ISLAM AND EUROPE

At a time when many Europeans are suspicious of, if not downright hostile to, Muslims, it is worth remembering how much the development of Europe is down to Islam.

The new religion swept out of the Arabian peninsula during the 7th century. At the time, the prevailing civilisation in this part of the world was Roman, geographically centred on and around the Mediterranean (which means "middle of the land"). True, the Romans' hold on this territory was in places rather fragile, not least because the Western part of it had collapsed at the end of the fifth century. Nevertheless, it was something to which many people aspired, whereas the idea of Europe would have met with blank stares.

Islam changed all of that. Within a century, Muslims had conquered a huge crescent of territory, from Spain in the west, round through North Africa and Egypt, and up through the Middle East as far as Afghanistan. In 732, they were stopped by the Franks' Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitiers, a couple of days' march from Paris. Retreating across the Pyrenees, they formed an Arab kingdom in Spain that lasted for a further 750 years. For most of the Middle Ages, the biggest building in Europe was the Great Mosque in Cordoba.

The conquests had two consequences. The first was that it cut off European Christians from those outside Europe. There is evidence that Christianity had reached China in the early first centuries; not only was that link broken, but so too were contacts with Christian communities in Egypt, Ethiopia, Armenia and Georgia. Thereafter, Christians of both the Eastern and Western churches were forced to go north and east; to Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, and finally Russia. Since Christianity was the glue that held mediæval society together, this inevitably led over time to a Christian Europe surrounded to the south and east by Islamic societies. The Crusades, in aiming to reconquer Jerusalem, were a long-lasting attempt to change this pattern, but they ended in failure. And to the extent that there were changes in the boundaries between the two faiths, they went the other way, as the Muslim Turks got a toehold in Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, took Constantinople in 1453, and spread into the Balkans thereafter.  

The second consequence was that it altered the balance of powers within the Christian world. Prior to the arrival of Islam, there were five patriarchs of Christianity; in Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria. The latter three were lost to Christian influence, leaving two, speaking two different languages (Latin and Greek), and living in two different worlds. When the Eastern Emperor at Constantinople failed to help the Papacy in its struggles against the Lombards, the Pope crossed the Alps in 753 and begged for help from Peppin, Charles Martel's grandson. Thus was forged the long-lasting link between France and the Papacy, reflected in the crowning in Rome of Peppin's son Charlemagne as Emperor on Christmas Day, 800 and much else.

Today, we take Europe for granted, but for centuries, it didn't really exist. By fixing its eastern and southern boundaries, Islam forced it to look inward. For much of the intervening period, that introspection was culturally inferior to (say) Muslim Spain. However, eventually it led to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the European world domination of the 19th century. It's quite a debt.

Walter Blotscher