Fields of Blood – Karen Armstrong – S04

Chapter Notes:

Ch 6 Byzantium: The Tragedy of Empire.

·   “In 323 Constantine defeated Licinius, emperor of the eastern provinces, and became sole ruler of the Roman Empire.”

·   “… he moved his capital from Rome to the city of Byzantium … which he renamed Constantinople.”

·   “… in antiquity, the rhetoric of kingship had always been virtually interchangeable with the language of divinity.”

·   “By crafting and articulating an imperial Christianity and baptizing the latrocinium of Rome, Eusebius entirely subverted the original message of Jesus.”

·   “Jesus had told his followers to give all they had to the poor, but the Christian emperor enjoyed immense wealth.”

·   “The close union of church and empire that began in 312 meant that warfare inevitably acquired a sacral character …”

·   “Yet again, we see that a tradition that had once challenged state aggression was unable to sustain this ethical stance when it became identified with aristocratic rule.”

·   “[Eusebius] taught the Christians of Byzantium to believe that the ruthless militarism and systemic injustice of the Roman Empire would be transformed by the Christian ideal. But Constantine was a soldier, with very little knowledge of his new faith. It was more likely that Christianity would be converted to imperial violence.”

·   “Constantine may have felt the ambiguity of his position, because he delayed his baptism until he was on his deathbed.”

·   “Because religion and politics were inseparable in Rome, lack of consensus in the Church threatened the Pax Romana. In matters of state, no Roman emperor could permit his subjects to “go their own way.””

·   “A significant number of North African Christians had refused to accept the episcopal consecration of Caecilian, the new bishop of Carthage, and had set up their own church with Donatus as their bishop.”

·   “… the Donatists were destroying the consensus of the Church. Constantine decided that he had to act.”

·   “Constantine was forced to revoke the edict, left the Donatists in peace, and instructed orthodox bishops to turn the other cheek.”

·   “Christianity’s universal claims seemed ideally suited to Constantine’s ambition to achieve world rule, and he believed that its ethos of peace and reconciliation were in perfect alignment with the Pax Romana. But to Constantine’s horror, the eastern churches, far from being united in brotherly love, were bitterly divided by an obscure—and to Constantine, incomprehensible—theological dispute.”

·   “In 318 Arius, presbyter of Alexandria, had put forward the idea that Jesus, the Word of God, had not been divine by nature.”

·   “Quoting an impressive array of biblical texts, he contended that God had simply conferred divinity upon the man Jesus as a reward for his perfect obedience and humility.”

·   “… many of the bishops felt quite at home with Arius’s theology. Like their pagan neighbors, they did not experience the divine as an impossibly distant reality; in the Greco-Roman world, it was taken for granted that men and women regularly became fully fledged gods.”

·   “Arius was vehemently opposed by Athanasius”

·   “Athanasius’s doctrine of incarnation spoke directly to this changed mood.”

·   ““The Logos became human that we might become divine,” Athanasius insisted.”

·   “Athanasius’s doctrine of the “deification” (theosis) of humanity made perfect sense to those Christians who had become convinced that in some mysterious way they had already been transformed and that their humanity had acquired a new divine dimension. But theosis seemed nonsensical to those who had not experienced it.”

·   “Two new “Christianities” had therefore emerged in response to a shift in the intellectual environment …”

·   “Constantine, of course, had no understanding of these theological issues but was determined nevertheless to repair this breach of ecclesiastical consensus. In May he summoned the bishops to a council in Nicaea to settle the matter once and for all.”

·   “Nicaea solved nothing, and the Arian controversy dragged on for another sixty years.”

·   “In 270, … Antony sold his property and embarked on a quest for freedom and holiness that would become a countercultural challenge to both the Christianized Roman state and the new worldly, imperial Christianity.”

·   “For the first fifteen years, like other “renouncers” (apotaktikoi), Antony lived at the very edge of his village …”

·   “In the immensity of the desert, Antony discovered a tranquillity (hesychia) that put worldly care into perspective.”

·   “For some time, Egyptian peasants had engaged in this type of disengagement (anchoresis) to escape economic or social tension.”

·   “When neighborly relationships became unendurable, therefore, people would sometimes retire to the very edge of the settlement.39 But once Christianity reached the Egyptian countryside in the late third century, anchoresis was no longer a disgruntled withdrawal but had become a positive choice to live according to the gospel in a way that offered a welcome and challenging alternative to the acrimony and tedium of settled life. The monk (monachos) lived alone (monos), seeking the “freedom from care” (amerimmia) that Jesus had prescribed.40 Like the renouncers of previous times, the monks set up a counterculture, casting off their functional role in the agrarian economy and rejecting its inherent violence.”

·   “However provocative the circumstances, monks must never respond aggressively to any attack.”

·   “These monks meditated constantly on Jesus’s command to “love your enemies” because most of them did have enemies in the community.”

·   “The monastic movement spread more rapidly, demonstrating a widespread hunger for an alternative to a Christianity that was increasingly tainted by imperial associations. By the end of the fifth century, tens of thousands of monks were living beside the Nile and in the deserts of Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Armenia.”

·   “They had, wrote Athanasius, created a spiritual city in the wilderness that was the antithesis of the worldly city, supported by taxation, oppression, and military aggression.49 Instead of creating an aristocracy that lived off the labor of others, monks were self-sufficient and existed at subsistence level, and whatever surplus they produced, they gave to the poor.”

·   “Christians were developing a history of grievance that intensified during the brief but dramatic reign of the emperor Julian (361–63), known as “the Apostate.””

·   “Once again, some Christians responded to the state that had suddenly turned against them with the defiant gesture of martyrdom.”

·   “In this aggressive form of martyrdom, the martyrs were no longer the innocent victims of imperial violence: their battles now took the form of a symbolic—and sometimes suicidal—assault upon the enemies of the faith.”

·   “Christians courted martyrdom by smashing the pagan gods’ effigies, disrupting rituals and defacing the temples that symbolized their degradation, and loudly praising those who had defied Julian’s “tyranny.””

·   “Christian and pagan aristocrats, however, still shared a common culture”

·   “Paedeia was an important antidote to the violence of late Roman society, where slaves were regularly beaten to death, where the flogging of social inferiors was perfectly acceptable, and where councilors were publicly thrashed for tax arrears.”

·   “A truly cultivated Roman was unfailingly courteous and self-controlled, since anger, vituperative speech, and irascible gestures were unbecoming to a gentleman, who was expected to yield graciously to others and behave at all times with restraint, calm, and gravitas.”

·   “… the Trinity was designed first to help Christians realize that what we call God lay beyond the reach of words and concepts.”

·   “The Trinity was an attempt to translate this Jewish insight into a Hellenistic idiom.”

·   “God, the Cappadocians explained, had one divine, inaccessible essence (ousia) that was totally beyond the reach of the human mind, but it had been made known to us by three manifestations (hypostases): the Father (source of being), the Logos (in the man Jesus), and the Spirit that we encounter within ourselves. Each “person” (from the Latin persona, meaning “mask”) of the Trinity was merely a partial glimpse of the divine ousia that we could never comprehend.”

·   “It was clearly easier to imperialize the faith than to Christianize the empire.”

·   “During the late fourth century, rioting had become a regular feature of city life. Barbarian tribes were ceaselessly attacking the frontiers, brigandage was rife in the countryside, and refugees poured into the towns.”

·   “… because the army was needed to defend the borders, governors had no military forces to quell these uprisings and passed the responsibility for crowd control to the bishops.”

·   “The bishops of Syria already relied on local monks to man their soup kitchens and serve as stretcher-bearers, hospital porters, and gravediggers. They were greatly loved by the people,”

·   “Unlike Antony’s Egyptian monks, the monks of Syria had no interest in fighting the demon of anger. Known as boskoi …”

·   “They would enforce the Pax Christiana as aggressively as they had previously imposed the Pax Romana.”

