Understanding Islam - 2

Ms Caroline Said (The Sunday Times, March 19) took me to task for my contribution "Understanding Islam" (March 12). She attacked me on four fronts. She maintained that (i) there is nothing wrong with Islamic theocracy because Moses and David, revered prophets, were also theocrats; (ii) Christianity owed its success to the intervention in its favour of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great; (iii) the Western Church used to be the most potent and largest landowner in Europe, and that she used to carry a heavy political clout; and (iv) Islamic society was strong and expansive when it was articulated in a universal state, namely, the Caliphate.

To see whether Ms Said's arguments hold water or not, it is best to conduct an empirical survey, and let History decide the issue. Let us begin with Ms Said's first line of attack, that is, that because Moses and David were theocrats, Islam can be so too.

Moses and David

The God of Moses and David was a "Lord of Hosts" and "a Man-of-War". He was a primitive God of the Arabian Wilderness who led his favourite nation out of bondage in the Land of Egypt and assisted David in uniting the tribes of the hill country of Judah against the coastal people of Philistia.

However, in a period in their history which began when Assyrian militarism scourged the peoples of Syria with whips and Babylonian imperialism whipped them with scorpions, the people of Israel and Judah raised themselves head and shoulders above the Syriac peoples in responding to the challenge of a 'Time of Troubles' by rising to a higher conception of religion.

Keenly conscious, and rightly proud, of the spiritual treasure they had thus wrested from an ordeal that had broken the spirit of their Aramaean and Phoenician and Philistine neighbours, the Jews perceived in the lineaments of the God of Moses and David, the epiphany of a God who was not only omnipresent and omnipotent, but was also the One True God.

It was indeed a mighty feat of spiritual intuition which came after years of suffering and misery. Deutero-Isaiah and the later prophets were gifted with unparallelled spiritual insight when they preached the One True God. And then after divining a truth which was absolute and eternal, they allowed themselves to be captivated by a temporary and relative half-truth.

They persuaded themselves that Israel's discovery of the One True God had revealed Israel itself to be God's Chosen People. The Prophet Muhammad was influenced by such notions when he was subjected to religious radiation emanating from Judaism and from the Nestorian and Monophysiate Churches which were nothing less than Syriac reactions against the Hellenic alloy in Christianity. In the end, Islam was also an anti-Hellenic movement and hence, the Islamic perception of God as a grand military leader who has the power to settle all issues manu militari. Who needs the spirit when politics and the sword can do the job?

Testimony of Julian

Ms Said opened her second front when she stated that were it not for the intervention of the Emperor Constantine, Christians might have remained an insignificant sect and their fortune would have been that of our present-day gypsies. When Constantine issued his Edict of Milan proclaiming Christianity as a religio licita, he was accepting the hard fact that Christianity was the religion of more than half of the Empire's subjects. Most of the soldiers of the legions which gave him victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge were either Christians or votaries of Sol Invictus. They would never have scraped the Sign of the Cross on their shields had they been adverse to Christian beliefs and symbols.

The truth was that by Constantine's time Christianity was not only the religion of the vast majority of the Oriental provinces of the Empire but was also that of the internal proletariat of the Western ones and was making steady inroads among the Roman senatorial and equestrian classes. Constantine was a master of what we today call realpolitik, and took the only possible road open to him in the circumstances.

After Constantine's children's death, his grand nephew Julian the Apostate tried in vain to reverse his uncle's wise decision. Neither imperial coercion nor generous subsidies could ever re-establish the old pagan order. We call Julian himself to the witness stand and we do well to hear the testimony of a noble adversary: the virtual monopoly of social welfare work by the Christian Church in the Hellenic world of the fourth century of the Christian Era is sorrowfully confessed in a pastoral letter to one of the pagan prelates of his Neoplatomic Anti-Church:

" ...Are we refusing to face the fact that atheism [i.e. Christianity] owes its success above all to its philanthropy towards strangers and to its provision for funerals and to its parade of a high puritanical morality? ...It is a disgrace to us that our own people should be notoriously going short of assistance from us when in the Jewish i.e. Christian] community there is not a single beggar, while the impious Galilaeans are supporting not only their own poor but ours as well. You should instruct the votaries of Hellenism to make voluntary contributions towards charitable services, and the Hellenic [i.e. pagan] parishes [in your see] to dedicate their first fruits for this purpose... Do not let us allow hostile competitors to outdo us in our strong points while we give way to slackness and indifference which are not merely a disgrace to our religion but a downright betrayal of it." (Letter from the Emperor Julian to Arsaces, Chief Priest of Galatia, Letter No. 84 in Bidez, J.: L'Empereur Julien: Oeuvres Completes: Tome i, Partie II: "Lettres et Fragments" [Paris 1924, Les Belles Lettres].)

Lands of the Church

We can never confute Ms Said's statement that the Church was the greatest and most potent landowner of Western Christendom. This in itself needs an explanation. The Church had to be a landowner. First to feed the hungry populations of the West when the barbarian invasions of the Western provinces had left these once fertile lands barren and unattended. Here we have to call as witness a pair of saviours who stepped in to tend the stricken and shepherdless Christians of the West.

