospital, of Charles the Great was founded in the centre of Jerusalem to attend to the needs of pilgrims.50

A legend grew up that Charles was sent the keys to the Holy Sepulchre, but this was almost certainly fictitious. What seems to have occurred is that the Patriarch of Jerusalem, in a gesture of politeness reflecting the warm diplomatic atmosphere created by the two sovereigns, sent to the Frankish emperor something that appeared to be the keys of the holy city, but which was really just a gift and a reminder: a kind of gilded tourist memento, roughly equivalent to a special edition of the imitation, resin-made artefacts that one finds in museum shops today. A similar item would have been sent by the patriarch to any distinguished sovereign or guest. A number of European commentators, seeking to justify the Crusades, have claimed that Charlemagne’s actions, in receiving the keys and in building a hospital, amounted to establishing a European protectorate over Jerusalem; but one has to have a very vivid sense of European superiority to interpret the sending of such a present as the gift of a foreign political protectorate.

In the exchange there was, besides the pride and pleasure of showing off power, an element of great-power calculation. Charles was looking for allies beyond the Byzantine Empire, whose emperor had inherited the mantle of Rome; he was seeking to enhance his own imperial legitimacy by opening diplomatic relations with a great ruler one step further away. Harun al-Rashid was likewise glad of positive relations with the Franks, to counterbalance the dynastic claims of the Spanish Umayyads (scions of the Damascus caliphate, a single member of whom had survived the Abbasid revolution). Even at this date the part played by religion in the creation of alliances and hostilities among world powers could be placed second by powerful and charismatic rulers. The idea that geographically distinct communities sharing the same religion have been politically ‘One’, either in early Christianity or within Islam, is a piece of mystification, an attempt to make a case for unity when separation was more likely to be the reality. A ruler could make statecraft and religion travel in opposite directions. Except as an invoked prayer ritual, ‘Christendom’ was losing unity by the ninth century, as was the Islamic umma, or community. A central philosophical conflict of the Middle Ages was that of Realism versus Nominalism, one view accepting the objective reality of universal concepts such as ‘church’, ‘nation’, ‘political party’ or ‘mankind’, while the other denied such a reality in favour of the observation and description of particulars, affirming that there were only individual believers (or individual members) and that the overarching concepts were merely names. It is hard to deny that ‘Christendom’ and the umma were developing into Realist myths. They were little more than names, having only a tenuous external reality. There were no diplomatic instruments or objects of faith or society that indicated unity between the many differing and hard-to-reconcile strands within either of the universal monotheistic faiths. Each was appearing more as an articulation of the Nominalist position: just an aggregation of individual members. The supposed uniting factors may have found reality in the prayers of believers, but there was less evidence in the tangible quotidianity of lived life.

Bernard the Wise, a pilgrim monk, visited Egypt and Palestine in the ninth century, at the time of the Abbasid caliph, al-Mu’tazz (866–9), and stayed at Charlemagne’s hostel: ‘We were received in the hospital of the most glorious emperor Charles, where are lodged all those who go to this place for devotional reasons and speak the Roman tongue. Close to it is a church in honour of St Mary, which has a noble library through the care of the aforesaid emperor, with twelve dwelling-houses, fields, vineyards and a garden, in the valley of Jehoshaphat.’51 He noted the continuing good relations between the adherents of the different religions: ‘The Christians and the pagans [i.e. Muslims] have this kind of peace between them there that if I were going on a journey, and on the way the camel or ass which bore my poor luggage were to die, and I were to abandon all my goods there without any guardian, and go to the city for another pack animal, when I came back, I would find all my property uninjured: such is the peace there.’ Bernard added that anyone travelling without a signed document was liable to be jailed until he gave an account of himself.52 It was common sense never to travel without a passport.