·   Theodosius I (r. 346–95) “It was he who summoned the Council of Constantinople that made Nicene orthodoxy the official religion of the empire in 381.”

·   “In 388 Theodosius gave the monks the go-ahead, and they fell on the village shrines of Syria like a plague…”

·   “The monks became the symbolic vanguard of violent Christianization.”

·   “The Christianization of the empire was now, increasingly, equated with the destruction of these iconic buildings. In 391, after Theodosius had permitted Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, to occupy the temple of Dionysius, the bishop pillaged all the temples in the city and paraded the looted treasure in an insulting display.”

·   “The success of these attacks convinced Theodosius that the best way of achieving ideological consensus in the empire was to ban sacrificial worship and close down all the old shrines and temples … to prove that the pagan gods could not even defend their own homes.”

·   “… it was Augustine who would develop the “just war” theory, the foundation of all future Christian thinking on the subject.89 When Jesus told his disciples to turn the other cheek when attacked, Augustine argued, he had not asked them to be passive in the face of wrongdoing.”

·   “What made violence evil was not the act of killing but the passions of greed, hatred, and ambition that had prompted it.91 Violence was legitimate, however, if inspired by charity—by a sincere concern for the enemy’s welfare—and should be administered in the same way as a schoolmaster beat his pupils for their own good.92 But force must always be authorized by the proper authority.93 An individual, even if acting in self-defense, would inevitably feel an inordinate desire (libido) to inflict pain on his assailant, whereas a professional soldier, who was simply obeying orders, could act dispassionately. In putting violence beyond the reach of the individual, Augustine had given the state almost unlimited powers.”

·   “Lacking imperial supervision, Western Europe became a primitive backwater, its civilization lost, and for a while it looked as though Christianity itself would perish there. But the Western bishops stepped into the shoes of the departing Roman officials, maintaining a semblance of order in some regions, and the pope, the bishop of Rome, inherited the imperial aura. The popes sent missionaries out to the new barbarian kingdoms who converted the Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the Franks in the old province of Gaul. Over the coming centuries, the Byzantines would look with increasing disdain on these “barbarian” Christians. They would never accept the popes’ claim that, as the successors of Saint Peter, they were the true leaders of the Christian world.”

·   “Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, who argued that Christ had two natures, one human and one divine.95 Where the Nicene Creed saw humanity and divinity as entirely compatible, however, Nestorius insisted that they could not coexist.”

·   “Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, vehemently accused him of outright heresy, arguing that when God stooped to save us, he did not go halfway, as Nestorius seemed to suggest, but embraced our humanity in all its physicality and mortality.”

·   “At the Council of Ephesus (431) that met to decide the issue, each side accused the other of “tyranny.””

·   “In 449 Eutyches, a revered monastic leader in Constantinople, maintained that Jesus had only one nature (mono physis)…”

·   “a virtual civil war over doctrine”

·   “A second council was convened at Ephesus in 449 to settle the “Monophysite” problem…”

·   “The following year, however, Theodosius died, and the monks lost their imperial support. A new council met at Chalcedon in 451 to reverse Second Ephesus and create a neutral theological middle ground.103 The “Tome” of Pope Leo, which declared diplomatically that Jesus was fully God and fully man, now became the touchstone of orthodoxy.”

·   “Dioscorus was deposed, and the roaming Syrian boskoi reined in. Henceforth all monks were required to live and remain in their monastery, forbidden to participate in both worldly and ecclesiastical affairs, and were to be financially dependent on and controlled by the local bishop.”

·   “… a committee of nineteen of the highest military and civil officials of the empire presided over Chalcedon …”

·   “In any previous empire the religion of the ruling class had always been distinct from the faith of the subjugated masses, so the Christian emperors’ attempt to impose their theology on their subjects was a shocking break with precedent and was experienced as an outrage.”

·   “Just as the two natures—human and divine—were found in a single person, there could be no separation of church and empire; together they formed the Kingdom of God, which would soon spread to the entire world.”

·   “Instead of providing a challenging alternative to imperial violence, the tradition that had begun in part as a protest against the systemic oppression of empire had become the tool of Rome’s aggressive coercion.”

·   “In 540 Khosrow I of Persia began to transform his ailing kingdom into the economic giant of the region in a reform based on a classic definition of the agrarian state …”

·   “The monarchy depends on the army, the army on money; money comes from the land tax; the land tax comes from agriculture. Agriculture depends on justice; justice on the integrity of officials, and integrity and reliability on the ever-watchfulness of the king.”

·   “Like most traditional agrarian rulers, the Persian kings had no interest in imposing their faith on their subjects; even Darius’s imperial version of Zoroastrianism had been strictly confined to the aristocracy. Their subjects worshipped as they chose …”

·   ”The Jewish community at Ctesiphon (near modern Baghdad) became the intellectual and spiritual capital of world Jewry, and Nisibis, dedicated to the study of Christian scripture, another great intellectual center.”

·   “While Byzantine horizons were shrinking, Persians were broadening their outlook.”

·   “Indeed, so intertwined were church and empire by now that Christianity itself had seemed under attack during the siege of Constantinople. When the city was saved, the victory was attributed to Mary, mother of God, whose icon had been paraded to deter the enemy from the city walls.”

·   Maximus (580–662) “The whole human being could become God, deified by the grace of God become man—whole man, soul and body, by nature and becoming whole God, soul and body by grace.” Every single person, therefore, had sacred value. Our love of God was inseparable from our love of one another. Indeed, Jesus had taught that the iron test of our love of God was that we love our enemies…”

·   “… right up to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, Byzantines continued to believe that the Pax Romana was compatible with the Pax Christiana.”

Ch 7 - The Muslim Dilemma

·   “For some years, Muhammad ibn Abdullah had made an annual retreat on Mount Hira, just outside the city.1 There he fasted, performed spiritual exercises, and gave alms to the poor while he meditated deeply on the problems of his people, the tribe of Quraysh.”

·   “Only a few generations earlier, their ancestors had been living a desperate life in the intractable deserts of northern Arabia. Now they were rich beyond their wildest dreams…”

·   “… merchants from India, East Africa, Yemen, and Bahrain began to take their caravans through the Arabian steppes to Byzantium and Syria, using the Bedouin to guide them from one watering hole to another. Mecca had become a station for these caravans…”

·   “Mecca’s prosperity also depended on its status as a pilgrimage center.”

·   “Mecca was in the grip of a social and moral crisis. The old tribal spirit had succumbed to the ethos of an infant market economy and families now vied with one another for wealth and prestige.”

·   “The ghazu was a kind of national sport, conducted with skill and panache according to clearly defined rules, which the Bedouin would have thoroughly enjoyed. It was a brutal yet simple way of redistributing wealth in a region where there was simply not enough to go round. Although the tribesmen had little interest in the supernatural, they gave meaning to their lives with a code of virtue and honor. They called it muruwah, a term that is difficult to translate: it encompasses courage, patience, and endurance. Muruwah had a violent core. Tribesmen had to avenge any wrong done to the group, protect its weaker members, and defy its enemies. Each member had to be ready to leap to the defense of his kinsmen if the tribe’s honor was impugned. But above all, he had to share his resources.”

·   “Muslims traditionally call the pre-Islamic period jahiliyyah, which is usually translated as “the time of ignorance.” But the primary meaning of the root JHL is “irascibility”—an acute sensitivity to honor and prestige, excessive arrogance, and, above all, a chronic tendency to violence and retaliation.”

·   “Mecca had to be a place where merchants from any tribe could gather freely to do business without fear of attack, so in the interests of commerce, the Quraysh had abjured warfare, maintaining a position of aloof neutrality. With consummate skill and diplomacy, they had established the “sanctuary” (haram), a twenty-mile zone around the Kabah where all violence was forbidden.5 Yet it would take more than that to subdue the jahili spirit. Meccan grandees were still chauvinistic, touchy, and liable to explosions of ungovernable fury.”