Benedict of Nursia (c. AD 480-543) was born just after the first barbarian 'successor-state' of the Roman Empire was set up by Odoacer in Italy, and he died in the throes of the long drawn-out and devastating war between the Ostrogothic 'successor-state' and the Imperial government of Constantinople.

On reaching manhood, he agreed to become the head of a monastic community: first in the valley of the Subiaco and eventually on Monte Cassino. In this last creative chapter of his career, the saint improvised in the wilderness a new education to take place of the obsolete system which, years before, in Rome, the child had rejected. And Benedict's senatorial contemporaries, who had never departed in their own careers from the traditional rut, now sent their sons out into the wilderness to be brought up in a new discipline by a Christian Cherion.

Moreover, the Benedictine community on Monte Cassino became the mother of monasteries which grew until they had spread the Benedictine Rule into the uttermost parts of the West; and this Rule was one of the main foundations of the new social structure which was eventually built in Western Christendom on the ruins of the ancient Hellenic order.

One of the most important features in Benedict's Rule was the prescription of manual labour; for this meant, first and foremost, agricultural labour. The Benedictine movement was, in fact, on the economic plane, an agricultural revival: the first successful agricultural revival in Italy, after innumerable attempts, since Hannibal's invasion seven centuries earlier. By the virtue of a spiritual élan, the Benedictine order not only turned the tide of economic life in Italy when it was at its lowest ebb. It also performed in medieval Transalpine Europe that strenuous pioneering work of clearing forests, draining marshes, creating fields and pastures, and starting manufactures which were performed in modern North America by the French and British backwoodsmen.

In 573 Gregory was appointed Praefectus Urbi. The impotence of the old order to deal with the starving population of Rome, an imperial capital which had lost its Empire stared Gregory in the face. He applied his estates in Sicily to the foundation and endowment of six Benedictine monasteries and distributed the rest of his property to the poor.

Gregory's life work, which began with his return to Rome and never ceased until his death in harness, was performed in the role of an ecclesiastical administrator and Pope. Gregory was elected to the Papacy in a year of war and pestilence and famine, and bore his burden heroically. On the Papal throne, he accomplished three great achievements. First he reorganised the administration of the Patrimonia Petri - the estates of the Roman Church in Italy and overseas - with such efficiency that the condition of the serfs was improved while at the same time revenues were raised for relieving, on the grand scale, the distress of the destitute population of the derelict Imperial City.

Gregory's second achievement - a labour of ten years - was to negotiate a modus vivendi in Italy between the Imperial authorities and the Lombards on the basis of uti possidetis. His third achievement was to lay the foundations of a new empire for Rome in place of her old empire which now lay in ruins.

This new empire, established by religious faith and not by military force, was eventually to conquer new worlds whose soil the legions had never trodden and whose very existence had never been suspected. And the first step towards this re-establishment of the Roman Empire in a new and more ethereal form was the recovery of a Roman foothold in Britain through the mission of Augustine.

Thus, in Rome's darkest hour, when the Lombards were at her gates, Gregory bravely out-manoeuvred the barbarians by sending his lieutenant overseas to acquire new allies for Rome and to win her a new sphere of influence, in the enemy's rear. The Church used its lands and power to give birth and to rear our Western civilisation.

The mirage of the Caliphate

Let us now come to Ms Said's final line of attack. She asserts that Islamic woes began when the Caliphate collapsed in the 19th century. Nothing can be further from the truth. The first, and most potent Islamic Caliphate, that of the Abbasids, was destroyed by Hulagu Khan and the Mongol hordes of the Il-Khans.

After the fall of Baghdad in the 12th century, the Abbasid Caliphs were welcomed in Cairo by the Ayyubids and after a few decades of virtual imprisonment by the Ayyubids, the Abbasids were deposed and a new Cairene Caliphate established.

The Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain was on the retreat for three whole centuries until the united forces of Castille and Aragon kicked them out of Andalusia. Soon afterwards Spanish and Portuguese mariners conquered the oceans and not only peopled the newly found continents on the other side of the Atlantic but also rounded the Cape and burst onto the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

The Osmanli Caliphate of Constantinople was the foremost military power when it swallowed the entire Orthodox Christian society in Anatolia and the Balkans. After invading Hungary and carving out of this Western province, the Pashalyqs of Buda and Pest, the West responded to the Osmanli challenge by throwing up the Hapsburg Monarchy which repulsed two successive Turkish sieges of Vienna. After failing to take Vienna, the Osmanlis (Ottomans) were always on the run and only the balance-of-power game played by the various West European powers allowed the Ottoman Turks to stagger along for two more centuries.

History shows that the Caliphate always proved to be a hollow shell, And now, when Osama bin Laden is nostalgically attempting to revive a ghost of ghosts and in his impossible quest to achieve this necromantic feat he is spreading terrorism, he and all those who think that they reach the goal of their endeavours by death and enormities, had better read a book of wisdom which is one of the spiritual fruits of the second and severer bout of a Sinic 'Time of Troubles':

"Stretch a bow to the very full. And you will wish that you had stopped in time; Temper a sword-edge to its very sharpest, And you will find it soon grows dull; He who stands on tip-toe does not stand firm, He who takes the longest strides, does not walk the fastest."

(The Tao-te King, chap. 9, translation by A. Waley, in The Way and its Power, Allen & Unwin, London, 1934).