The First Muslims in England
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> No Christian even knew the words "Islam" or "Muslim",
> Christians simply could not accept that Islam was a coherent religious belief. Instead they dismissed it as a pagan polytheism or a heretical deformation of Christianity.
That is just not true. Christians knew Islam for almost millennium before 16th century and centuries before crusades. There were christian communities all over Muslim world.
It's an interesting piece of history that not a lot of people realize.
That's why all these places have/had Christian communities. They're the leftover conquered people who were too stubborn to convert of leave under the abuse of their Muslim rulers. It's not like a bunch of Christians have ever immigrated into any Muslim country - lol!
I think it's pretty commonly known the Byzantine empire was Christian and did rule in many of the lands you referenced.
> all Christian before the armies of Islam came in 632-1683.
But to call these countries (to the extent they're even comparable geographical areas) as 'all Christian' is nonsense. For example, Berbers in Morocco in 500 weren't 'all Christian', not even close. Some surely were, and they'd surely been influenced by it like many religions before, but they weren't all Christian anywhere to the same extent they're virtually all Muslim today.
> That's why all these places have/had Christian communities. They're the leftover conquered people who were too stubborn to convert of leave under the abuse of their Muslim rulers. It's not like a bunch of Christians have ever immigrated into any Muslim country - lol!
Again, take Morocco. A lot of the Christian communities that exist today aren't remnants of settlements that are 1500 years old. Take Volubilis, a place where once Christians lived in Morocco, it's been abandoned for almost 1.000 years. Rather, many of today's Christian communities are remnants of much more recent migration, a few hundred years ago, in a colonial context. e.g. about 100 years ago a quarter million Spaniards lived in Morocco, most of them Christian, and - lol! - they did migrate to a Muslim country. Countless other examples exist, millions of Christians migrated to muslim countries during the colonial era, and indeed they also left their mark, and not all of them left.
Those old warrior popes sound a lot like the Mullahs of today. I particular enjoyed this line: "In the 12th century, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: "'The knight of Christ may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently; for he serves Christ when he strikes, and saves himself when he falls.... When he inflicts death, it is to Christ's profit, and when he suffers death, it is his own gain.'""
There are also some striking differences. Aside from the Byzantine, Christianity was mostly monolithic, with secular rulers jockeying for power inside of one Pope. On the other side, the religious and secular authority were both the same person.
This led, over time, to the crusades being a way of wielding internal control over Christiandom, because one guy (the Pope) could preach a crusade against any local, domestic opponents and get some kind of traction out of it. Islam has no centralized authority. (Lots of other differences also)
The Crusades were full of ironies. One of the most prominent was that they ended up sacking Constantinople, which was exactly the opposite intent of how it all started.
The Crusades started off when the Patriarch of Constantinople wrote a letter to the Pope wanting money, basically. He talked about how the Holy Land was in jeopardy and pilgrims couldn't make their pilgrimages anymore.
So the Pope preaches a sermon about how bad things are in the Holy Land. Tons of regular people decided to go over there and fight to "take it back" The nobles saw what was happening and ended up more joining in than anything else. (They did not lead it)
So here you have this ragtag army of regular citizens making a huge land journey. It must have been like locusts for the poor villages in the way. The nobles that participated, meanwhile, did what they could to try to turn this disorganized mob into some kind of organized fighting force.
When they showed up, they simply overwhelmed the Islamic forces that were there. Ended up taking a huge swath of territory.
Does any of this sound familiar? Sermons, unintended consequences, common-man-as-warrior, huge victory because nobody was prepared, etc?
That's ISIS.
It took over a hundred years for the effects of the First Crusade to wear off, and yes, in that time there were many more. But in the end the Crusaders turned out to be really good at being true believers and fighting and dying for their cause. Maintaining a complex series of alliances in a land that was hostile? Not so much. Wonder if ISIS will manage to last that long. Doubtful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Andalus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate_of_C%C3%B3rdoba
At this time, it was just English who were slowly finding out, how to manipulate Ottomans and Berbers against other Europeans.
Note that this story is in the context of England ("England - like the rest of Christendom - understood a garbled version of Islam mainly through the bloody and polarised experiences of the Crusades.")
There may have been people in England (and the rest of Europe) at that time that used the words "Islam" and "Muslim" to describe that religion. However, they weren't people who wrote a lot, and those terms certainly weren't wide-spread.
Look at it in Google's NGram viewer: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Islam&case_ins...
The author isn't arguing that they didn't know of the religion at all, just that they were ignorant of much of what it believed.
Christian-Muslim contact was widespread, starting with the jihad that established Islam to begin with (the Byzantine Empire, large swathes of the Mideast, and most of North Africa was Christian), and continuing up to the Franco-Ottoman alliance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Ottoman_alliance ) which the English were definitely familiar with (see the Ottoman rug in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambassadors_%28Holbein%29 ).
Mariners would have been by necessity extremely familiar with the Muslim piracy and slave trades (see eg John Smith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Smith_%28explorer%29 ).