·   “When Muhammad, the pious merchant, began to preach to his fellow Meccans in 612, he was well aware of the precariousness of this volatile society.”

·   “Gathering a small community of followers, many from the weaker, disadvantaged clans, his message was based on the Quran (“Recitation”), a new revelation for the people of Arabia. The ideas of the civilized peoples of the ancient world had traveled down the trade routes and had been avidly discussed among the Arabs. Their own local lore had it that they themselves were descended from Ishmael, Abraham’s eldest son, and many believed that their high god Allah, whose name simply meant “God,” was identical with the god of the Jews and Christians. But the Arabs had no concept of an exclusive revelation or of their own special election. The Quran was to them simply the latest in the unfolding revelation of Allah to the descendants of Abraham, a “reminder” of what everybody knew already. Indeed, in one remarkable passage of what would become the written Quran, Allah made it clear that he made no distinction between the revelations of any of the prophets.”

·   “The bedrock message of the Quran was not a new abstruse doctrine, such as had riven Byzantium, but simply a “reminder” of what constituted a just society that challenged the structural violence emerging in Mecca: that it was wrong to build a private fortune but good to share your wealth with the poor and vulnerable, who must be treated with equity and respect. The Muslims formed an ummah, a “community” that provided an alternative to the greed and systemic injustice of Meccan capitalism.”

·   “Eventually the religion of Muhammad’s followers would be called islam, because it demanded that individuals “surrender” their whole being to Allah; a muslim was simply a man or woman who had made that surrender.”

·   “By caring for the vulnerable, freeing slaves, and performing small acts of kindness on a daily, even hourly basis, they believed that they would gradually acquire a responsible, compassionate spirit and purge themselves of selfishness.”

·   “Unlike the tribesmen, who retaliated violently at the slightest provocation, Muslims must not strike back but leave revenge to Allah,12 consistently treating all others with gentleness and courtesy.”

·   ““Not one of you can be a believer,” Muhammad is reported to have said, “unless he desires for his neighbor what he desires for himself.””

·   “… when Muhammad began to emphasize the monotheism of his message, they became alarmed, for commercial rather than theological reasons. An outright rejection of the local deities would be bad for business and alienate the tribes who kept their totems around the Kabah and came specifically to visit them during the hajj. A serious rift now developed …”

·   “In 622, therefore, some seventy Muslim families left their homes for the oasis that would become known as al-Madinat, or Medina, the City of the Prophet”

·   “Medina was not a unified city but a series of fortified hamlets, each occupied by a different tribal group.”

·   “Muhammad, as a neutral outsider, became an arbitrator and crafted an agreement that united Helpers and Emigrants in a supertribe—“one community to the exclusion of all men”—that would fight all enemies as one.”

·   “The Emigrants were a drain on the community’s resources. They were merchants and bankers, but there was little opportunity for trade in Medina; they had no experience of farming, and in any case there was no available land. It was essential to find an independent source of income, and the ghazu, the accepted way of making ends meet in times of scarcity, was the obvious solution. In 624, therefore, Muhammad began to dispatch raiding parties to attack the Meccan caravans,”

·   “When they finally got the hang of it, the raiders broke two Arabian cardinal rules by accidentally killing a Meccan merchant and fighting during one of the Sacred Months, when violence was prohibited throughout the peninsula.17 Muslims could now expect reprisals from Mecca.”

·   “Muslims trounced the Quraysh at the Battle of the Trench,”

·   “The ummah also had internal troubles. Three of Medina’s Jewish tribes—the Qaynuqa, Nadir, and Qurayzah—were determined to destroy Muhammad, because he had undermined their political ascendency in the oasis.”

·   “Muhammad expelled them from Medina.”

·   “… after the Battle of the Trench, when the Qurayzah had put the entire settlement at risk by plotting with Mecca during the siege, Muhammad showed no mercy. In accordance with Arab custom, the seven hundred men of the tribe were slaughtered and the women and children sold as slaves.”

·   “… this atrocity marked the lowest point in the Prophet’s career.”

·   “… he intensified his diplomatic efforts…”

·   “Muhammad must be one of the few leaders in history to build an empire largely by negotiation.”

·   “…in 630 Mecca voluntarily opened its gates to the Muslim army.”

·   “Our main source for Muhammad’s life is the Quran, the collection of revelations that came to the Prophet during the twenty-three years of his mission.”

·   “… standardized under Uthman, the third caliph, some twenty years after Muhammad’s death.”

·   “The Quran is not a coherent revelation: it came to Muhammad piecemeal in response to particular events …”

·   “Jihad (“struggle”) is not one of the Quran’s main themes: in fact, the word and its derivatives occur only forty-one times, and only ten of these refer unambiguously to warfare.”

·   “There is no univocal or systematic Quranic teaching about military violence.”

·   “… contradictory instructions occur throughout the Quran, and Muslims developed two exegetical strategies to rationalize them.”

·   “The first linked each verse of the Quran with a historical event in Muhammad’s life and used this context to establish a general principle. Yet because the extant text does not place the revelations in chronological order, the early scholars found it difficult to determine these asbab al-nuzal (“occasions of revelations”). The second strategy was to abrogate verses: scholars argued that while the ummah was still struggling for survival, God could only give Muslims temporary solutions to their difficulties, but once Islam was victorious, he could issue permanent commands. Thus the later revelations—some of which call for unrestrained warfare—were God’s definitive words and rescinded the earlier, more lenient directives.”

·   “The American scholar Reuven Firestone has suggested that the conflicting verses instead expressed the views of different groups within the ummah during the Prophet’s life and after.”

·   “Muslims would interpret their revelation in radically divergent ways and, like any other faith, Islam developed in response to changing circumstances.”

·   “…some Muslims would not be happy to hear that God had encouraged fighting: “Fighting has been ordained for you, though it is hateful to you.””

·   “Believers, why, when it is said to you, “Go and fight in God’s cause,” do you feel weighed down to the ground? Do you prefer this world to the world to come? How small is the enjoyment of this world compared with the life to come! If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place.”

·   “Yet this group could point to the many verses in the Quran that instruct Muslims not to retaliate but to “forgive and forbear,””

·   “Ultimately, however, the more militant groups prevailed, possibly because by the ninth century, long after the Prophet’s death, the more aggressive verses reflected reality, since by this time Muslims had established an empire that could be maintained only by military force.”

·   “the “Sword Verse,”

·   “When the forbidden months are over wherever you encounter the idolaters, kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every look-out post; but if they repent, maintain the prayer, and pay the prescribed alms let them go on their way, for God is most merciful and forgiving.”

·   “There is thus a constant juxtaposition of ruthlessness and mercy in the Quran:”

·   “Muhammad’s confederacy broke up after his death in 632,…”

·   “Within two years, Abu Bakr succeeded in restoring the Pax Islamica, and after his death in 634, Umar ibn al-Khattab”

·   “(r. 634–44), the second caliph, believed that peace could be preserved only by an outwardly directed offensive.”

·   “Umar’s solution was to raid the rich settled lands beyond the Arabian Peninsula, which, as the Arabs knew well, were in disarray after the Persian-Byzantine wars.”

·   “Under Umar’s leadership, the Arabs burst out of the peninsula, initially in small local raids but later in larger expeditions. As they expected, they met little opposition.”

·   “When they finally subdued Iran, they fulfilled the dream that had eluded both the Persians and Byzantines and re-created Cyrus’s empire.45 It is hard to explain their success.”

·   “The Arabs had no experience of state building and just adopted Persian and Byzantine systems of land tenure, taxation, and government.”

·   “There was no attempt to impose Islam on the subject peoples”

·   “When Umar conquered Jerusalem from the Byzantines in 638, he immediately signed a charter to ensure that the Christian shrines were undisturbed and cleared the site of the Jewish temple,”

·   “The Muslims’ ability to establish and maintain a stable, centralized empire was even more surprising than their military success.”

