Academic whitewashes Islam

In the run-up to the election for the Conservative leadership, the Guardian ran a determined campaign to discredit him. One of its initiatives was to dig out an essay written by Johnson in 2007, in which he had written that the Muslim world is “centuries behind” the west, because of a “fatal religious conservatism” that prevented the development of liberal capitalism and democracy. According to Johnson “virtually every global flashpoint you can think of – from Bosnia to Palestine to Iraq and Kashmir” is defined by “some sense of Muslim grievance”. Echoing his hero Winston Churchill’s view that there was “no stronger retrograde force” than Islam, Johnson believes “that the real problem with the Islamic world is Islam”.

The Guardian then enlisted Professor Jerry Brotton of Queen Mary’s College, London, to refute Johnson’s these in an article describing it as “historically illiterate”

Brotton writes,  “But Johnson’s 2007 essay – an appendix to a later edition of his book praising the Roman empire – reveals a level of historical ignorance shocking even for such a political opportunist. He claims Byzantine Constantinople “kept the candle of learning alight for a thousand years”, while the Ottomans failed to develop printing presses in the city “until the middle of the 19th century”. Wrong. Byzantine rule had gone backwards for generations prior to its fall to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II in 1453, who repopulated the ruined city with Jews and Christians to help build one of the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan centres of its time, courted for its commercial power by Venice and a magnet for Renaissance Italian scholars and artists (Leonardo even proposed a design for a bridge across the Golden Horn for the sultan in 1502).”

This is a case of pots and kettles. The most authoritative study on this subject is probably “The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire” by Edward N Luttwak; presumably Brotton has read this book.

Luttwak summarises thus: “The East Roman empire by us called Byzantine… was successively threatened from the east by Sasanian Persia, the Muslim Arabs, and finally the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, and from the north by waves of steppe invaders, the Huns, Avars, Bulghars, Pechnegs, Magyars, Cumans, and from the west, too by the ninth century.” Survival for 1,000 years after the fall of Rome was no mean achievement. What left it vulnerable in the end was, ironically the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade – the Latin Christians, which had been sent to assist against the Saracens.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a brutal event, in which thousands were killed, 5,000 inside the church of Hagia Sophia itself. Naturally, Constantinople needed to be repopulated. Thereafter, Ottoman rule was no benign affair, which does not accord with the glittering picture painted by Brotton, “that Mehmed II transformed Constantinople into ‘one of the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan centres of its time’ ”

The Christian Balkans – Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece – were regularly plundered for slaves and soldiers. The Orthodox calendar lists hundreds who were martyred by the Turks because they held to their Christian faith. For over two centuries, south east Europe was under relentless pressure from the Turks, who were turned only in 1683 when the Polish army defeated the Ottoman forces who had besieged Vienna for several months; this was the result of a surprise attack by the Polish King Jan Sobieski, from a direction which the Ottomans had left undefended because their commander thought it was securely protected by the steep slopes of the Vienna woods. Hungary remained under Ottoman occupation until 1686.

The Ottoman Empire ended as brutally as it began. The Balkans gradually threw off the Turkish yoke from the beginning of the ninteenth century. Greece achieved liberation in 1830, following a ten year struggle in the course of which the Patriarch of Constantinople was hanged in public on Easter Sunday, 1821. The final phase was marked by a massacre in Bulgaria in 1876, followed by the genocides in 1915 and 1923, when three million died. Its dark legacy remains, as was seen in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and continues in the current ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo.

Brotton excuses the Ottomans’ belated adoption of printing thus: “The city’s first officially recognised printing press opened in 1727, not because of previous objections by zealous mullahs but because of the Islamic handwritten calligraphic tradition that regarded words as art – something print struggled to reproduce.”

That is feeble. Printing for the diffusion of knowledge can and does perfectly well co-exist with the production of calligraphic volumes of religious texts. The 250 years of banning of printing is a form of censorship.

Brotton, again, “But then there’s little sense that he even grasps the differences between the two Islamic denominations as he collapses the diversity of what he calls the Islamic world into one angry, ignorant monolith.”

Looking at the present-day manifestation of this ancient animosity, Brotton has a point here; ‘monolithic’ it is not, but ‘angry’ and ‘ignorant’, certainly; the description applies as much to the Iranian Ayotollahs which seek the death of every Jew as to the leaders of the Wahabi Mullahs.

Brotton “And hardly anyone within that field studies Arab or early Islamic history, or bothers learning Arabic. “So the myths and prejudices harden into facts. There is no awareness of the life of Muhammad, a merchant outside the Meccan trading elite, and the early history of the Qur’an...There is no space in Johnson’s rhetoric for the scientific and cultural achievements of medieval Islam. Nor is there any acknowledgement that the “fatal religious conservatism” is primarily down to the influence of Wahhabism, the puritanical doctrine founded in the 18th century that is now the official state religion of Saudi Arabia, which condemns millions of Muslims – including Shias – as apostates and has inspired terrorist organisations such as Isis.”

It is Brotton who is on shaky ground here. Wahabism is no more and no less than attempt to return Islam to its roots in the life of Mohammed and his associates. ISIS and the Salafists model themselves closely on Mohammed himself, as all faithful Moslems are required to do.

Brotton rightly criticises Johnson for his loose grasp of detail, but Johnson’s grasp of the overall picture is sound. How many scientists, philosophers, political thinkers, technological innovators, critics of rule by clerics, etc etc who underpin the ‘modernism’ that drives the contemporary world could Brotton could name who have come from Islamic states in the last 500 years or so? His main motivation, here and in others of his publications, seems to be to whitewash Islam and soften us up for the takeover which seems to be under way.