The Double Standard

The Catholic News Agency reports that José María Aznar, the former president of Spain, is tired of the "double standard in relations between Islam and the West":

Speaking at a Washington think tank, Aznar asked why no Muslims have apologized for the 800 year Moorish invasion of his country.

Speaking at a weekend conference at the Hudson Institute, Aznar asked, “What is the reason ... we, the West, always should be apologiz(ing) and they never should ... apologize? It's absurd!  They occupied Spain for eight centuries!”

Aznar also said that the Western world is in serious trouble when it comes to relations with the Islamic world, and not just because of radical Islamic terrorists. The former president said that poor leadership in the West has led to a sense that Western values are indefensible. “I can put on the table the names of various Western leaders who don’t believe in the West,” he said.

Unfortunately, no table big enough could be found, so the names have not yet been revealed. But what of Aznar's complaint that Muslims have never apologized for invading and conquering Spain? A recent statement by the Muslim American Society, given in response to Benedict XVI's Regensburg lecture, "explains" why such apologies will probably never be made:

Islam does not, and never did, sanction spreading the faith by the sword. More than half of the Muslims today live in countries that were never militarily conquered by Muslims, such as Southeast Asia, sub-saharan Africa, Europe and the Americas. In lands that were conquered by early Muslim armies, no forced conversion ever occurred and there is no historical evidence indicating such. The perception of “spreading faith by the sword” was circulated by eighteenth and nineteenth century Eurocentric scholars, who in their analysis of the Muslim world relied on dogma more than objective observation and research. The Quran which is the first source of legislation in Islam states unequivocally: “…There is no compulsion in religion.” (Surah 2, verse 256)

But, in addition to being confused (if Islam was never spread by the sword, why were Muslims continually invading and conquering countries for so many centuries? For the fun of it?), this is false. An exhaustive resource (nearly 600 pages long) demonstrating otherwise is The Myth of Islamic Tolerance (Prometheus Books, 2005), edited by Robert Spencer. In the foreword, "The Genesis of a Myth," former Muslim Ibn Warraq writes:

Those [Muslim] apologists who continue to perpetuate the myth of Islamic tolerance should contemplate the massacre and extermination of the Zoroastrians in Iran; the million Armenians in Turkey; the Buddhists and Hindus in India; the more than six thousand Jews in Fez, Morocco, in 1033; hundreds of Jews killed in Cordoba between 1010 and 1013; the entire Jewish community of four thousand in Granada in 1066; the Jews in Marrakesh in 1232; the Jews in Tetuan, Morocco in 1790; the Jews of Baghdad in 1828; and so on ad nauseam.

Warraq outlines the intriguing theory that the myth of Islamic tolerance came about, in large part, because of mythology of the "noble savage," which was developed by thinkers such as Montaigne, Pierre Jurieu, and Pierre Bayle. "Thus," he writes, " by the eighteenth century, the noble savage was simply a device to criticize and comment on the follies of one's own civilization. The noble savage is no longer the simpleton from the jungle but a sophisticated and superior observor of the contemporary scene in Europe. By emphasizing the corruption, vice, and degradation of the Europeans, eighteenth-century writers exaggerated the putative superiority of the alien culture, the wisdom of the Chinese or Persian or Peruvian moralist and commentator." Within this setting, many intellectuals were ready to "adopt the myth of Muhammad as a wise and tolerant ruler and lawgiver..."

One retort to this would be, "But what about the Crusades?" It is widely accepted that, at best, the Crusades were perhaps equal in moral weight to acts of Muslim aggression but, more likely, were the cause of any military action by adherents of Muslim. Not so, writes Bernard Lewis, considered by many to the West's leading expert on Islam. In The Crisis of Islam (Random House, 2003), Lewis takes pains to distinguish between the purposes behind jihad and the Crusades:

Jihad is sometimes presented as the Muslim equivalent of the Crusade, and the two are seen as more or less equivalent. In a sense this is true — both were proclaimed and waged as holy wars for the true faith against an infidel enemy. But there is a difference. The Crusade is a late development in Christian history and, in a sense, marks a radical departure from basic Christian values as expressed in the Gospels. Christendom had been under attaack since the seventh century, and had lost vast territories to Muslim rule; the concept of a holy war, more commonly, a just war, was familiar since antiquity. Yet in the long struggle between Islam and Christendom, the Crusade was late, limited, and of relatively brief duration. Jihad is present from the beginning of Islamic history — in scripture, in the life of the Prophet, and in the actions of his companians and immediate successors. It has continued throughout Islamic history and retains its appeal to the present day. The word crusade derives of course from the cross and originally denoted a holy war for Christianity. But in the Christian world it has long since lost that meaning  and is used in the general sense of a morally driven campaign for a good cause. ... The one context in which the word crusade is not used nowadays is precisely the original religious one. Jihad too is used in a variety of senses, but unlike crusade it has retained its original, primary meaning. (pp 37-8).