·   “Later generations would idealize the Conquest Era, but it was a difficult time. The failure to defeat Constantinople was a bitter blow.”

·   “The ahadith gave fighting a spiritual dimension it had never had in the Quran.”

·   “Ahadith list his heavenly rewards:”

·   “In the sight of God the martyr has six [unique] qualities: He [God] forgives him at the first opportunity, and shows him his place in paradise; he is saved from the torment of the grave, he is safe from the great fright [of the Last Judgment], a crown of honor is placed upon his head—one ruby of which is better than the world and all that is in it—he is married to 72 of the houris [women of paradise], and he gains the right to intercede [with God] for 70 of his relatives.”

·   “It was probably inevitable that, as Muslims made their astonishing transition from a life of penury to world rule, there would be disagreements about leadership, the allocation of resources, and the morality of empire.”

·   “Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, became the fourth caliph;”

·   “not accepted in Syria, where the opposition was led by Uthman’s kinsman Muawiyyah, governor of Damascus.”

·   “The trauma of this civil war marked Islamic life forever.”

·   “The fate of Ali became for some a symbol of the structural injustice of mainstream political life, and these Muslims, who called themselves the shiah-i Ali (“Ali’s partisans”), developed a piety of principled protest, revering Ali’s male descendants as the true leaders of the ummah.”

·   “… most Muslims decided that unity must be the first priority, even if that meant accommodating a degree of oppression and injustice. Instead of revering Ali’s descendants, they would follow the sunnah (“customary practice”) of the Prophet.”

·   “For Muslims, the suffering, oppression, and exploitation that arose from the systemic violence of the state were moral issues of sacred import and could not be relegated to the profane realm.”

·   “Muawiyyah moved his capital from Medina to Damascus and founded a hereditary dynasty. The Umayyads would create a regular agrarian empire, with a privileged aristocracy and an unequal distribution of wealth. Herein lay the Muslim dilemma.”

·   “They modeled their court ceremonial on Persian practice, shrouded the caliph from public view in the mosque, and achieved a monopoly of state violence by ruling that only the caliph could summon Muslims to war.”

·   “One event above all others symbolized the tragic conflict between the inherent violence of the state and Muslim ideals. After Ali’s death, the Shii had pinned their hopes on Ali’s descendants.”

·   “All Muslims lament the murder of the Prophet’s grandson, but for the Shiah, Karbala epitomized the Muslim dilemma. How could Islamic justice be realistically implemented in a belligerent imperial state?”

·   “The Dome of the Rock, built by Abd al-Malik in Jerusalem in 691,”

·   “But as soon as they were in power, the Abbasids cast aside their Shii piety and set up an absolute monarchy on the Persian model, which was welcomed by the subject peoples but strayed wholly from Islamic principles by embracing imperial structural violence.”

·   “Christendom was saved by the Abbasids’ total indifference to the West.”

·   “By the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786–809), the transformation of the Islamic Empire from an Arab to a Persian monarchy was complete.”

·   “… when the Umayyads had besieged Constantinople (717–18), ulema, hadith-collectors, ascetics, and Quran-reciters had assembled on the frontier to support the army with their prayers.”

·   “Some of these scholars and ascetics took part in the fighting and in garrison duties, but most supplied spiritual support in the form of prayer, fasting, and study.”

·   ““Volunteering” (tatawwa) would put down deep roots in Islam and resurface powerfully in our own day.”

·   “Muhammad had said to his companions: “We are returning from the Lesser Jihad [the battle] and returning to the Greater Jihad”—the more exacting and important effort to fight the baser passions and reform one’s own society.”

·   “The caliphs therefore asked the ulema to develop the standardized system of Islamic law that would become the Shariah. Four schools of law (maddhab) emerged, all regarded as equally valid. Each school had its distinctive outlook but was based on the practice (sunnah) of the Prophet and the early ummah. Like the Talmud, which was a strong influence on these developments, the new jurisprudence (fiqh) aimed to bring the whole of life under the canopy of the sacred.”

·   “Shariah law provided a principled alternative to the aristocratic rule of agrarian society, since it refused to accept a hereditary class system.”

·   “Where the aristocratic adab took a pragmatic view of what was politically feasible, the Shariah was an idealistic countercultural challenge, which tacitly condemned the structural violence of the imperial state and boldly insisted that no institution—not even the caliphate—had the right to interfere with an individual’s personal decisions.”

·   “There was no way that an agrarian state could be run on these lines, however, and although the caliphs always acknowledged the Shariah as the law of God, they could not rule by it. Consequently, Shariah law never governed the whole of society,”

·   “Nevertheless, the Shariah was a constant witness to the Islamic ideal of equality that is so deeply embedded in our humanity that despite the apparent impossibility of incorporating it in political life, we remain stubbornly convinced that it is the natural way for human beings to live together.”

·   “Al-Shafii formulated what would become the classical doctrine of jihad,”

·   “Al-Shafii argued. The human race was divided into the dar al-Islam (“The Abode of Islam”) and the non-Muslim world, the dar al-harb (“The Abode of War”).”

·   “What distinguished Islam from other revelations, however, was that it had a God-given mandate to extend its rule to the rest of humanity. Its mission was to establish the social justice and equity prescribed by God in the Quran, so that all men and women could be liberated from the tyranny of a state run on worldly principles.”

·   “Perhaps the role of religious vision is to fill us with a divine discomfort that will not allow us wholly to accept the unacceptable.”

·   “Al-Shafii was writing at a time when the Abbasids had renounced territorial expansion, so he was legislating not for offensive jihad but only for defensive warfare. Muslims still debate the legitimacy of jihad in these terms today.”

·   “Sunni Muslims had accepted the imperfections of the agrarian system in order to keep the peace.”

·   “The Shii still condemned its systemic violence but found a practical way of dealing with the Abbasid regime. Jafar”

·   “Henceforth the Shiah would hold aloof from the mainstream, their disengagement a silent rebuke to Abbasid tyranny and a witness to true Islamic values.”

·   “Jafar had, in effect, separated religion and politics. This sacred secularism would remain the dominant ideal of Shiism until the late twentieth century.”

·   “Yet the Imams remained an unbearable irritant to the caliphs.”

·   “… they were nearly all murdered by the caliphs.”

·   “When toward the end of the ninth century, the Twelfth Imam mysteriously vanished from prison, it was said that God had miraculously removed him and that he would one day return to inaugurate an era of justice.”

·   “The myth reflected the tragic impossibility of implementing a truly equitable policy in a flawed and violent world.”

·   “On the anniversary of Imam Husain’s death on the tenth (ashura) of the month of Muharram, Shiis would publicly mourn his murder,…”

·   “The Ismailis, who believed that Ali’s line had ended with Ismail, the Seventh Imam, remained convinced that piety must be backed up by military jihad for a just society.”

·   “In the tenth century, the Muslim empire was beginning to fragment.”

·   “Muslim religious thought subsequently became less driven by current events and would become politically oriented again only in the modern period, when the ummah faced a new imperial threat.”

·   “The Seljuk Turks from Central Asia gave fullest expression to the new order.”

·   “But most Muslims accommodated easily to Seljuk rule.”

·   “they created the first madrassas,”

·   “the Shariah courts became a stable authority in each region.”

·   “Moreover, Sufi mystics and the more charismatic ulema traveled the length and breadth of the Seljuk Empire, giving ordinary Muslims a strong sense of belonging to an international community.”

·   “In 1071 the Seljuk chieftain Alp Arslan defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert in Armenia,”

Ch 8 – Crusade and Jihad

·   “Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85) was deeply disturbed to hear that hordes of Turkish tribesmen had invaded Byzantine territory, and in 1074 he dispatched a series of letters summoning the faithful to join him in “liberating” their brothers in Anatolia. He proposed personally to lead an army to the east, which would rid Greek Christians of the Turkish menace and then liberate the holy city of Jerusalem from the infidel.”

