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HOW ISLAM CREATED EUROPE

How Islam Created Europe
By Robert D. Kaplan
The Atlantic
May 2016 Issue

Europe was essentially defined by Islam. And Islam is redefining it now.

For centuries in early and middle antiquity, Europe meant the world surrounding the Mediterranean, or Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea”), as the Romans famously called it. It included North Africa. Indeed, early in the fifth century A.D., when Saint Augustine lived in what is today Algeria, North Africa was as much a center of Christianity as Italy or Greece. But the swift advance of Islam across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries virtually extinguished Christianity there, thus severing the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves, with the “Middle Sea” a hard border between them rather than a unifying force. Since then, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset observed, “all European history has been a great emigration toward the North.”

After the breakup of the Roman empire, that northward migration saw the Germanic peoples (the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and Lombards) forge the rudiments of Western civilization, with the classical legacy of Greece and Rome to be rediscovered only much later. It would take many more centuries for the modern European state system to develop. Slowly, though, feudalism, whose consensual give-and-take worked in the direction of individualism and away from absolutism, gave way to early modern empires and, over time, to nationalism and democracy. Along the way, new freedoms allowed the Enlightenment to take hold. In sum, “the West” emerged in northern Europe (albeit in a very slow and tortuous manner) mainly after Islam had divided the Mediterranean world.

Islam did much more than geographically define Europe, however. Denys Hay, a British historian, explained in a brilliant though obscure book published in 1957, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, that European unity began with the concept (exemplified by the Song of Roland) of a Christendom in “inevitable opposition” to Islam – a concept that culminated in the Crusades. The scholar Edward Said took this point further, writing in his book Orientalism in 1978 that Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing Europe what it was against. Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery. Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution: Early modern Europe, starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East, then dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as something beautiful, fascinating, and – most crucial – inferior.

A classical geography is reasserting itself, as terrorism and migration reunite North Africa and the Levant with Europe.

In the postcolonial era, Europe’s sense of cultural preeminence was buttressed by the new police states of North Africa and the Levant. With these dictatorships holding their peoples prisoner inside secure borders – borders artificially drawn by European colonial agents – Europeans could lecture Arabs about human rights without worrying about the possibility of messy democratic experiments that could lead to significant migration. Precisely because the Arabs lacked human rights, the Europeans felt at once superior to and secure from them.

Islam is now helping to undo what it once helped to create. A classical geography is organically reasserting itself, as the forces of terrorism and human migration reunite the Mediterranean Basin, including North Africa and the Levant, with Europe.

The Continent has absorbed other groups before, of course. In fact, Europe has been dramatically affected by demographic eruptions from the east: In the medieval centuries, vast numbers of Slavs and Magyars migrated into central and eastern Europe from deeper inside Eurasia. But those peoples adopted Christianity and later formed polities, from Poland in the north to Bulgaria in the south, that were able to fit, however bloodily, inside the evolving European state system. As for the Algerian guest workers who emigrated to France and the Turkish and Kurdish guest workers who emigrated to Germany during the Cold War, they represented a more containable forerunner to the current migration.

Today, hundreds of thousands of Muslims who have no desire to be Christian are filtering into economically stagnant European states, threatening to undermine the fragile social peace. Though Europe’s elites have for decades used idealistic rhetoric to deny the forces of religion and ethnicity, those were the very forces that provided European states with their own internal cohesion.

Meanwhile, the new migration, driven by war and state collapse, is erasing the distinction between the imperial centers and their former colonies. Orientalism, through which one culture appropriated and dominated another, is slowly evaporating in a world of cosmopolitan interactions and comparative studies, as Said intuited it might. Europe has responded by artificially reconstructing national-cultural identities on the extreme right and left, to counter the threat from the civilization it once dominated.

Although the idea of an end to history – with all its ethnic and territorial disputes – turns out to have been a fantasy, this realization is no excuse for a retreat into nationalism. The cultural purity that Europe craves in the face of the Muslim-refugee influx is simply impossible in a world of increasing human interactions.

