Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [4]
For using the word “infidel,” however, I make no apology. For convenience I have taken the European, Latinate word “infidel,” both for the way that the Christians referred to Muslims and as the equivalent for the Arabic kafir, which was how the Islamic world regarded the Christians. Other words were used, but the category—those without the benefit of the true faith, Islam for one world, Christianity for the other—was roughly symmetrical. That suggestion of a mirror image, and its consequences, underpins what follows herein.
Preface
I REMEMBER SITTING BESIDE A ROAD IN THE MIDDLE OF MOROCCO, alone and fearful. Two men in an ancient little truck stopped and asked, first in Arabic and then in French, where I was going. I told them, north, to Tangier, and then to Spain. As we drove, very slowly, we talked in a desultory way, but most of the journey was silent. But when we got to the city, they insisted that I stay with them.
These two brothers took me to their home, where I stayed for several days. They showed me the low life of the city, which was extensive, and we spent (it seemed) many hours in the suq, drinking Moroccan mint tea, for which I have never lost the taste. At night the power invariably failed, leaving the center of Tangier in darkness. The hubbub would stop for a few seconds, and then lights and candles would be lit, people shifting effortlessly from a modern to a more traditional pattern of life. Eventually, and with some reluctance, I said that I had to catch the boat to Malaga, and undertake another long walk to Granada. My new friends, Hassan and Mahmud, took me to the port and I left. I never saw them again, but that is where this book began.
This is the kind of experience that many travelers, men and women, have had. Later on the road I heard of people who had been robbed or held up in Morocco. From the stories I could tell that while some accounts were obviously true, others stemmed from some instinctive suspicion and from the consequent misinterpretation of a friendly gesture that can arise between “East” and “West.” At the time I said nothing, thinking how foolhardy I had been. But subsequently I understood not just the hospitality of my two chance friends but also the risk that they had taken, picking up someone who might claim that they had stolen from him, or worse. This had not stopped them. Hassan and Mahmud saw only someone tired and thirsty.
The fear was real and so too was the friendship. Over the succeeding years researching in Spain and the Middle East, I read more and more about the deep antipathy between Islam and the Western world, about the violence and hatred that it generated. But as the pile of material grew, the clarity of this image diminished. So too did the connection between cause and effect. Often some occurrence, a massacre or some other act of violence, was rooted in particular events, but as often the trail petered out. The rationale just lay somewhere in the undifferentiated past. It was a given: the two worlds (“East” and “West” or, more accurately, “north” and “south,” at all events “Christendom” and “Islam”) were in opposition to each other. There were connections even longer in duration, such as the relationship between the Christian and the Jewish worlds, that often generated atrocity. But it was not the same. There was something quite specific in the meeting between Islam and Christendom that seemed to engender violence. The deep cause seemed hidden beneath the normal explanations, underlying political and economic rivalries, personal ambitions and vanities, chance and accident.
As a child I used to play a game called Chinese Whispers. There is a story from the First World War of a message being whispered down a trench, Send reinforcements, we