·   “… libertas had different connotations in medieval Europe.”

·   “The Roman clergy thus adopted the old aristocracy’s ideal of libertas, which had little to do with freedom; rather, it referred to the maintenance of the privileged position of the ruling class, lest society lapse into barbarism.4 As the successor of Saint Peter, Gregory believed that he had a divine mandate to rule the Christian world. His “crusade” was designed in part to reassert papal libertas in the Eastern Empire, which did not accept the supremacy of the bishop of Rome.”

·   “Gregory struggled but ultimately failed to assert the libertas, the supremacy and integrity, of the Church against the rising power of the lay rulers. Hence his proposed crusade came to nothing,”

·   “The Germanic tribes who established kingdoms in the old Roman provinces had embraced Christianity and revered the warrior kings of the Hebrew Bible, but their military ethos was still permeated with ancient Aryan ideals of heroism and desire for fame, glory, and loot.”

·   “Charlemagne (r. 772–814) showed what a king could do when supported by such substantial resources.7 By 785 he had conquered northern Italy and the whole of Gaul; in 792 he moved into central Europe and attacked the Avars of western Hungary, bringing home wagonloads of plunder.”

·   “Far from being inspired solely by religious zeal, these wars of expansion were also informed by the economic imperative of acquiring more arable land.”

·   “… statements of political rather than spiritual realignment.”

·   “On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne “Holy Roman Emperor” in the Basilica of St. Peter. The congregation acclaimed him as “Augustus,” and Leo prostrated himself at Charlemagne’s feet.”

·   ““Our Lord Jesus Christ has set you up as the ruler of the Christian people, in power more excellent than the pope or the emperor of Constantinople,” wrote Alcuin, a British monk and court adviser to Charlemagne. “On you alone depends the whole safety of the churches of Christ.” In a letter to Leo, Charlemagne declared that as emperor it was his mission “everywhere to defend the church of Christ.”

·   “The monks of Europe were very different from their counterparts in Egypt and Syria. They were not peasants but members of the nobility; they lived not in desert caves but on estates farmed by serfs who were the monastery’s property.”

·   “Most followed the Rule of St. Benedict, written in the sixth century at a time when the bonds of civil society seemed on the point of collapse. Benedict’s aim had been to create communities of obedience, stability, and religio (“reverence” and “bonding”) in a world of violence and uncertainty.”

·   “The rule provided disciplina, similar to the military disciplina of the Roman soldier: it prescribed a series of physical rituals carefully designed to restructure emotion and desire and create an attitude of humility very different from the aggressive self-assertion of the knight.”

·   “… during the ninth and tenth centuries support for the rule became a central feature of government in Europe.”

·   “Abjuring sex, money, fighting, and mutability, the most corrupting aspects of secular life, they embraced chastity, poverty, nonviolence, and stability.”

·   “At this point, Western Christendom did not distinguish public and private, natural and supernatural. Thus by combating the demonic powers with their prayers, monks were essential to the security of the realm. There were two ways for an aristocrat to serve God: fighting or praying.19 Monks were the spiritual counterparts of secular soldiers, their battles just as real and far more significant:”

·   “…during the Carolingian period, two distinct aristocratic orders emerged: the warrior nobility (bellatores) and the men of religion (oratores).”

·   “military violence was about to receive a Christian baptism.”

·   “For decades French knights had been engaged in almost ceaseless warfare and were now economically dependent on plunder and looting.”

·   “… warfare was “perhaps above all, a source of profit, the nobleman’s chief industry,””

·   “… there was “no line of demarcation” in early medieval Europe between “warlike activity” and “pillaging.””

·   “This surge of violence coincided with the development of the manors, the great landed estates, and a full-fledged agrarian system in Europe, which depended on the forcible extraction of the agricultural surplus.”

·   “The manorial system had abolished the ancient distinction between the free peasant, who could bear arms, and the slave, who could not.”

·   “A two-tier stratification had emerged in Western society: the “men of power” (potentes) and the “poor” (pauperes). The aristocracy needed the help of ordinary soldiers to subjugate the poor, so knights became retainers, exempt from servitude and taxation and members of the nobility.”

·   “The aristocratic priests naturally supported this oppressive system and indeed were largely responsible for crafting it,”

·   “The monks of the Benedictine abbey of Cluny in Burgundy responded to the twofold crisis of internal violence and social protest by initiating a reform that attempted to limit the lawless aggression of the knights.”

·   “… by promoting the practice of pilgrimage to sacred sites.”

·   “At the same time, the reformers tried to give fighting spiritual value and make knightly warfare a Christian vocation.”

·   “They decided that a warrior could serve God by protecting the unarmed poor from the depredations of the lower aristocracy and by pursuing the enemies of the Church.”

·   “In a related movement, the bishops inaugurated the Peace of God to limit the knights’ violence and protect Church property.”

·   “I will not carry off either ox or cow or any other beast of burden; I will seize neither peasant nor merchant; I will not take from them their pence, nor oblige them to ransom themselves; and I will not beat them to obtain their subsistence. I will seize neither horse, mare nor colt from their pasture; I will not destroy or burn their houses.”

·   “They now also introduced the Truce of God, forbidding fighting from Wednesday evening to Monday morning each week in memory of Christ’s days of passion, death, and resurrection.”

·   “These peacekeeping forces helped to make knightly violence a genuine “service” (militia) of God, equal to the priestly and monastic vocation.34 The Peace movement spread throughout France,”

·   “This political struggle for power between popes and emperors would inform the religiously inspired violence of the Crusading period; both sides were competing for political supremacy in Europe, and that meant gaining the monopoly of violence. In 1074 Gregory’s crusade had no takers; twenty years later, the response from the laity would be very different.”

·   “Urban urged the knights of France to stop attacking their fellow Christians and instead fight God’s enemies.”

·   “They should then proceed to the Holy Land to liberate Jerusalem.”

·   “Urban would always call the expedition a pilgrimage—except that these pilgrims would be heavily armed knights, and this “act of love” would result in the deaths of thousands of innocent people.”

·   “… seven thousand pilgrims had left Europe for the Holy Land to force the Antichrist to declare himself so that God could establish a better world. In 1095 many of the knights would have seen the Crusade in this populist, apocalyptic light.”

·   “Pious ideas would certainly have been fused with more earthly objectives. Many would take up their cross to acquire wealth overseas, and fiefs for their descendants, as well as fame and prestige. Events quickly spiraled out of Urban’s control—a reminder of the limitations of religious authority.”

·   “It had never occurred to Urban that the Crusaders would attack the Jewish communities in Europe, but in 1096 an army of German Crusaders slaughtered between four to eight thousand Jews in Speyer, Worms, and Mainz.”

·   “Some Crusaders seemed genuinely confused. Why were they going to fight Muslims thousands of miles away when the people who had actually killed Jesus—or so the Crusaders mistakenly believed—were alive and well on their very doorsteps?”

·   “The Crusades made anti-Semitic violence a chronic disease in Europe: every time a Crusade was summoned, Christians would first attack Jews at home. This persecution was certainly inspired by religious conviction, but social, political, and economic elements were also involved.”

·   “… when the bishops tried to protect the Jews, it appears these less affluent townsfolk joined the Crusaders in the killing.”

·   “Crusaders would always be motivated by social and economic factors as well as by religious zeal.”

·   “There were also inevitably adventurers, robbers, renegade monks, and brigands in the Crusading hordes, many doubtless drawn by dreams of wealth and fortune as well as a “restless heart.””

·   “The terrifying experience of Crusading soon changed their views and expectations.”

·   “The Turks operated a scorched-earth policy, so there was no food,”

·   “The Crusaders soon realized that they were badly led and inadequately provisioned.”

