faith and sword globalities Series editor: Jeremy Black globalities is a series which reinterprets world history in a concise yet thoughtful way, looking at major issues over large time-spans and political spaces; such issues can be political, ecological, scientific, technological or intellectual. Rather than adopting a narrow chronological or geographical approach, books in the series are conceptual in focus yet present an array of historical data to justify their arguments. They often involve a multi-disciplinary approach, juxtaposing different subject-areas such as economics and religion or literature and politics. In the same series Why Wars Happen A History of Language Jeremy Black Steven Roger Fischer The Nemesis of Power A History of Writing Harald Kleinschmidt Steven Roger Fischer Monarchies, 1000–2000 A History of Reading W. M. Spellman Steven Roger Fischer The Global Financial System, Cinemas of the World 1750–2000 James Chapman Larry Allen Navies in Modern World History Geopolitics and Globalization in Lawrence Sondhaus the Twentieth Century Brian W. Blouet Sovereign Cities: The City-State through History Mining in World History Geoffrey Parker Martin Lynch China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the West J.A.G. Roberts Landscape and History since 1500 Ian D. Whyte Faith and Sword A Short History of Christian–Muslim Conflict alan g. jamieson reaktion books Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2006 Copyright © Alan G. Jamieson 2006 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound by cpi/Bath Press Ltd, Bath British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Jamieson, Alan G. Faith and sword : a short history of Christian-Muslim conflict. - (Globalities) 1. Christianity and other religions - Islam - History 2. Islam - Relations - Christianity - History I.Title 261.2'7'09 isbn-10: 1 86189 272 1 Contents list of maps 6 1 Introducing the Longest War 7 2 The Arab Conquests, 632–750 13 3 Byzantine Defiance, 750–1000 27 4 Rise of the West: Christian Advances in the Eleventh Century 41 5 Muslim Reaction: Victory over Outremer, Defeat in Spain, 1100–1300 58 6 Rise of the Ottoman Turks, 1300–1500 77 7 Ottoman Challenge: The Sixteenth Century 95 8 Ottoman Revival and Decline, 1600–1815 114 9 Triumph of the West, 1815–1918 136 10 Breaking Free, 1918–1979 157 11 Challenging America, 1979–2005 182 12 Conclusion: A New Conflict? 208 glossary of place name changes 216 chronology 218 select bibliography 223 acknowledgments 240 index 241 List of Maps Europe and the Middle East at the time of the Arab conquests 20–21 The Iberian Peninsula in the 12th and 13th centuries 68 Central Asia and the Indian Ocean in the 16th century 97 Arabic and Turkish spellings have been simplified throughout, and where an English version of an Arabic or Turkish name is common, e.g., Saladin, it has been used. one Introducing the Longest War It had been a long day for the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, Hussein Selim al-Husaini. Once the Ottoman Turkish forces had left Jerusalem, the mayor had borrowed a white sheet from an American missionary and set out on the morning of 9 December 1917 to surrender the holy city of three world religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to the approaching British army. First he met two army cooks who had blundered into Jerusalem in search of water, but they felt unable to accept the responsibil- ity of taking the surrender. Then the mayor encountered two infantry sergeants patrolling on the Lifta–Jerusalem road. They declined the honour as well, but had their photograph taken with the mayor and his party. Eventually, before the end of the day, the mayor worked his way up the British chain of command until he reached Major-General J.S.M. Shea of the 60th (London) Division, who was ready to accept his surrender of the city on behalf of General Sir Edmund Allenby, the British commander-in-chief. Allenby made his formal entry into Jerusalem via the Jaffa Gate at noon on 11 December 1917. To show his respect for the holy city, the general entered on foot. In his proclamation to the inhabitants of ‘Jerusalem the Blessed’, Allenby made it clear that he would respect and protect the holy places of all the three religions that held the city to be sacred. The British prime min- ister, David Lloyd George, had asked Allenby to capture Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the British nation. He had carried out that task with two weeks to spare, and not a single sacred building had been damaged. General Allenby was the first Christian conqueror of Jerusalem since 1099, when the city had been stormed by the 7 soldiers of the First Crusade, who had massacred the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Allenby had tactfully avoided any men- tion of crusades in his proclamation to the people of Jerusalem, but press accounts of his success were less reticent. British pro- paganda sought to make much of the capture of Jerusalem from the Turks at the end of 1917, but the war-weary allied popula- tions were largely unimpressed. Crusader imagery could not offset the grim realities of a bad year for the allied cause, with events such as the French army mutinies, the slaughter of British troops in the mud of Passchendaele, Russian withdrawal from the war and Italian defeat at Caporetto. The year 1918 brought further crises, but in the end the allied cause was victo- rious. In the autumn of 1918 Turkish resistance in the Middle East finally collapsed and an armistice was agreed. Allied forces took possession of Constantinople, which had been lost by the Christians in 1453, and the Ottoman empire, for centuries the most powerful Muslim opponent of Christian Europe, lay pros- trate. When Turkey rose again after 1919 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), it would be a very different state, committed to secularism, modernization and other aspects of Westernization. The Turks lost the Arab parts of their empire. Despite British promises of independence for the Arabs, these territories were divided between the French and the British. France was to receive Syria, but local Arabs declared Prince Feisal king of Syria in March 1920. Four months later, French troops under General Henri Gouraud swept aside Arab resistance and expelled Feisal from the Syrian capital Damascus. The British would later make him king of Iraq. General Gouraud, who had lost an arm fighting the Turks at Gallipoli in 1915, was to prove less tactful than General Allenby. Once he was in control of Damascus, Gouraud went to the tomb of Saladin, perhaps the greatest Muslim hero in the centuries-long struggle between Christianity and Islam, and boldly declared: ‘Saladin, we have returned. My presence here consecrates the cross over the crescent.’ In France the memory of that country’s major role in the Crusades had never been forgotten, but Gouraud’s triumphal- ism also reflected the view of Christians in many countries. For them the victory of the allied powers over the Ottoman empire 8 . faith and sword represented a victory of Christianity over Islam, marking the end of what had been perhaps the longest conflict in human his- tory. For almost 1,300 years Christians and Muslims had fought frequent and bitter wars, and for most of that period the Muslims had generally had the better of the struggle. However, from the seventeenth century onwards the power of Christian Europe grew dramatically. With the division of the Ottoman empire after the allied victory in 1918, only a handful of Muslim states were not part of one of the European colonial empires. The triumph of the Christians seemed complete. Yet the sources of the power that gave the Christians victory also undermined any idea that this success was principally based on a religious commitment. The superior economic and military power of the Christian West sprang from the scientific revolu- tion in the seventeenth century, the secular spirit of enquiry of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and, above all, from the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. Christianity may have helped to shape the conditions that gave birth to these revolutionary changes, but the wider implications of those changes challenged all forms of religious belief, including both Islam and Christianity. The destruction of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War ended the Christian–Muslim contest that had its basis in religious rivalry, but a new type of struggle could still break out and continue the conflict between the two sides. Muslims were the principal victims of European imperialism, and between 1920 and 1970 they were to fight successfully to free themselves from this foreign domination.The nature of the conflict had changed, however, with religious elements being less important to both sides. The Christian West became increas- ingly secular in its outlook, while Muslim resistance movements saw imported doctrines such as nationalism and socialism as being more important than their religious identity. The Second World War made it clear that European states like Britain and France were no longer world powers and leader- ship of the West passed to the United States of America. Apart from short wars with the Barbary pirates and clashes with Muslim rebels in the Philippines, the usa had little past history of serious conflict with the Islamic world, so its dominance introducing the longest war . 9 might well have been acceptable to Muslim countries.