What Clash of Civilizations?

Around the time of Turkey’s application for entry talks into the EU a couple of years ago, a campaign was started up in Austria against Turkey becoming a member. Part of this campaign involved the memory of the “Tuerkenjahr” of 1683, when the fearsome army of Islam threatened to swarm through the gates of Vienna and into all of Christendom. Let Turkey into Europe, ran the subtext, and the Siege of Vienna will happen all over again – only this time we will be inundated not with janissaries and pashas, but with immigrants and Islamists.

In reality, over half of this “Army of Islam” was Christian – not just the various Christian soldiers (Greeks/Serbs/Armenians) within the Ottoman army, but also the hundred thousand Hungarian Calvinists who were revolting against Catholic (Habsurg) oppression. Those Austrians (and others) who paint a picture of Islamic hordes storming the gates of a Christian Europe have swallowed a Disney version of history. The fact that such a ridiculous myth still circulates is due, more than anything else, to our abiding desire to be seen as the victims of outrage, not the perpetrators of it.

The history of Muslim Christian alliances in Europe, when looked at overall, is quite remarkable. Moments when Muslims and Christians banded together to fight a common foe have taken place repeatedly throughout the history of Europe, in every age, in every country, and (most interestingly) on both sides of the Crusades. Muslim soldiers were the bodyguard of Frederick II when he negotiated for Jerusalem in 1226, and the Aragonese helped the Arabs defend Tunis against Charles of Anjou in 1271. The factors were also various, and not always cynical: sometimes the reasons were Realpolitikal, of course, as well as having to do with  mercenary and conscription. Sometimes, however, there was also a common culture or a genuine sense of friendship at work.

The Serbian prince, for example, who fought for the Turks at the Battle of Ankara (1402)  and risked his life to save the Sultan’s son, seems to have acted beyond the duty of a vassal. The thousands of Arabs who, in the time of Dante, fought for a German Christian emperor outside the walls of Milan and Verona appear to have had an extremely un-Islamic loyalty to the Hohenstaufen cause. The fact that a Russian Field Marshall in the Crimean War could talk about the Tartar soldiers in his Russian army as “our Muslims” says a great deal about how closely Muslim soldiers interacted in Christian armies.

Muslim Christian alliances were no strange exceptions but rather a normal and widely-used standard procedure for most Mediterranean conflicts, from the Arab gunners who worked for the Spanish to the Greek sailors in the Ottoman navy who were eventually replaced by Armenian ones in the 19th century. Muslim-Christian military cooperation is inextricably woven into the fabric of European – particularly southern European – history. Airbrushed out by both sides, the presence of the infidel in the armies of a queen or a sultan was a regular occurrence. Neither Christian chronicler nor Muslim poet was too happy to record this (although, to his credit, the allegedly Islamophobic Gibbon dutifully recorded each Greek-Turkish alliance that took place, including the wedding of the Byzantine emperor’s daughter to the Turkish sultan Orhan).

The term ‘Clash of Civilizations” has been bandied about a great deal over the past ten years. Despite its refutations from several quarters, the phrase has achieved its purpose, even in its failure to convince: it has created a pseudo-debate of the most simplistic proportions, one which decides that there is something called the Muslim World and something called Christian Europe, and that a permanent tension must exist between these two. What any sober view of medieval history reveals, more than anything else, is the historical ignorance of Samuel Huntington’s phrase, how it assumes that cultures push one another out as oil displaces water, without any regard for the millennium of Christian/Jewish/Muslim co-existence around the shores of a Mediterranean where, as late as the 1970s, Greek could still be heard on the streets of Alexandria and Istanbul.

It has always seemed strange to me that, for all our conviction of the separateness of the West from Islam and the Arab world, each of us knows at least ten Arabic characters – ones which we use each day, so frequently and so familiarly, that we have forgotten they are actually Arabic. Our notion of a “Christian Europe,” in many ways, is a similar case of historical amnesia. What a recollection of the thousands of moments of Muslim-Christian military collaboration brings us closer to is a recognition, however politically inconvenient, that the history of Islam and the history of Europe belong together. They are two strands of the same rope. To think in this way is not to idealize or romanticize the very definite conflicts which have taken place, but to try and see why we, in Europe today, continue to emphasise those conflicts – and overlook an equally significant amount of shared cultural history. Instead of harping on the Crusades, why not talk about the bishops who knew Arabic and the imams whose only language was Spanish? Instead of endlessly invoking the image of the Terrible Turk, why not speak of the Greek monks who shared their Cappadocian caves with Sufis, or the Turcophone Greeks, Armenians and Jews who worked in the highest echelons of the Ottoman Empire? How did we forget that thousands of Arabs, in the time of Giotto and Aquinas, fought for the Hohenstaufen north of Milan, in the very heart of Europe, at the foot of the Alps ? Until we learn to deactivate and uninstall the version of a Christian Europe which we cling to today, such facts are never going to seem anything other than unlikely and surreal.