And yet the mythology of nasty, brutish crusading Christians attacking peace-loving, tranquil Muslims continues, often promoted and continually allowed to pass for truth by many in the West who either should know better or who do not believe in the West. Perhaps it's time to get Mr. Aznar that table.

Comments

[Les]

In the west, (including Europe) the secularists are ashamed of their Christian past, and the Protestants are ashamed of their Catholic past, and by dint of lies and browbeating, the aggregate has made the Catholic ashamed of his medieval past.

Amidst all of this self-loathing, few have the courage to challenge Islamic myths.

[clive]

"Those [Muslim] apologists who continue to perpetuate the myth of Islamic tolerance should contemplate the massacre and extermination of the Zoroastrians in Iran; the million Armenians in Turkey; the Buddhists and Hindus in India;"

Ah yes, the well known peacable rule of the Moghuls in India. In that regard there is a very interesting musuem of the Martyrs at the Sikh Golden Temple, Amritsar. If you have a strong stomach, go, see what the peaceful Moslems perpetrated against the Sikh peoples from the 16th through to the 18th centuries.

Freedom to worship. Not.

[stephen sparrow]

As I understand it. The first genocide of the 20th C occurred in Turkey during WW I: 1916 to be exact and the number of Armenian Christians rounded up and slaughtered was 1.8 million souls. Not just the one million mentioned above.

[Celestial SeraphiMan]

I too have been increasingly wondering whether the Crusades were simply a reactive effort to rescue the Eastern Christians and retake Jesus' homeland. However, I still can't help but wonder whether abuses of the Crusades were isolated or widespread. Surely the "Black Myth" had to come from somewhere.

One thought about "self-loathing": how can I be sure that "self-loathing" isn't a code-word for healthy self-criticism? Didn't John Paul II issue a widely publicized (if little understood) apology for historical abuses by Christians?

I could say much more, but I'm trying to be emotionally sober as I express my reservations about the polarized climate of the "culture wars". Hopefully, I managed to succeed this time.

[Les]

Celestial SeraphiMan, it is true that Christians need a periodic examination of conscience.

However, it is unhealthy to confess, regret or apologize for that which one is not guilty. Thus, historical clarity is absolutely essential.

"Surely the "Black Myth" had to come from somewhere."
Certainly, and one such place could well be in the mind and imagination of those with a particularly virulent hatred of the Church. I have known such people, even in our time, with the European religious territorial wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries long past.
And are we surprised that the Muslims might be inclined to perpetuate such mythology?

Remember, polarization is not necessarily evil, in and of itself, if it tends to serve a higher good. Christ himself said that he would tend to cause division among people, including families when some decided to follow Him and others refused. Ultimately unity can only be acheived in truth. In the midst of the culture war, the outcome of which is critical to our future freedom of religion, we need to seek truth and when we find it, hold onto it regardless of any polarizing effect. There are those who do not want truth, do not want to hear it, or believe it, if it impedes their lifestyle or self-interest in any way.

Finally, it is a Christian who has failed to follow Christ who may commit abuses. The abuses do not come from Catholic Christian teaching or doctrine. That is an essential distinction. As goes the Lord's Prayer, "forgive us our trespasses and we forgive those who trespass against us."

[Daniel C.]

If only Western leaders were as "polarized" as Seraphiman fears. Unfortunately, most join in what he describes as "healthy self-criticism", and what other observers have described as the Suicide of the West.

[Cristina A. Montes]

I have been spending these past "Dark Ages" (three days without electricity nor water nor contact with the outside world, due to a very strong typhoon here in the Philippines) finishing "The Shield and the Sword" (about the Military Order of St. John) and starting Thomas Madden's "A Concise History of the Crusades" by candlelight. Great reads!

I'm frustrated that, with a few exceptions, the history of the Western World is either not taught or taught badly in schools. History should not be a game of accumulating trivia in one's head or showing which culture or race or religion is the most evil. History should be, first of all, knowing the story: what happened and why it did; tracing a chain of causality among events.

It's a waste, because history is very rich and very interesting.

[Celestial SeraphiMan]

I should hope that you're not suggesting white-European "racial consciousness", because that's what the extreme right espouses in the name of Christianity.