Islam in European Thought

From the time it first appeared, the religion of Islam was a problem for Christian Europe. Those who believed in it were the enemy on the frontier. In the seventh and eighth centuries armies fighting in the name of the first Muslim empire, the Caliphate, expanded into the heart of the Christian world. They occupied provinces of the Byzantine empire in Syria, the Holy Land and Egypt, and spread westwards into North Africa, Spain and Sicily; and the conquest was not only a military one, it was followed in course of time by conversions to Islam on a large scale. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries there was a Christian counter attack, successful for a time in the Holy Land, where a Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was created, and more permanently in Spain. The last Muslim kingdom in Spain was brought to an end in 1492, but by that time there was a further Muslim expansion elsewhere, by dynasties drawn from the Turkish peoples: the Saljuqs advanced into Anatolia, and later the Otto­mans extinguished what was left of the Byzantine empire and occupied its capital, Constantinople, and expanded into eastern and central Europe. As late as the seventeenth century they were able to occupy the island of Crete and to threaten Vienna.

The relationship between Muslims and European Christians, however, was not simply one of holy war, of crusade and jihad.There was trade across the Mediterranean, and the balance of it changed in course of time; from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onwards the Italian ports expanded their trade, and, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ships from the ports of northern Europe began to appear in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. There was also an exchange of ideas, and here the traffic moved mainly from the lands of Islam to those of Christendom: Arabic works of philosophy, science and medicine were translated into Latin, and until the sixteenth century the writings of the great medical scientist Ibn Sina were used in European medical schools.

Separated by conflict but held together by ties of different kinds, Christians and Muslims presented a religious and intellectual challenge to each other. What could each religion make of the claims of the other? For Muslim thinkers, the status of Christianity was clear. Jesus was one of the line of authentic prophets which had culminated in Muhammad, the 'Seal of the Prophets', and his authentic message was essentially the same as that of Muhammad. Christians had misunderstood their faith, however: they thought of their prophet as a god, and believed he had been crucified. The usual Muslim explanation for this was that they had 'corrupted' their scriptures, either by tampering with the text, or by misunderstanding its meaning. Properly understood, Muslim thinkers maintained, the Christian scrip­tures did not support Christian claims that Jesus was divine, and a passage of the Qur'an made clear that he had not been crucified but had somehow been taken up into heaven. Again, Christians did not accept the authenticity of the revelation given to Muhammad, but a proper interpretation of the Bible would show that it had foretold the coming of Muhammad.

For Christians, the matter was more difficult. They knew that Muslims believed in one God, who might be regarded, in His nature and operations, as being the God whom Christians worshiped, but they could not easily accept that Muhammad was an authentic prophet. The event to which Old Testament prophecy had pointed, the coming of Christ, had already taken place; what need was there for further prophets? The teaching of Muhammad, moreover, was a denial of the central doctrines of Christianity: the Incarnation and Crucifixion, and therefore also the Trinity and the Atonement. Could the Qur'an be regarded in any sense as the word of God? To the few Christians who knew anything about it, the Qur'an seemed to contain distorted echoes of biblical stories and themes.

With few exceptions, Christians in Europe who thought about Islam, during the first thousand or so years of the confrontation, did so in a state of ignorance. The Qur'an was indeed available in Latin translation from the twelfth century onwards; the first translation was made under the direction of Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny. Some Arabic philosophical works were well known in translation, those which carried on the tradition of Greek thought. There was very limited knowledge, however, of those works of theology, law and spirituality in which what had been given in the Qur'an was articulated into a system of thought and practice. There were a few exceptions: in the thirteenth century, some of the Dominican houses in Spain were centers of Islamic studies, but even these declined in later centuries. On the Muslim side, rather more was known, and indeed had to be known. Christians continued to live in some Muslim countries, and particularly in Spain, Egypt and Syria, and many of them lived through the medium of the Arabic language. Knowledge of what they believed and practised was therefore available, and it was necessary for administrative and political purposes. The extent of the knowledge should not be exaggerated, however: its limits are shown in such works as al-Ghazali's refutation of the doctrine of the divinity of Christ[1].

Looking at Islam with a mixture of fear, bewilderment and uneasy recognition of a kind of spiritual kinship, Christians could see it in more than one light. Occasionally the spiritual kinship was acknowledged. There is extant, for example, a letter written by Pope Gregory VII to a Muslim prince in Algeria, al-Nasir, in 1076. In it he says:

There is a charity which we owe to each other more than to other peoples, because we recognize and confess one sole God, although in different ways, and we praise and worship Him every day as creator and ruler of the world [2].

There has been some discussion of this letter among scholars, and it seems that its significance should not be overstated. It has been suggested that there were practical reasons for the warm and friendly tone in which Gregory wrote: the need to protect the shrinking Christian communities of North Africa, the common opposition of the Papacy and al-Nasir to another Muslim ruler in North Africa, and perhaps the desire of merchants in Rome to have a share in the growing trade of the port of Bougie (Bijaya), in al-Nasir's domains. In other letters, written to Christians, Gregory wrote of Muslims and Islam in harsher ways. Nevertheless, the terms in which the letter is written show that there was some awareness at the time that Muslims were not pagans, and this is the more surprising because it was written just before the beginning of the greatest episode of hostility, the Crusades.

A more commonly held view was that which saw Islam as an offshoot or heresy of Christianity. This was the view of the first Christian theologian to consider it seriously, St John of Damascus. He had himself been an official in the administration of the Umayyad caliph in Damascus, and knew Arabic.

He includes Islam in a section of his work on Christian heresies: it believes in God, but denies certain of the essential truths of Christianity, and because of this denial even the truths which it accepts are devoid of meaning. The most widely held belief, however, was that which lay at the other end of the spectrum: Islam is a false religion, Allah is not God, Muhammad was not a prophet; Islam was invented by men whose motives and character were to be deplored, and propagated by the sword[3].