“The West,” if it does have a meaning beyond geography, manifests a spirit of ever more inclusive liberalism. Just as in the 19th century there was no going back to feudalism, there is no going back now to nationalism, not without courting disaster. As the great Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen observed, “History does not turn back … All reinstatements, all restorations have always been masquerades.”

The question is thus posed: What, in a civilizational sense, will replace Rome? For while empire, as Said documented, certainly had its evils, its very ability to govern vast multiethnic spaces around the Mediterranean provided a solution of sorts that no longer exists.

Europe must now find some other way to dynamically incorporate the world of Islam without diluting its devotion to the rule-of-law-based system that arose in Europe’s north, a system in which individual rights and agency are uppermost in a hierarchy of needs. If it cannot evolve in the direction of universal values, there will be only the dementia of ideologies and coarse nationalisms to fill the void. This would signal the end of “the West” in Europe.

(Robert D. Kaplan the author of In Europe’s Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.)

 

EUROPE, ISLAM AND RADICAL SECULARISM

Europe, Islam and Radical Secularism
By George Friedman
Geopolitical Futures
April 14, 2016

In traveling to Europe this week, I am going to a place that is experiencing both an influx of Muslim refugees at the same time that it is experiencing terrorist acts by Muslims. In one sense, this is a very old story. Muslims invaded Europe in the 8th century, seizing Spain and penetrating France. Muslims also invaded Europe from the southeast, penetrating as far as Vienna in the 17th century. Europe invaded Muslim lands during the Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries. The Europeans again mounted major penetrations in the 19th and 20th centuries. These were accompanied by lesser attacks as well as population movements.

So in this sense, this conflict has been waged for well over a thousand years, with endless friction and occasional major movements. This has been a conflict between two religions, which both see their foundations in the book of the Jews, the Old Testament, but expanded on that with new and in some ways contradictory revelations. Both have many followers, and fairly defined, vast territories. In the struggle between Christians and Muslims, both have lost at some times and won at others, but neither has been able to decisively defeat the other.

This seems to be a rather minor phase of conflict in an ongoing war. But this chapter is different in a fundamental way. All prior conflicts have been between Christians and Muslims. This one is not. Since World War II, Europe has redefined itself. It was once Christian. It is now officially secular, and this is therefore a conflict between Muslim religiosity and European secularism. And that makes the dynamics of the conflict different.

Europe has embraced the principles of the French Enlightenment, which holds that religion is an entirely private matter that ought not become part of public life and that cannot be blamed for what others do in public life. The critique of the idea that Islam, migrants and terrorism are the same thing is rooted in a complex understanding of public and private, and collective and individual responsibility based on the complexities of the European enlightenment.

Europe has become profoundly secular, more so than the United States. That should not surprise anyone since Europe was the center of the Enlightenment. Europe therefore was once a Christian continent, until Christianity became a private matter, seen as one system of belief among many, with the public sphere neutral on all such matters.

Of course, such neutrality is impossible. Public life is impossible without some shared moral principles. European public life is filled with such principles, usually derived from the themes of the French Revolution, such as liberty, equality and fraternity – the right of citizens to live as they chose, to be treated equally under the law and with brotherhood, in which no one is excluded. These are of course complex values and more interesting in the things they exclude than what they include. They exclude any mention of God in general and Christ in particular. In other words, in neutralizing the public sphere, all religions have been rendered equal and made to respect the values of the public sphere.

Religions are also political movements, because in reshaping private things like conscience and obligation, they must reshape how the religious behave in public life. Christian private beliefs – or those of any other religion – ultimately demand public action and empower the leadership of the faith to make political demands. Therefore, today the demand to halt abortion derives from a private Christian belief that cannot be contained simply as a private value. Believing in that requires political action.