·   “Even so, they could not have arrived at a more opportune moment.”

·   “The Crusaders knew nothing about local politics, and their understanding was derived almost entirely from their religious views and prejudices. Onlookers described the Crusading armies as a monastery on the march. At every crisis there were processions, prayers, and a special liturgy.”

·   “When they finally succeeded in conquering Jerusalem on July 15, 1099, they could only conclude that God had been with them.”

·   “From all accounts, the Crusaders seemed half-crazed.”

·   “… when they fell on the inhabitants of Jerusalem, they slaughtered some thirty thousand people in three days.59 “They killed all the Saracens and Turks they found,” the author of the Deeds of the Franks reported approvingly. “They killed everyone, male or female.”60 The streets ran with blood. Jews were rounded up into their synagogue and put to the sword, and ten thousand Muslims who had sought sanctuary in the Haram al-Sharif were brutally massacred.”

·   “unable to dispose of the bodies “ [for over 6 months].

·

·   “… the Crusaders were standing beside the tomb of a man who had been a victim of human cruelty, yet they were unable to question their own violent behavior. The ecstasy of battle, heightened in this case by years of terror, starvation, and isolation, merged with their religious mythology to create an illusion of utter righteousness. But victors are never blamed for their crimes, and chroniclers soon described the conquest in Jerusalem as a turning point in history.”

·   “… a complete denial of the pacifist strain in Christianity.”

·   “Five Crusader states were established, in Jerusalem, Antioch, Galilee, Edessa, and Tripoli.”

·   “These states needed a standing army, and the Church completed its canonization of warfare by giving monks a sword:”

·   “… the Knights Hospitaler of St. John were founded originally to care for poor and sick pilgrims, and the Knights Templar, housed in the Aqsa Mosque on the Haram, policed the roads. They took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to their military commander, and because they were far more disciplined than ordinary knights, they became the most professional fighting force in the West since the Roman legions.”

·   “The Templars, however, combined the meekness of monks with military power, and their sole motivation was to kill the enemies of Christ.”

·   “The Muslims were stunned by the Crusaders’ violence.”

·   “Muslims had never experienced anything like the Jerusalem massacre.”

·   “Muslim sources reported in horror that the Franks did not spare the elderly, the women, or the sick; they even slaughtered devout ulema,”

·   “Despite this appalling beginning, not only was there no major Muslim offensive against the Franks for nearly fifty years, but the Crusaders were accepted as part of the political makeup of the region. The Crusader states fitted neatly into the Seljuk pattern of small, independent tributary states,”

·   “No longer poised to resist foreign invasion, the emirs had been lax in their defense of the borders; they were unconcerned about the “infidel” presence, since they were too intent on their campaigns against one another.”

·   “Muslim chroniclers to record the Crusade completely failed to recognize the Franks’ religious passion”

·   “… the Franks who stayed in the Holy Land realized that their survival depended on their ability to coexist with their Muslim neighbors and soon lost their rabid prejudice. They assimilated with the local culture and learned to take baths, dress in the Turkish style, and speak the local languages; they even married Muslim women.”

·   “Far from being maniacally programmed for holy war by their religion, the Muslims had little appetite for jihad and were preoccupied by new forms of spirituality. In particular, some of the Sufi mystics would develop an outstanding appreciation of other faith traditions.”

·   “…no sustained action was taken against the Crusaders until 1144,”

·   “it was the spectacle of the huge armies arriving from Europe to recover Edessa in the Second Crusade (1148) that finally galvanized some of the emirs.”

·   “Yusuf ibn Ayyub, usually known by his title Salah ad-Din (“Honor of the Faith”), who would reconquer Jerusalem.”

·   “Saladin had to spend the first ten years of his reign fighting other emirs in order to hold Nur ad-Din’s empire together, and during this struggle he made many treaties with the Franks. Saladin too first concentrated on the Greater Jihad and endeared himself to the people by his compassion, humility, and charisma, but as his biographer explained, his real passion was the military jihad:”

·   “In the future any Western intervention in the Middle East, however secular its motivation, would evoke the memory of the fanatical violence of the First Crusade.”

·   “Saladin discovered that his enemy could be its own greatest foe.”

·   “When he took possession of Jerusalem, his first impulse was to avenge the Crusaders’ massacre of 1099 but was persuaded by a Frankish envoy to take the city without violence.82 Not a single Christian was killed, the Frankish inhabitants of Jerusalem were ransomed for a very moderate sum, and many were escorted to Tyre, where the Christians maintained a stronghold.”

·   “Christians in the West were uneasily aware that Saladin had behaved more humanely than the Crusaders”

·   “…. the Franks managed to retain a narrow coastal state stretching from Tyre to Beirut, which continued to threaten Muslim Jerusalem until the late thirteenth century.”

·   “Crusading was increasingly driven by material and political interests that sidelined the spiritual.”

·   “The Third Crusade (1189–92), led and convened by the Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Philip II of France, and Richard I of England, reasserted the temporal rulers’ monopoly of violence.”

·   “… the Fourth Crusade was hijacked purely for commercial gain by the merchants of Venice, the new men of Europe, who persuaded the Crusaders to attack their fellow Christians in the port of Zara and plunder Constantinople in 1204.”

·   “Pope Innocent III reclaimed papal libertas in 1213 by summoning the Fifth Crusade, which attempted to establish a Western base in Egypt,”

·   “The Sixth Crusade (1228–29) entirely subverted the original Crusading ideal because it was led by the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II, who had recently been excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX.”

·   “Muslims were now convinced that the West was their implacable enemy, and Christians seemed to think it more important to fight Muslims than to get Jerusalem back.”

·   “Christians lost Jerusalem again in 1244, when the marauding Khwarazmian Turks in flight from the Mongol armies rampaged through the holy city, a portent of a terrifying threat to both Christendom and Islamdom.”

·   “In 1257 Hulugu, Genghis Khan’s son, crossed the Tigris, seized Baghdad,”

·   “… the Muslims would save the Crusaders’ coastal state and, possibly, Western Christendom from the Mongols. Finally, the Mongol rulers who established states in the Middle East would convert to Islam.”

·   “… the brilliant Mamluk commander Baibars defeated the Mongol army at the Battle of Ain Jalut in Galilee.”

·   “Mongol violence was not caused by religious intolerance:”

·   “Muslims were always ready to learn from other cultures, and in the late fifteenth century they did so from the heirs of Genghis Khan.”

·   “… the Mongols also unwittingly inspired a spiritual revival. Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–73) had fled the Mongol armies with his family, migrating from Iran to Anatolia, where he founded a new mystical Sufi order.”

·   “Another thinker of the period who has also achieved great influence in our own time was the “fighting scholar” Ahmed ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1382), also a refugee … hated the Mongols.”

·   “Ibn Taymiyyah urged Muslims to engage in the Greater Jihad and return to the pure Islam of the Prophet’s time, ridding themselves of such inauthentic practices as philosophy (falsafah), Sufi mysticism, Shiism, and the veneration of saints and their tombs. Muslims who persisted in these false devotions were no better than infidels.”

·   “Muslims had traditionally been wary of condemning fellow Muslims as apostates, because they believed that only God could read a person’s heart.”

·   “The practice of takfir, declaring that a fellow Muslim has apostatized, would take on new life in our own times, when Muslims have once again felt threatened by foreign powers.”

·   “Until the early eleventh century, Jews had been fully integrated in Europe.”

·   “There were no “ghettos”: Jews and Christians lived side by side”

·   “… during the eleventh century, there were rumors that Jews had persuaded the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim to destroy the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem in 1009,”

·   “This wave of persecution was certainly inspired by a distorted Christian mythology,”

·   “… towns were beginning to dominate Western Christendom, and by the end of the twelfth century were becoming important centers of prosperity, power, and creativity. There were great disparities of wealth. Lowborn bankers and financiers were becoming rich at the expense of the aristocracy,”

·   “… during the twelfth century Jews had their lands confiscated and many were forced to become bailiffs, financial agents of the aristocracy, or moneylenders and were thereafter tainted by their association with money.”