Relations continued thus. In 869 the patriarch Theodosius of Jerusalem wrote: ‘The Saracens show us great good will. They allow us to build our churches and to observe our own customs without hindrance.’53

There was an intellectual exception to the low-key, sacred interchange between Christian and Muslim. In one location the interaction of Christian with Muslim was not that of the penitent spirit harvesting the humble fruits of sanctity and cloistered devotion. This was Islamic Spain, where a culture of vitality and vibrancy had sprung up, and where as a result the sin-conscious, bowed-down life of the starved, contrite soul had been eclipsed by the colourful educated splendour of a multicultural civilisation. Here Jews, Christians and Muslims forgot their differences (and most of their sins) and embarked on a voyage through learning, literature and pleasure. The Cordovan Christian scholar Paul Alvarus was a bishop who opposed civilised early humanism, being more concerned with final judgement, the Antichrist, the Beast 666 and the Second Coming, in the manner of Puritan Bible-literal end-timers both of the seventeenth century and of today. He became a prey to the uneasy thought-patterns that religion can create in the overdevotional cast of mind that excludes the broader elements of culture and civilisation. Writing in 854, in a mood of sorrow and censure, he said:

The Christians love to read the poems and the romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the holy scriptures, or who studies the gospels, prophets or apostles? Alas, all talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their language. For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves.54

The same society found Samuel ibn Nagdela, who was Jewish, as vizier to the king of Granada in about the year 1050. Samuel, known as haNagid or the Prince, was (according to Cecil Roth) a ‘generous and discriminating patron of letters’ who had gained his position by virtue of his Arabic style.55

If the Islamic West was flourishing, in the east circumstances were changing. The times were witnessing the slow sunset of a tolerant order which had existed since the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem. Knowledge, which had developed powerfully in the years from 830, was harder to find in the Islamic East in the years following the mid-ninth century. Tolerance of the sciences gave way to persecution of these studies, since science and philosophy were suspected of leading to a ‘loss of belief’.56 This intolerance, combined with political weakness, gravely weakened the Baghdad caliphate, even though it kept its civilisation and some of its learning. The caliph started to employ ethnic Turks from the east as bodyguards. Al-Mutasim built the city of Samarra (outside Baghdad) for them. Soon they were powerful enough to hold their sovereign as prisoner.

The power of culture, language and poetry was always apparent in fashioning the raw elements of Islamic history as much as religious belief and militarily based political power. One example is that of the Samanids, a dynasty founded in the ninth century AD in Central Asia. There is a linguistic paradox here. In the Iberian peninsula Arabic eased out Latin and early Spanish and became the language of culture and refinement, of love and sociability. But in Central Asia the Samanids, who appointed ethnic Turks as provincial governors, people renowned for their Islamic orthodoxy and devotion to the Arabic language, found that Persian became the dominant language. Individuals like Mahmud of Ghazna (in Afghanistan), a successor to the Samanids, were captivated by Persian literature. Mahmud, who also holds an unenviable reputation as a great looter of Hindu temples, invited all the poets of Persia to his court, and patronised the great Firdawsi, author of the Shahnama, or ‘Book of Kings’, promising him (but not delivering) a gold piece for every verse. The poets of the tenth century spoke their verses in a language which came to be known as New Persian, and which was in essentials the language which developed into that of modern Iran, written in the streamlined, smartly abbreviated and elegantly sloping script that is in use today.57

Knowledge did not vanish from the Fertile Crescent, Central Asia or the Islamic Mediterranean. But in the east mysticism grew strong, weakening the desire to rule and control that the Arabs had initially inherited from the Romans and the Persians. The desire to rule diminished, just as centuries later British rule in India would grow untenable after the intellectual assault of liberal values upon imperialism. The faith in some quarters was seen as veiled. The Koran was looked on as a mystical allegory.

This sceptical and mystical temperament found expression in the quatrains (‘Rubaiyyat’) of Omar al-Khayyam:58

There was a door to which I found no key

There was a veil past which I could not see,

Some little talk awhile of me and thee

There seemed – and then no more of thee and me.

Among those in the forefront of resisting the embrace of scholarly hesitation were the Turkish palace guards. Both in Central Asia and in the Fertile Crescent, their martial competence was seen as their principal quality, which created a contrast to the new mood of the East, which was one of savouring and reflecting. The Turks took over the reins of power when the ruling imperial nation had lost interest in ruling and administration. At the same time the new militia guards followed the faith and rule of their sovereign–captives. The Central Asian newcomers proved able in their new role; but the intellectual excitement found at the courts of the ninth-century Abbasid caliphs had vanished.