That action encounters not merely the moral imperative of public neutrality, but the entire structure of values derived from the Enlightenment. In a sense, Enlightenment values are more extreme than religious ones. They not only object to the religious political agenda, but demand that the religious not express their political will. So on the one hand, all religions are equal, but all must be apolitical, including Christianity, which used to be integral to Europe’s public life.

The complexity of Europe’s stance toward religion is part of the complexity of its most recent encounter with the massive Muslim migration. The Muslim world flirted with secularism during the 20th century, but in the end, the region has remained religious, and has intensified its Islamic stance. Islam, like traditional Christianity, is a political movement for which the Enlightenment’s distinction between public and private life is alien and the distinction between the individual and the community of believers is complex. The level of violence and the military dimension is nothing like what it was in the past. But this encounter between what I would call radical secularism and Islam is in many ways more complex.

From the standpoint of secularism, there is nothing incompatible between Europe and Muslims so long as they accept the distinction between public and private life, and between their private beliefs and participation in the community. For Muslims, those distinctions are alien and untenable. For secularists, the private realm is not only the realm of religion, but the realm of pleasure. There is a hedonism that is part of secularism. For Muslims, private life is the realm of a personal discipline away from hedonism, and that discipline must be found in public life as well.

There was a symmetry between Christianity and Islam. Both saw public and private lives as different aspects of the same existence. Each saw hedonism as the problem to be solved and not an option to be appropriated. And both were evangelical. Of course modern secularism is evangelical as well, in the belief that secular notions of human rights ought to be respected throughout the world. And that is the place where Christianity, Islam and secularism merge. Each is in a struggle for the others’ souls.

The concept of equality – between believers and non-believers, between men and women, between homosexuals and heterosexuals, and so on – is at the heart of political secularism. Secularism bans or seeks to ban public speech that rejects these principles, on the basis of hurtful speech unprotected by the First Amendment. Most important, secularists see the use of force as potentially acceptable to end injustice, which is defined as violations of liberty and equality. It is in this sense that secularism is evangelical. But there is also a deep difference. Traditional Christianity and Islam are unconflicted in their evangelical creed. Secularism cannot be straightforward, as it is continually trying to balance the rights of people to be divergent, against their need to marginalize those who disapprove of that divergence.

Secularism is a young religion in a way, and has not yet learned to carry political power gracefully. This places it on the intellectual defensive against Islam in a way that Christianity wasn’t. Christianity understood Islam in a way that secularism can’t. Christians and Muslims were enemies over the centuries. Secularism is both respectful of Islam and outraged at its values. In fighting a complex enemy, it is best to have elegantly consistent beliefs.

When I go to Europe, I speak for the most part to secularists, many of whom despise the increasing anti-secular sensibility of the European right, its xenophobia and its repressiveness. Having done that, the secularists must find a way to come to grips with Islam, which shares these traits unapologetically with the right. Yet, they do not wish to be seen as xenophobic and repressive. There is no simple solution for the political problem at the core of Europe. Europe is secular. Secularism has many virtues. Being effective in defining an enemy is not one of them. Secularism has not yet mastered its contradictions. Nor, I expect, will I be able to persuade secularists of these contradictions.

(George Friedman is a geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs.)

 

HAVE HUMANS ALWAYS GONE TO WAR?

Have humans always gone to war?
Sarah Peacey
IFL Science
April 11, 2016

http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/have-humans-always-gone-war

The question of whether warfare is encoded in our genes, or appeared as a result of civilisation, has long fascinated anyone trying to get to grips with human society. Might a willingness to fight neighbouring groups have provided our ancestors with an evolutionary advantage? With conflicts raging across the globe, these questions have implications for understanding our past, and perhaps our future as well.

The Enlightenment philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had different visions of prehistory. Hobbes saw humanity’s earliest days as dominated by fear and warfare, whereas Rousseau thought that, without the influence of civilisation, humans would be at peace and in harmony with nature.

The debate continues to this day. Without a time machine, researchers examining warfare in prehistory largely rely on archaeology, primatology and anthropology.

