V. Islam and the "Dark Ages"
(Here there’s a short technical lacuna
in the transcript. I asked about
reviews; Dr. Stark said most reviews have remained generous, even as he moved
toward Christianity. He then
noted that he is presently working on a book in which he defends the Crusades. I responded:)
Oh … boy.
I’m sure you'll get a negative review of that!
Sure I will. But the point is, I'm able to demonstrate,
I think, that the so-called "famous Muslim or Arab culture" was in fact the
culture of the dhimmis; that is to
say, of the various Christians and Jews and what-not they were sitting on[2]. In the 1300s, when they
started to kill all these people, their culture went away. Suddenly, in 1500 the Arabs are all so
backwards. How did that
happen? Well, they were always
backward! I’ve got all kinds of
material that shows that, throughout Arab lands, all the bureaucrats were
Christians! Every once in a while,
they’d kill them all, and they couldn’t replace them, and they’d hire
Christians back again.
They might bring back witch-hunting.
Yeah, well, I don’t give a
damn. The fact of the matter is that
Arab culture is pretty much nonsense. I mean, Arabic numbers are in fact Indian numbers.
All the inventions that are accredited to the Muslim
civilization, you would say basically came from Jews and Christians?
The whole medical thing (was from)
Nestorian Christians. No, it’s
pretty much a myth. There were
some universities at that time. They were Nestorian!
Is there some essence to Arab culture that causes it
to be backwards? Or is it Islam
that is the cornerstone?
They started out being a very
backwards culture; I mean, they were desert Arabs. They never had any intellectual elite, they were almost all
Christians and Jews and Syrians and Persians and Hindus.
(Hasn’t) it changed at all?
I was going to say the 12th
Century, the 13th Century. At the Battle of Lepanto, which is 1571, the Muslim fleet is sunk. What's interesting is that the admirals
on both sides were Christians. And
the boats were built in Venice. They
never had a navy.
I don’t know if you’ve read Naipaul, who won the
Nobel Prize writing travel books about going through Arab lands? A quarter of the Muslims in the world
are Arabs. He makes the case that
Arabs are trying to impose their culture on other Muslims around the
world.
That’s probably true. But the culture that we all talked
about being so superior really wasn't.
This is the problem that Bernard Lewis talks about: “What went
wrong?”[3]
My answer to Bernard Lewis really
is, nothing went wrong. It was an
illusion in the first place.
What went wrong was they converted
and killed off all the Christians and Jews. And with the demise of the dhimmis was the demise of the delusion! When they build Bagdad, or when they built the big mosque in Jerusalem,
it was Byzantine architects. So it's
not clear there ever was an Arab architecture, as a matter of fact. It was paid for by Arabs but ….
But isn't that true of Christianity, too? I mean, we borrowed Greek and Roman
architecture.
Well, sure! But this is not borrowing, this is like
having Greeks and Romans come back and build them for you.
So you're saying what the Saudis are doing with Filipinos
and Indians today ….
Oh, I don’t know about today. I’m talking about back when this famous
Arab culture was so superior to Europe, so-called. The 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th,
and 11th Centuries, when Europe was in the Dark Ages, which never
happened. I’m saying, "But
hey! That wasn't an Arab culture
at all!" It was a continuation of
the Christian and Jewish culture of North Africa and the Middle East – and the
Persians.
I can see some of the strands of those ideas in some
of your earlier books.
Well, I had to sit down and read
all this stuff. (When I got) about
to chapter three in this book on the Crusades, I had to face the (question):
How was it that these … "ignorant savage Middle-Age (Crusaders)" could
travel 2,500 miles, lose about 75% to 80% of their numbers on the way ….
And still take Jerusalem.
And kick butt when they got to the
other end! The fact is, they had
much better weapons, and they had better armor, and better strategy, and they
were more advanced! So how does
that work? Gosh, maybe I’d better
start looking back here. And you've
got (the) thesis that Europe went down the drain because the Arabs took control
of the Mediterranean.
You go back and look, and the Genoese
and the Venetians and what-not are raiding Arab coastal towns throughout the
entire so-called Middle Ages. The
Byzantines can land troops anywhere they want. Where is this control of the sea? And the answer is, it wasn’t there!
The Muslims are landing in Italy and Switzerland,[4] too.
They were in Sicily and Italy,
absolutely. And they got kicked
out, because they couldn't reinforce by sea, as a matter of fact.
Byzantium was in fact a corrupt
nightmare. For the Arabs to run
over part of it – not a big surprise. But then the first time they faced the Franks, bam! They really got kicked.
But (as for) the term the Dark Ages, at the very
least, even if the lifestyle of the people in Europe was better as you say, isn't
it true that the Muslim world had huge libraries, while most people in Europe
couldn't read or write?
Well, but isn't it interesting that
Saladin, the famous wonderful liberal, destroyed the biggest library in Islam,
gave the books away. It's not at
all clear and clean.
You could make a case for the Dark Ages just from the
fact that there wasn't much reading and writing going on in Western Europe.
There was enough. No. I think the Dark Ages was a complete fraud. The fact that you may not be too familiar with the early Greeks, that you may not in fact write such good Latin, what's that got to do with the price of eggs? They were building dams and windmills and things that the Romans couldn't have imagined.
And they were much healthier, and
much better-fed. And I'm sorry,
science was going forward. Science
doesn't just suddenly jump out of the wall in the 1400s and 1500s. It was there in the 10, 11, 1200s. The university is a Dark Ages
institution. And it was very
sophisticated.
Spending some time in Oxford, walking around and
looking at the history – a lot of it is legendary, you don't know exactly how
it started – is a real education. I’m amazed that someone like Richard Dawkins has managed to be such an
anti-Christian bigot in a place like that.
And an ignorant bigot. His attacks are 3rd
grade. I have a student who has
written a wonderful book that you might like. I don't like the introductory chapter, but everything else
is wonderful. It's called The
Plot to Kill God. It's by Paul Froese. It's about the seventy-some year attempt
in Russia to get rid of religion, and how after seventy years they got
nowhere. He points out that one of
the problems is the people who were planning the atheist curriculum were all
guys like Richard Dawkins; they didn't know diddle about religion! And they didn't have enough respect for
it to think they needed to know anything. And so they're always aiming these "killer arguments" that demonstrated
the falsity of religion that half the peasants knew the answers to! (Laughter)
I guess Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan
Denisovich is a pretty good picture of the sort of person ….
Exactly. You’ve got it.
(Laughter) It’s a good
book, I recommend it.
[2] This term seems to have been popularized by
Egyptian scholar Bat Ye’or, author of The Decline of Eastern Christianity
Under Islam. It refers to Christians and Jews who paid a
“poll tax” to traditional Muslim governments in the Middle East, which Muslims
were not required to pay – among other restrictions and regulations.
[3] See my review of Lewis’ What Went Wrong: Western
Impact and Middle Eastern Response.
[4] Dr. Stark assumed I misspoke, but not in this
case. For Muslim incursion into
modern Switzerland up to Lake Constance, see Paul Fregosi, Jihad, p.24.