In the East, the Christian Byzantine Empire (or Eastern Rome) suffered a series of defeats at the hands of the Muslim Seljuq Turks. The emperor wrote to Pope Urban II to seek Europe’s help against the Turks. His call was heeded. Urban launched a holy war (known as the Crusades) in 1095 and called upon all Christians in Europe to unite and fight against the “enemies of God.” This charge wasn’t simply, or even primarily, about religion. As John Esposito explains, “For the Pope, the call to the defense of the faith and Jerusalem provided an ideal opportunity to gain recognition for papal authority and its role in legitimating temporal rulers, and to reunite the Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) churches.”10 Religion became the screen behind which social and economic conflicts were played out. To be sure, it was not just Muslims who were killed by the crusaders: systematic pogroms were carried out against Jews in Europe, and Christians in the Byzantine Empire were also mercilessly slaughtered. Additionally, at various points Muslims and Christians cooperated with one another, and turned against their own sides, out of self-interest.
European rulers took up the call to Holy War for a variety of different reasons. “Christian rulers, knights, and merchants were driven by the political, military, and economic advantages that would result from the establishment of a Latin kingdom in the Middle East.”11 Additionally, Europe consisted of a number of rival feudal regimes that constantly fought each other. The Crusades served as a means to reduce this intra-European conflict and to deflect attention onto an external enemy. When Urban launched the First Crusade, he proclaimed: “Let those . . . who are accustomed to wantonly wage private war against the faithful march upon the infidels. . . . Let those who have long been robbers now be soldiers of Christ. Let those who once fought against brothers and relatives now rightfully fight against the barbarians. Let those who have been hirelings for a few pieces of silver now attain an eternal reward.”12 Using religion to cement identity and loyalty, the papacy sought to create a united Christian Europe over which it could hold spiritual authority. Those who heeded this call and joined the crusader armies, however, were driven by everything from religious zeal to the rewards of plunder.
Thus, the image of the Muslim enemy and of Islam as a demonic religion started to come into focus in this context in the late eleventh century. Mobilizing the population for a holy war required religious arguments; it became necessary to acquire information about Islam, its teachings, the life of the prophet Muhammad, and so on in order to argue against them. Here the works of Peter the Venerable and others provided useful fodder for the Church to attack Islam as a heresy and Muhammad as a false prophet.
What Christians now confronted was a religion that was similar to theirs but that challenged the primacy of their belief system. The God of Christianity is the same God of Abraham worshiped in Islam, but Christianity claims that God’s revelation in Jesus marked the end of revelation and of prophecy. Islam makes a similar claim but argues that Muhammad was the last prophet who received the final and correct Word of God.
This was not the first time Christianity had encountered such a challenge. Jews, similarly, do not accept the Christian version of revelation and prophecy. However, Jews weren’t marching armies into Christian capitals. They were not a threat to the elites in the way the Muslim empires were. Thus, as Richard Southern suggests, it was easy for Christianity to dismiss the Jewish challenge because of the “economic and social inferiority of the Jews.”13 In other words, Jews did not have the social, economic, or political power to threaten Christendom. Furthermore, Christians had access to “an embarrassing wealth of material for answering the Jewish case.”14 Such material was now collected for the case against Islam.
Norman Daniel has conducted one of the most authoritative studies on the image of Islam generated by the intellectual elite in the West from the early twelfth century to the middle of the fourteenth. His book Islam and the West shows that key among their various lines of attack was the argument that Islam’s revelations were “pseudo-prophecies,” based not only on the authority of Christian scriptures but also on the notion that Muhammad could not be a prophet. Instead, Muhammad was cast as “a low-born and pagan upstart, who schemed himself into power, who maintained it by pretended revelations, and who spread it both by violence and by permitting to others the same lascivious practices he indulged himself.”15 We see at this stage the association of Islam with violence, a theme that would recur over the centuries. The thrust here was that those who didn’t come under Muhammad’s spell, as the “simpleminded” Arabs had, were either subjugated with violent force or enticed with sexual indulgences.
On what grounds did the Church claim that Islam attracted followers through sexual deviance and perversion? For Christians, marriage meant a union with one partner, dissoluble only by death—they thus pointed to Muhammad’s multiple wives as proof of his perversion. (Abraham’s multiple wives, however, were left out of the debate.) Islam permitted men to take four wives, allowed divorce, and even allowed divorced women to remarry. Christians viewed this with horror. In both scholarly and popular accounts, all sorts of venomous (and entirely fictional) stories began to circulate:
Muhammad was said to be a magician, a sorcerer who used his evil powers to produce fake miracles and thereby seduce men into embracing his false doctrines; he was a renegade Christian priest, perhaps even a cardinal, whose frustrated lust for power led him to seek revenge on the church by propagating his own pernicious teachings; he was sexually promiscuous, an adulterer, and promoted licentiousness in order to ensnare men into depravity; his death was as disgusting and shameful as his life, for he was devoured by dogs, or suffocated by pigs during an epileptic fit.16
Such outrageous and apocryphal stories began to circulate with apparently no need for evidence of any sort. (You can find still some of them today being propagated by the likes of Glenn Beck.) The result was that Islam was debased and constructed as a dangerous enemy.
What was particularly dangerous about this enemy was that not only was it taking over Christian lands but, worse still, it was succeeding in converting people to Islam. When Muslim armies advanced on European lands from the seventh to the eleventh centuries, many non-Muslim subjects (including Christians and Jews) converted to Islam. For instance, non-Orthodox Christians who were persecuted by the Greek Church welcomed Muslim rule. Over a period of several centuries, many converted.
Islam, therefore, was presented as a serious threat. It had to go, and this meant mobilizing an army to retake the Holy Land, rid Spain of the interlopers, and reestablish Christian hegemony. Such a task necessitated the kinds of demonic and highly negative images discussed above. Even during this period, though, pockets of more sympathetic representations and relations existed. The culture of al-Andalus was one such exception, as was the attitude among Christian scholars in the rest of Europe following the period of retranslation.
In addition, direct contact with Muslims produced images that went against the grain. Commerce between Muslim and Christian traders, while not amicable, was at least conducted on terms of mutual respect. Similarly, on the battlefield, the crusaders loathed the infidels but praised their military prowess and told stories of the bravery of Muslim warriors.17 The emperor Saladin, who retook Jerusalem from the crusaders and was therefore an archenemy, was also admired for his chivalry. An abundance of stories were written about him, and his name was given to European children for generations thereafter. Nevertheless, most scholars of the Middle Ages agree that the dominant view of Islam and of Muslims during this period was extremely negative. In short, it was the “crusading” spirit—the combination of military conquest with religious fervor—that characterized European attitudes at the time.
From Polemic to Indifference
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as Europe began to come out of the Middle Ages and into the modern era, its polemical construction of Islam changed. As Islam was less and less seen as an existential threat, an attitude of