Earlier this year, details of one of the most striking examples of prehistoric intergroup violence were published – 27 skeletons, including those of children, had been found at Nataruk near Lake Turkana, Kenya. Blades embedded in bones, fractured skulls and other injuries demonstrated this had been a massacre. The bodies were left, unburied, next to a lagoon on the lake’s former western shore, around 10,000 years ago.

The Nataruk finds are claimed as the earliest evidence for prehistoric violence in hunter gatherers. A 12,000-14,000 year-old cemetery at Jebel Sahaba in Sudan was previously thought to be the first, but its date is less certain and some have claimed that since the bodies were buried in a cemetery they were linked to a settlement, and not true hunter gatherers.

The evidence for warfare becomes clearer in the archaeological record after the beginning of the agricultural revolution around 10,000 years ago, when humanity moved from hunting and gathering to farming settlements. War may have existed before then, but there are few remains from the early days of Homo sapiens, and causes of death can be extremely difficult to ascertain from skeletons. This means that at the moment, the archaeology remains inconclusive.

CHIMPS IN COMBAT

Animal behaviour studies provide another means of exploring the debate. Jane Goodall’s discovery that chimpanzees make war shocked the world. A group in Tanzania were observed beating members of a rival community to death, one by one, before taking over the defeated group’s territory. Despite attempts to dispute Goodall’s findings, similar patterns of behaviour were later discovered in other groups, and evidence for warfare in one of our closest relatives became indisputable.

WHEN CHIMPS GO TO WAR

However, bonobos, also known as pygmy chimpanzees, share as much DNA with us as chimps do, but are overall more peaceful, despite some anecdotal reports of aggression between groups. This is partly attributed to differences in the two species’ social systems. For example, bonobos’ societies are female-dominated, which perhaps keeps male aggression in check, whereas chimpanzees’ social hierarchy is male-dominated.

How did our last common ancestor behave? Were they like bellicose chimpanzees or peaceful bonobos? Although parallels between all three species are fascinating, using them to answer this question is difficult, as ultimately each followed its own evolutionary pathway.

But chimps demonstrate that war without civilisation does exist in a species similar to our own. Not only that, but similarities can be seen between chimpanzee and human hunter-gatherer warfare. For example, in both species, an imbalance of power and risk-averse tactics are often a feature of attacks: a group of chimpanzees will assault a lone rival, and hunter-gatherer groups avoid pitched battles in favour of guerrilla warfare and ambushes.

TWO TRIBES

Anthropologists, whose knowledge of “traditional” societies could provide clues as to how our ancestors behaved, also took sides in the Hobbes-Rousseau debate. Margaret Mead’s research on Samoan islanders led her to conclude that “warfare is only an invention”, which had not existed before civilisation, while Napoleon Chagnon reported that among the Venezuelan Yanomamö, fighting and raids on enemy villages were commonplace. Both were criticised: Mead for overlooking widespread evidence of violence in Samoa, and Chagnon for inappropriately using a society of small-scale farmers as a proxy for prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

Of course, any traditional society that anthropologists choose to study has still been exposed to outside influences. And they differ vastly from one another, not least in their participation in warfare. But early accounts suggest that lethal aggression did exist between some hunter-gatherer groups before their contact with other societies.

Waldemar Jochelson, who studied the Siberian Yukaghir in the 1890s, described them as having persecuted their enemies like “wild beasts”. Similarly, the Andamanese, from isolated islands in the Bay of Bengal, had longstanding feuds between themselves and participated in dawn raids on enemy camps.

It’s difficult to conclude that prehistory was free from intergroup aggression. Military historian Azar Gat and evolutionary psychologist Stephen Pinker, among others, argue that warfare existed before the agricultural revolution. Pinker also claims that violence has overall decreased over the centuries. This may seem difficult to believe given the gloomy headline news in 2016, but such a zoomed-out view of history at least suggests hope for the future.

(Sarah Peacey has a PhD in Ecological Systems of Cooperation, from UCL in London.)