“Europe and Islam: Shared History,
Shared Identity”
Continued ...
Turoldus’ narrative depicted another titanic clash between Occident and Orient in which Baligant of Babylon, the aged, grand amir of the Muslim world, vows to end the Christian threat to Andalusia and summons his men from forty kingdoms. “I shall go to France to wage war against Charles, and if he does not kneel at my feet and beg my mercy, and should he refuse to forsake the Christian fate, I shall seize the crown from his head,” Turoldus writes. Stanza follows stanza as the opponents amass and maneuver: ten divisions for Charlemagne, with many more behind the amir’s pennant–the tribes of the Dar al–Harb on the march. In the great battle, Charlemagne slays Baligant, Charlemagne’s allies decimate the enemy, the gates of Zaragoza open, and the city’s people all convert to Christianity.
The Song of Roland placed the West’s future at the service of the Frankish nation, a chosen people charged to seek and destroy the Muslim Antichrist and build the new Jerusalem with sword and cross. This foundational document was to be a superordinate factor in the European sense of self and otherness. Though much of it was fabrication, it had the higher truth of folk myth. Turoldus’s epic embedded the “otherness” of Islam deep in the memory of the West.
During the 9th and 10th centuries, Muslim Europe and Christian Europe faced each other in delicate equipoise at the Pyrenees. In the short run, history would be less kind to Christian Europe: the Carolingian Empire’s collapse and fragmentation after 843, the Viking infestations in the late 9th century, the Magyar incursions in the 10th. Meanwhile, Andalusia’s Golden Age unfolded and the reign of the remarkable amir and caliph `Abd al–Rahman III resulted in the convivencia, which prevailed in Al–Andalus for another century or more. By the early 1100s, philosophy and science practically tumbled out of Toledo into Christian Europe in an Indian summer of interfaith collaboration between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Toledo transmitted most of what Paris, Cologne, Florence, and Rome would know of Aristotle and Plato, Euclid and Galen, “Hindu numbers,” and Arab astronomy.
Levering Lewis closed by sharing an observation about the contingency of history that he found analytically compelling. At every moment, history might have taken another course. In that late 15th to early 16th–century moment of equipoise between China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe, any one of Europe’s rivals could have made the same fateful decision that Spain, Portugal, and England did to support voyages of exploration and conquest. Christianity could have become ever more locked in anti–materialism and zealotry; a few shifts in royal succession could have brought the Inquisition to England; and Oliver Cromwell could have become the key patron of English political philosophy instead of John Locke. In this parallel universe, the Muslim world could have led the Renaissance and Enlightenment. As Michael Hamilton Morgan states: “This author does not believe that there was any inevitability to the rise of the West.”
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