·   “The conditions of peasants had reached their lowest level, and poverty had become a major problem.”

·   “Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), son of a wealthy merchant, renounced his patrimony, lived as a hermit, and founded a new order of friars dedicated to serving the poor and sharing their poverty;”

·   “On January 2, 1492, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile celebrated their victory over the Muslim kingdom of Granada in southern Spain.”

·   “The Ottoman Empire was the strongest and most powerful state in the world, ruling Anatolia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Arabia. But the Safavids in Iran and the Moghuls in India had also established absolute monarchies in which almost every facet of public life was run with systematic and bureaucratic precision. Each had a strong Islamic ideology that permeated every aspect of their rule:”

·   “the last magnificent expression of the “conservative spirit” that was the hallmark of premodern society.”

·   “Premodern education could not encourage originality, because it lacked the resources to implement many new ideas.”

·   “In a conservative society, stability and order were far more important than freedom of expression.”

·   “… warfare—to conquer, expand, or maintain the tax base—was essential to these states.”

·   “But for centuries now, Europeans had been devising a commercial economy that would result in the creation of a very different kind of state. The modern world is often said to have begun in 1492; in fact, it would take Europeans some four hundred years to create the modern state. Its economy would no longer be based on the agrarian surplus, it would interfere far more in the personal lives of its subjects, it would be run on the expectation of constant innovation, and it would separate religion from its politics.”

·   “For some, Western modernity would be empowering, liberating, and enthralling; others would experience it as coercive, invasive, and destructive.”

·   “The early colonialists stormed violently into the New World as if they were conducting a giant acquisition raid, greed melding seamlessly with pious intent.”

·   “… between three and five million Africans were torn from their homes and enslaved there.”

·   “… a purely trading empire: the Portuguese made no attempt to conquer territory inland. Meanwhile, the Spanish had invaded the Americas, slaughtering the indigenous peoples and seizing land, booty, and slaves.”

·   “For Europeans, colonialism brought unimaginable wealth; for the native peoples, it brought death on an unprecedented scale.”

·   “Their conquests were achieved with martial savagery and maintained by systematic exploitation.”

·   “ By the end of the sixteenth century, they were shipping on average 300 million grams of silver and 1.9 million grams of gold every year. With these unprecedented resources, Spain established the first global empire,”

·   “There was a strain of ruthlessness and cruelty in early modern thought. The so-called humanists were pioneering a rather convenient idea of natural rights to counter the brutality and intolerance they associated with conventional religion. From the outset, however, the philosophy of human rights, still crucial to our modern political discourse, did not apply to all human beings.”

·   ““what is possessed by none belongs to everyone.””

·   Spanish Inquisition.

·   “The Spanish Inquisition did not target Christian heretics but focused on Jews who had converted.”

·   “Spanish Inquisition has become a byword for excessive “religious” intolerance, but its violence was caused less by theological than by political considerations.”

·   “…the emphasis always on practice and social custom rather than “belief.””

·   “Seeking out dissidents in this way would not infrequently become a feature of modern states, secular as well as religious, in times of national crisis.”

·   “… on March 31, 1492, the monarchs signed the edict of expulsion, which gave Jews the choice of baptism or deportation.”

·   “… about eighty thousand crossed the border into Portugal, and fifty thousand took refuge in the Ottoman Empire.”

·   “In 1499 … Muslims were required to convert … But the Muslim converts (Moriscos) were given no instruction in their new faith, and everybody knew that they continued to live, pray, and fast according to the laws of Islam.”

·   “A practical convivencia had been restored … between 1,500 and 2,000 people were actually executed … [this] proved lamentably counterproductive. … Spain was, therefore, feared and resented…”

·   “By the sixteenth century a different kind of civilization was slowly emerging in Europe, based on new technologies and the constant reinvestment of capital.”

·   “By the early seventeenth century, the Dutch had created the building blocks of Western capitalism. … the joint-stock company … the bank …. the stock exchange … the church had no control”

·   “Successful merchants, artisans, and manufacturers would become powerful enough to participate in the politics that had formerly been the preserve of the aristocracy,”

·   “With the emergence of the absolute monarchy and the sovereign state in England and France, the commercial classes, or bourgeoisie, became increasingly influential as market forces gradually made the state independent of the restrictions imposed upon it by a wholly agrarian economy. But would it be less structurally or militarily violent than the agrarian state?”

·   “In Germany there were no strong, centralizing monarchies, only a welter of forty-one small principalities that the Holy Roman emperor was unable to control.”

·   “… the towns of central and southern Germany had become the most vital commercial centers in northern Europe.”

·   “In 1517 Martin Luther (1483–1546), an Augustinian friar, nailed his famous ninety-five theses on the castle church door in Wittenberg and set in motion the process known as the Reformation.”

·   “The more intellectually vigorous clergy spread Luther’s ideas in their own books, which thanks to the new technology of printing, circulated with unprecedented speed, launching one of the first modern mass movements.”

·   “In leaving the Roman Church, the reformers were making one of the earliest declarations of independence of Western modernity,”

·   “The reformed Christian stood alone with his Bible before his God: Protestants thus canonized the growing individualism of the modern spirit.”

·   “Luther was also the first European Christian to advocate the separation of church and state,”

·   “In Luther’s political writings we see the arrival of “religion” as a discrete activity, separate from the world as a whole,”

·   “Luther understood that without a strong state, “the world would be reduced to chaos,” and that no government could realistically rule according to the gospel principles of love, forgiveness, and tolerance.”

·   “While it could have nothing to do with the spiritual realm, the state must have unqualified and absolute authority in temporal affairs.”

·   “Protestants believed that the Roman Church had failed in its true mission because it had dallied with the sinful Kingdom of the World.”

·   “Luther’s Christian was supposed to retreat into his own interior world of righteousness and let society, quite literally, go to hell.”

·   “The rebels, {of the Peasant’s War] he concluded, were in thrall to the devil, and killing them was an act of mercy, because it would rescue them from this satanic bondage. Because this rebellion threatened the entire social structure, the state suppressed it savagely: as many as a hundred thousand peasants may have died.”

·   “… the Bible could be a dangerous weapon if it got into the wrong hands.”

·   “The Reformation, however, had introduced an entirely new emphasis on “belief.””

·   “Catholics would do likewise in their own reformation,”

·   “… increasingly confessional allegiance would become the criterion of political loyalty.”

·   “Although the Reformation produced fruitful forms of Christianity, it was in many ways a tragedy. It has been estimated that as many as eight thousand men and women were judicially executed as heretics in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”

·   “We cannot expect these early modern states to have shared the outlook of the Enlightenment. Civilization had always depended upon coercion, so state violence was regarded as essential to public order. Petty theft, murder, forgery, arson, and the abduction of women were all capital offenses, so the death penalty for heresy was neither unusual nor extreme.50 Executions were usually carried out in public as a ritualized deterrent that expressed and enforced state and local authority.51 Without a professional police force and modern methods of surveillance, public order was dependent on such spectacles. Utterly repugnant as it is to us today, killing dissenters was seen as essential to the exercise of power, especially when the state was still fragile.”

·   “Yet heresy was different from other capital crimes, because if the accused recanted, she was pardoned and her life spared.”

·   “… there was no headlong rush to martyrdom. The vast majority were content to keep their convictions to themselves and conform outwardly to state decrees.”

·   “The one thing on which Catholics and Protestants could agree was their hatred of the Spanish Inquisition. But despite its gruesome reputation, the crimes of the Inquisition were exaggerated. …. not all it was cracked up to be. The auto-da-fé had no deep roots in Spanish culture. … about a hundred people died, whereas three hundred Protestants were put to death under Mary Tudor; twice that number were executed under Henry II of France (r. 1547–59), and ten times as many were killed in the Netherlands.”

