So the other day I linked to a CNN report on a Sudanese Christian woman sentenced to death for apostasy, because, according to Sudanese law, she was “born Muslim” and had no right to be a Christian. And I also started to read a book on modern-day persecution of Christians by Muslims, Crucified Again, the fundamental claim of which, based on the initial chapter, is that it’s a part of the fundamental nature of Islam to be intolerant of other religions. At the same time, the most recent CNN comments at the time I read the article (and CNN articles on religion seem to attract largely angry anti-religion and anti-Christian commenters) basically say: “so what if the Sudanese want to execute this woman? The Christians have blood on their hands because of the inquisition, anyway.”
So it left me thinking:
Is there something in the nature of Islam which is, fundamentally, intolerant of other religions? In the so-called “Golden Age” of Islam, we’re told, Christians and Jews lived in harmony with Muslims under the rule of benevolent caliphs, while, in Europe, everyone lived in squalor and ignorance. How golden was this age? Was the tax that nonbelievers were required to pay punitive or symbolic? Was the prohibition on building or even restoring churches rigorously enforced? etc.
At the same time, I’m reminded of an account of a Christian woman working at an NGO in Afghanistan, In the Land of the Blue Burqas. She doesn’t prosthelytize, except in a more gentle way, because what the Afghani women she talks to (and she’s learned the local language to be able to talk without an interpreter) experience of God is not the Christian/Western conception of God at all: their God is angry and punitive and doesn’t really care about human beings one way or the other. And while I don’t claim that this is representative of all Muslims, it certainly does indicate that it’s naive to think that the notion of a loving God is something we share with all religions.
Anyway, the CNN commenters claimed that, basically, it was only due to the atheist Enlightenment philosophers that Christianity was obliged respect other religions and treat nonbelievers with equality; hence, it was only a historical accident that modern Christianity is tolerant and modern Islam executes apostates (and polls regularly show that “rank and file” believers are A-OK with this, not just radical clerics).
So after the kids are in bed tonight, my aim is to pull out some of my old, buried-in-the-basement books, and refresh my memory on pagans, Jews, and heretics in late antiquity/the middle ages. In the meantime, I thought, with that agenda, I thought I’d see if readers have any initial opinions.
UPDATE:
So I went down into the basement to see what books I still had from my grad school days.
Find 1: A History of the Arab Peoples, by Albert Hourani. I had actually never read this but apparently felt I might have someday, because it survived multiple purges of the basement shelves (to make room for books exiled from the living room shelves). He’s not particularly concerned with non-Muslims, but the get a few mentions. As two commenters have now observed, for quite some time, the question of Muslim treatment of Christians was not a matter of how the majority treated the minority, but how a minority ruling class treated those it ruled over:
By the eleventh century Islam was the religion of the rulers, the dominant groups, and a growing portion of the population, but it is not certain that it was the religion of a majority anywhere outside the Arabian peninsula.
. . .
By the twelfth century the Christian churches of the Maghrib [North Africa] had virtually disappeared, but a large part of the population of the Muslim kindgoms of Andalus [Spain] were Christians of the Roman Catholic Church. Coptic Christians were still an important element of the Egyptian population by the fifteenth century, although their numbers were shrinking by conversion. Further south, in the northern Sudan, Christianity had disappeared by the fifteenth or sixteenth century, as Islam spread across the Red Sea and down the Nile valley. All over Syria and in northern Iraq Christian communities remained, although in diminished form. (page 96)
Jews, of course, also lived in the Islamic world — and it is striking that the Jewish community, although a minority community in the first place, continued to exist, where in most of the Islamic world, Christianity was wholly wiped out. Was this a matter of geography? – that is, were Jews concentrated in precisely those areas where Christianity survived, anyway? Was there an urban/rural component? Houriani treats the disappearance of Christianity as a sort of natural event, but were conversions really voluntary? Was there an increasing degree of pressure, the more Christianity became a minority? Was there a greater pressure on Christians, due to the fact that Muslims viewed the doctrine of the Trinity as polytheism? Or, on the other hand, were rural Christians simply less likely to hold onto their faith than educated Jews or Christians in the city.
Anyway, Houriani also says,
In the early centuries of Islamic rule there appears to have been much social and cultural intercourse between adherents of the three religions. . . As time went on, however, the barriers became higher. The conversion of Christians and, perhaps to a lesser extent, of Jews to Islam turned a majority into a diminishing minority. As Islam changed from being the religion of a ruling elite to being the dominant faith of the urban population, it developed its own social institutions, within which Muslims could live without interacting with non-Muslims.
Find 2: The Formation of a Persecuting Society, by R.I. Moore. (comments to come on this tomorrow!)
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