In North Africa, Shii Islam took root in the tenth century. Soon much of the southern-Mediterranean littoral had adhered to a variety of Shiism. Egypt, an unlikely recruit for Shiism, created its own caliphate, named after Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet. A number of the representatives of this caliphate were tolerant men, who showed a spirit of benevolent indifference to their Christian subjects. They were educated people who encouraged the sciences and amassed great libraries. They observed the non-Muslim communities largely without fuss: the Muslim traveller al-Mukaddasi remarks, after a visit to Jerusalem in about AD 985, ‘Everywhere the Christians and the Jews have the upper hand.’59 But there was a violent and significant exception to this pattern. Just thirty years after the foundation of Cairo, a Fatimid caliph emerged who was to send a tremor of anxiety throughout the Christian world. Al-Hakim came to power as sixth Fatimid caliph in AD 996.60 He was an extreme Shiite, and he may have driven himself half-mad by mystical exertions. The influence of hermetic, secret, Neoplatonic ideas lay heavily with him: the notions that some human beings were chosen to be, or might aspire to become, the elect, the privileged, the in-crowd, the clique – an idea which is always attractive to the human mind in its narcissistic mode. Every society has its private clubs and cliquishness. The Ladder of Perfection often has a hard heart of self-absorption, despising benefits to the wider community.

Al-Hakim declared himself a member of the most exclusive society of all. He was divine. His status was higher than that of ‘divine emanation’ accorded to other Fatimid caliphs. Although his views were offensive to Sunni Muslims, he placated them by concessions. But he was intolerant towards Christians and persecuted them until his death in 1021, reducing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to ruins and destroying several other Jerusalem churches, probably in the year 1010.61 He was said to have been particularly inflamed by what he perceived as the fraudulence of the Ceremony of Holy Fire, performed on Easter Eve. In a flash of residual rationality, he affirmed that the fire which illuminated the church for the Easter festivities, and which filled the souls of the devout with the light of faith at that pivotal sacred moment, did not (as the priests asserted) descend from heaven but originated in the spark of a deacon’s flint.

Al-Hakim’s whirlwind of destruction did not last, and within two years of his death calm returned. The Byzantine emperor funded the rebuilding of the Holy Sepulchre, and pilgrim trade revived. When the Persian pilgrim Nasir-i Khusrau visited Jerusalem in 1047, he described this central church of Christianity in all its magnificence: how it could hold 8,000 worshippers amidst decoration of coloured marble and adornment of fine sculpture. Walls were covered in Byzantine brocade worked in gold thread and depicting saints and martyrs. Here too were pictures of Jesus, portraying him riding on an ass. The prophets were shown in paintings varnished with oil of red juniper and covered by a thin layer of protective glass.62 It was clear that the Holy Sepulchre, and Christianity in the Holy Land, had staged a brilliant and rapid turnaround.

Nasir-i Khusrau also describes a building which would have been Charles the Great’s hospital: ‘Great numbers of people are here served with draughts and lotions; for there are physicians who receive a fixed stipend to attend at this place for the sick.’63 The Persian traveller also noted that ‘From all the countries of the Greeks, and also from other lands, the Christians and the Jews come up to Jerusalem in great numbers, in order to visit the church and the synagogue that is there.’ Jerusalem was a city of multifaith pilgrimage under the Fatimids. This point is also reflected in the annual Jerusalem fair which was held each September, in which commerce acted as a deterrent to fanaticism and extremism.64 The Jerusalem fair unified the people of the Mediterranean and created bonds of human brotherhood. The spirit of the fair made sure that no one cared who was Jew, Christian or Muslim. All that mattered was whether you could buy or sell. Here, within an Islamic society, was a pioneering example of the commercial rationalism which, seven centuries later, Voltaire was to hold up as an example of a defence against murderous religious hate. In business, Voltaire quipped, the only infidel was the bankrupt.