·   “ [in the] 1580s, when Spain was at war with other European states, the crown once again turned on the “enemy within,” this time the Moriscos, who, like the Jews before them, were resented less for their beliefs than for their cultural difference and financial success.”

·   “… in 1609, the Moriscos were expelled from Spain, eliminating the last substantial Muslim community from Europe”

·   “….the Wars of Religion that culminated in the horror of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). These conflicts gave rise to what has been called the “creation myth” of the modern West, because it explains how our distinctively secular mode of governance came into being.61 The theological quarrels of the Reformation, it is said, so inflamed Catholics and Protestants that they slaughtered one another in senseless wars, until the violence was finally contained by the creation of the liberal state that separated religion from politics.”

·   “But nothing is ever quite that simple.”

·   “European rulers had other concerns.”

·   “In the minds of the participants, however, these wars were certainly experienced as a life-and-death struggle between Protestants and Catholics. Religious sentiments helped soldiers and generals to distance themselves from the enemy, blot out all sense of a shared humanity, and infuse the cruel struggle with a moral fervor that made it not only palatable but noble: they gave participants an uplifting sense of righteousness. But secular ideologies can do all this too. These wars were not simply and quintessentially “religious” in the modern sense.”

·   “Charles, a Catholic, paid little attention to the Lutherans in Germany and instead concentrated on fighting the pope and the Catholic kings of France in Italy.”

·   “… yet another episode in the long struggle of European monarchs to control the church in their own realms.”

·   “The Catholic kings of France were so alarmed by the Habsburgs that they were even prepared to make alliances with the Ottoman Turks”

·   “…during the First Schmalkaldic War, other prominent Lutheran princes fought on Charles’s side, while the Catholic king Henry II of France joined the Lutheran League in an attack”

·   “… many of Charles’s soldiers in the imperial army were mercenaries”

·   “…henceforth in Europe the religious allegiance of the local ruler determined the faith of his subjects—a principle later enshrined in the maxim cuius regio, eius religio.”

·   “The Catholic and Lutheran princes of Germany had ganged up on Charles,”

·   “The peasantry and the lower classes showed little theological conviction but switched from Catholicism to Lutheranism and back again as their lords and masters required.”

·   “A similar complexity can be observed in the French Wars of Religion (1562–98).”

·   “… a  political contest among competing aristocratic factions.”

·   “But in a landmark 1973 article, Natalie Zemon Davis examined the popular rituals in which both Catholics and Protestants drew on the Bible, the liturgy, and folk traditions to dehumanize their enemies and concluded that the French civil wars were “essentially religious.”76 Since then, scholars have reemphasized the role of religion, pointing out, however, that it is still anachronistic to separate the “political” from the “religious” at this date.”

·   “The French pamphleteer Antoine Marcourt listed four arguments against the Eucharist, “by which the whole world … will be completely ruined, cast down, lost and desolated”:”

·   “The polemic was so extreme that even Theodore Beza, Calvin’s future deputy in Geneva, condemned it in his history of the French Protestant Church. Yet it was this disreputable attack that sparked the French Wars of Religion.”

·   “King Francis was not a theological bigot; he was open to new ideas and had entertained Erasmus and other humanists at his court. But he rightly saw the placards not simply as a theological denunciation but also as an assault on the entire political system.”

·   “… a rite that bound the community together,”

·   “…understood by both Catholics and Protestants as an implicit critique of the monarchy.”

·   “…during the ensuing wars, it was impossible to divide the French population into neat communities of Protestants and Catholics.”

·   “… the Thirty Years’ War, which would kill about 35 percent of the population of central Europe.”

·   “…. there was rarely a wholly solid “Catholic” or “Protestant” response.”

·   “In the early 1980s a steady stream of young men from the Arab world made their way to northwestern Pakistan, near the Afghan border, to join the jihad against the Soviet Union.”

·   “The charismatic Jordanian-Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam had summoned Muslims to fight alongside their Afghan brothers.”

·   Osama bin Laden - It seemed entirely proper to Reagan and CIA director William Casey, a devout Catholic, to support Muslim mujahidin against atheistic Communists.

·   “There were rarely more than three thousand Arab fighters in the region at any one time. Some merely spent part of their summer vacation on “jihad tours,””

·   “… the Pakistanis and Afghans regarded them as somewhat bizarre.”

·   ““History does not write its lines, except in blood,” Azzam insisted. “Honor and respect cannot be established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses.””

·   “Jihad, he believed, was the Sixth Pillar, on a par with the shehadah, prayer, almsgiving, the Ramadan fast, and hajj.”

·   “Once they had liberated Afghanistan, the Arab-Afghans should go on to recover all the other lands wrested from the ummah by non-Muslims—Palestine, Lebanon, Bokhara, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, South Yemen, Tashkent, and Spain.”

·   ““Bombs create only hatred in the hearts of people. And that hatred and anger breed more terrorism,” said Bibi’s son. “No one ever asked us who was killed or injured that day. Not the United States or my own government. Nobody has come to investigate nor has anyone been held accountable. Quite simply, nobody seems to care.””

·   “… we also have to find a way to acknowledge our relationship with and responsibility for Mamana Bibi, her family, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have died or been mutilated in our modern wars simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

·   “Identical religious beliefs and practices have inspired diametrically opposed courses of action.”

·   “Until the modern period, religion permeated all aspects of life, including politics and warfare, not because ambitious churchmen had “mixed up” two essentially distinct activities but because people wanted to endow everything they did with significance. Every state ideology was religious.”

·   “… because these states and empires were all created and maintained by force, religion has been implicated in their violence.”

·   “It was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that religion was ejected from political life in the West.”

·   “Until the American and French Revolutions, there were no “secular” societies.”

·   “The problem lies not in the multifaceted activity that we call “religion” but in the violence embedded in our human nature and the nature of the state, which from the start required the forcible subjugation of at least 90 percent of the population.”

·   “… the relationship between modernity and religion has not been wholly antagonistic. Some movements, such as the two Great Awakenings and the Muslim Brotherhood, have actually helped people to embrace modern ideals and institutions in a more familiar idiom.”

·   “Modern religious violence is not an alien growth but is part of the modern scene. We have created an interconnected world. It is true that we are dangerously polarized, but we are also linked together more closely than ever before.”

·   ““Am I my brother’s guardian?” The answer must surely be yes.”

·   “We need ideologies today, religious or secular, that help people to face up to the intractable dilemmas of our current “economic and historical situation” as the prophets did in the past.”

·   “… there is still massive inequality and an unfair imbalance of power.”

·   “All this requires the “surrender,” selflessness, and compassion that have been just as important in the history of religion as crusades and jihads.”

·   “Protestant fundamentalism came into being in the United States when evangelical Christians pondered the unprecedented slaughter of the First World War.”

·   “When we confront the violence of our time, it is natural to harden our hearts to the global pain and deprivation that makes us feel uncomfortable, depressed, and frustrated. Yet we must find ways of contemplating these distressing facts of modern life, or we will lose the best part of our humanity.”

·   “Somehow we have to find ways of doing what religion—at its best—has done for centuries: build a sense of global community, cultivate a sense of reverence and “equanimity” for all, and take responsibility for the suffering we see in the world. We are all, religious and secularist alike, responsible for the current predicament of the world. There is no state, however idealistic and however great its achievements, that has not incurred the taint of the warrior. It is a stain on the international community that Mamana Bibi’s son can say: “Quite simply, nobody seems to care.” The scapegoat ritual was an attempt to sever the community’s relationship with its misdeeds; it cannot be a solution for us today.”

11726 words of highlight

150 w/m is 78m

Want 10m so

 10/78=13%

= 1500 w

This doc is 16 words/line

1500 w is 94 lines