Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [28]
CHAPTER TWO
First Contact
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT ENMITY, HOW IT WAS CREATED AND HOW IT IS sustained. While Muslims were not the first or only enemies of Western Christendom, they quickly became its prime focus for fear and hatred. Eventually the very words used to describe them became common tokens of abuse.1 Christians at the time of Lepanto often insulted each other in terms applied to Muslims. Protestants in sixteenth-century Bavaria described their clerical enemy as “Jesuits and Mamelukkes.” In England, William Tyndale regretted how many of his Catholic countrymen had become “the Antichriste of Rome’s mamelukes.” “Lustful Turk,” “street Arab,” and “mad mullah” are all nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century epithets, but they reached back to ideas about the East that developed steadily from the seventh century onward.2
The Christian preoccupation with “Islam,” if we judge it by the volume of written texts—books, exegeses, descriptions, polemics, odes, and epics—far exceeded any Muslim interest in Western Christendom.3 We should distinguish Islam or Christianity, which are the faiths that their adherents would recognize, from “Islam” or “Christianity,” which are images constructed by their enemies. From the mid–seventh century, “Islam” was seen as the prime external challenge to true Christian faith. Only the enemy within, heresy, came close to its deadly menace. The image of “Islam” as enemy, competitor, and archadversary grew more complex and more potent over time. The initial crudity of the image was made more subtle both by adding new dimensions as circumstances altered and by jettisoning those no longer relevant. So, the crude parodies of the Prophet Mohammed tended to diminish while ever more baroque descriptions of Islamic virulence multiplied.
This ability to “construct” enemies, to make them demonic in their power, all-embracing in their antagonism, unsurpassed in their malevolence, permeated western European society. It was deployed on many occasions, and proved effective against all types of dissidents, and every kind of political, ethnic, and social enemy.4 We should therefore take nothing said about “Islam,” or for that matter “heresy” or “Judaism,” at face or surface value, but try to see, first of all, behind the accretion of meanings. From the outset, the pace of Islam’s advance took Christendom by surprise. The Prophet Mohammed was born about 570, only five years after the death of the emperor Justinian, who had restored the Roman Empire to its greatest extent since the second century A.D. Yet within a single generation after the Prophet’s own demise in 632, the desert warriors of Islam were laying siege to Justinian’s capital city, Constantinople. As Edward Gibbon observed, “When the Arabs first issued from the desert, they must have been surprised at the ease and rapidity of their own success.”
Before the coming of Islam, Arabs took pride in their tribal wars and their heroic wildness; the Latin epithet later used was ferox, suggesting a wild headstrong impetuosity. The Latin suggested an animal vigor, but for the Arabs it was a largely positive self-image, while for Christians it was a synonym for barbarism.5 The armies of Islam that emerged from the void beyond Roman Philadelphia (modern Amman in Jordan) and the other Roman cities of the desert edge, known collectively as the Decapolis, looked no different from any other tribesmen. They had none of the trained skills or the well-made weapons of the best Byzantine troops or of the heavily armored Persian horsemen. At best, they were tribal warriors inured to a hard life, who could flourish in a desert environment where the heavily armored cavalry and plodding infantry could not survive for more than a few days. Neither of the two Eastern empires—Rome and Persia—paid much attention to the desert margin. They hired other Arabs to protect their towns and cities from desert marauders. This was the approach that the Western Roman Empire had centuries before adopted toward its own “barbarians.”
This was a different