medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
R. Landes wrote:
>>Sheesh, Landes! Get in the ring and start throwing punches after the ref
>>has sounded the bell why >>dontcha? Nice Rovian bit of stagecraft there!
>>(MP)
>sorry. i wd have done it in real time if my schedule had permitted.
>things move fast in cyberspace. (RL)
Let me get you straight: you would have thrown punches in real time? Odd
that I get chided for calling you Landes, but you get a pass for saying you
would have taken a real swing at me? Ooooo-kay.
Now, as to the topic: is there a qualitative difference in violence
committed before or after 1000 AD? Is there some grandfather clause I've
missed? As I've read your post, there's something, I don't know, a bit more
louche in Islam because it spread initially with Arab expansion, while
Christianity waited a decorous period before giving into its own
expansionist urges. I concede that early Islam has a more bellicose early
history than Christianity, but so what? What about the entirety of their
respective histories? And are you certain that Arab expansion wouldn't have
happened without Islam?
Overall I'm surprised by the general, almost dismissive tone with which you
present the expansion of Islam. Sure, warfare was a central part of Arab
expansion, as it is perforce a part of any imperial expansion. But are you
sure there isn't more detail, whether economic, social, religious? I'm no
specialist, yet I recall reading that in some areas, cities and even
provinces capitulated largely because the local populace was tired of what
it considered corrupt or oppressive Byzantine rule, and so were sympathetic
to the new faith, with which it had been in contact via trade. If that's not
demotic, I don't know what is! And what happened after an area was taken
over? Jews and Christians were allowed to keep their faiths with the payment
of a tax, which by our standards is oppressive but back then was pretty
forward thinking. It was certainly better than what happened to Muslims
under Christian rule. I don't think any historian disputes that. And what of
other areas? Your argument about the warlike nature of Islam implies that as
a religion it had to be forced upon conquered populaces, which is far from
true. How then to account for Indonesia and Malaysia? Trade, and yes,
missionary activity played a role in Islam just as it did in Christianity.
Don't forget its broad popular appeal: no complicated, ever-shifting
filioque-riddled trinitarian theology, no priestly hierarchy, its
insistence, in theory at least, on the equality of all believers, which
allowed converts in India to throw off the shackles of the caste system,
etc.
To imply that Christianity ("Christian culture") is less violent than Islam
("Islamic culture") simply because it had the good fortune to inherit an
empire that had already been established is just, well, I don't know what to
say. Then again, we do live in a society in which a person is held blameless
if he inherits his father's ill-gotten fortune, but reviled if he goes out
and steals his own money the honest way.
As Dr. Wright pointed out, there is a decided lack of nuance in the
critiques of Islam seen on the list. Islam, like Christianity, encompasses
many cultures, each with its own version of Islam, each with its own complex
and long history. We can compare body counts and blood-soaked chronologies
till the moon turns blue, but I'm not ultimately trying to say one religion
is superior to the other based on the number of respective casualties (or
when in that religion's history the casualties happened). First off, I
object to the easy conflation of a religion and a culture: "Islamic cultures
in the Middle East," as DM put it, is too general. That was why I originally
analogized that if we are to say that there is a propensity for violence in
ICITME, it would be as fair to say that Nazism, Stalinism, industrialized
genocide, etc. show a similar propensity for violence in Western Christian
culture, which I do not believe in the least. Second, it seems like RL is
giving a latitude to the nuances of the spread of Christianity he is
unwilling to accord Islam, which is just unsportsmanlike.
For example, he seems to maintain that later Christian conquests are somehow
different because of the amount of time Christianity had been around, and
thus altered by its social matrix to become "political monotheism" (a terms
that seems equally applicable to Islam). To me this says: the Teutonic
Knights were Germans who happened to be Christian, while the Ottomans who
sacked Constantinople were Muslims who happened to be Turks, and the
conquest part of the spread of Islam, rather than of Turkish imperialism.
Then it hit me: should RL and I attribute our being on this fair and
bounteous land mass to violent Christian expansionism, or is there more to
the picture?
MP
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