Before the immigration waves form N. Africa and the Middle East the vast majority of British Muslims were from British India. There were very few Mosques in western Europe at the time and they were virtually non prior to the late 19th century, Switzerland didn't had a single mosque till the 1960's, the first Mosque in Sweden was built in 1984.
While Europe has had some Muslim population it was quite different than the current one, most of it was aristocracy and upper middle class in Britain, France, Italy and Spain which was quite detached from the current form of Islam which is heavily influenced by modern Wahhabism and the post Ottoman Muslim Brotherhood movements.
Other than those communities the few other Muslim communities which were present in Western Europe at the time were mostly from the Baltic states which had a population of Muslims in the forms of Tattars which also as detached from what one would expect from Islam today as possible.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b074w30m
That title feels like a hat tip to This Sceptred Isle, an excellent programme. Sadly, only four episodes are available on the website. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00qh19l
Another history series people might be interested in is "Voices from the Old Bailey". http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012stwb
Shop lifting http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04fc80v
and smuggling http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04d4sbs
are particularly interesting.
A good piece from the Economist here - http://www.economist.com/node/1213392
> in the 1,000 years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun, say the authors, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in one year.
I do hope we see a return to more terrestrial matters from that part of the world.
After all they have been staying there for centuries before oil became a thing.
Oh? When did we bomb Norway?
The west has meddled in Nigeria since forever -- search for Shell (the oil company) and Nigeria. (Hint: on the mainstream media you'll find 1/10 of the stuff reported on independent ones without big oil corps as advertisers).
Russia? Are you kidding me? You had a full blown cold war, and tons of "proxy" peripheral wars with Russia for half a century. And the US still tries to influence Russian policy, replace their government with some friendly clown like the early Yeltsin, etc. Countless money are spent in campaigns to influence local policies there (imagine the outburst if Russia sponsored this or that US candidate, and had NGOs and groups report on the elections, gun laws, etc).
Mexico? Heck, California, Texas, etc were part of Mexico. And you don't need to bomb it, since you've controlled the place, and had friendly lackeys in power for decades.
Do you have any evidence for this, beyond the crazed rantings of the late dictator?
>The west has meddled in Nigeria since forever -- search for Shell (the oil company) and Nigeria. (Hint: on the mainstream media you'll find 1/10 of the stuff reported on independent ones without big oil corps as advertisers).
So we went from "the US bombs countrise to oblivion" to "The West meddles in countries' affairs". That's quite a step down. Here we were talking about something interesting, namely bombing, and now we're at nebulous "meddling". All countries "meddle" in the affairs of other countries. What do you think OPEC countries are doing throwing around cash in Washington?
>Russia? Are you kidding me? You had a full blown cold war, and tons of "proxy" peripheral wars with Russia for half a century.
Which had absolutely nothing to do with oil.
>Mexico? Heck, California, Texas, etc were part of Mexico. And you don't need to bomb it, since you've controlled the place, and had friendly lackeys in power for decades.
Sure, California and Texas were part of Mexico before oil existed as an industry. And again, do you have any actual evidence we had "friendly lackeys" in power in Mexico? As far as I can tell, the Mexican government has a lot more influence in the US than the other way around.
And the war with Mexico occurred thirteen years before the US started using oil commercially.
This "wars for oil" stuff is something a lot of people repeat to themselves without really thinking about it.
And then you bring Venezuela, Russia, Nigeria etc as examples where these things didn't happen...
Not only forgetting all the places where those wars DID happen (all over the wider middle east for one), but also the numerous ways the west intervened in those places, from constant pressure with tons of ways (sponsoring political opponents, arming guerilla groups, helping their border states invade them, manipulating their economy, down to toppling governments).
Maybe get 2-3 good books about the subject?
Or an article to start:
http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-i...
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=852
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/18/u-s-interventions-in-...
http://www.venezuelasolidarity.co.uk/latest-wikileaks-show-f...
http://www.amazon.com/Crude-Interventions-United-States-Worl...
http://williamblum.org/chapters/freeing-the-world-to-death/u...
A certain country that is rich as anything might get poor 50 or 100 years from now, and the majority of people in that country are of a certain religion and so a lot of people of that religion may decide to relocate and when to hey do, they may come to Europe. And if they do ... so what?
Imagine you favorite town. Say, NY. Imagine 20 million people of a certain religion relocating there. Could be Muslims, hardcore religious nuts from the South, whatever.
Imagine them changing the culture of the place towards their religious views and customs. E.g. persecuting gays. Enforcing strict restrictions to their women (and other women). Not in the "melting pot", ethnic-flavor cutesy way of NY, in the "we are too many of us now here and we want things a certain way".
This can happen to a place. And it has already happened to certain places, neighborhoods in Europe and elsewhere.
The inverse can happen too: a place get full of Westerners, expats, etc, and they alter its color, buy the government to do them favors, pass their own laws, even sponsor a full blown sex industry with the locals as victims, like in Thailand. Usually with them it's through influence though, from their power and wealth, not from their numbers.
This adds the value.