The Western world has in the course of the centuries devised a number of ways of subdividing mankind. The Greeks divided the world into Greeks and barbarians, the Jews into Jews and Gentiles. Later the Greeks also invented a geographical classification in which the world was seen as consisting of continents-Europe, their own, and Asia, that which lay on the opposite side of the Aegean Sea. Eventually, when a larger and remoter Asia was seen to loom beyond the Aegean coast, that became Asia Minor and the name Asia given a wider extension. In time, Asia (i.e., non- Europe) was also subdivided, and that part of it which lay on the southern shore of the Mediterranean was given new names in Greek and Latin-first Libya, later Africa. The medieval world was, for Europeans, divided initially between Christendom and heathendom and, then, within Christendom by monarchies. The modern world has adopted the nation-state as its basic classification, the determinant of identity and loyalty.
The Muslim view of the world and its peoples was differently constructed. Until the nineteenth century, Muslim writers on history and geography knew nothing of the names which Europeans had given to the continents. Asia was unknown, an ill-defined Europe-spelled Uriifa-received no more than a passing mention, while Africa, Arabicized into Ifriqiya, appeared only as the name of the eastern Maghrib, consisting of Tunisia and the adjoining areas. Muslim geographical writers divided the world into "climates" (iqlim) deriving from the ancient Greek clima, but this is a purely geographical classification without any of the political or even cultural implications injected into the names of the continents in modern Western parlance. Muslim historical writings make virtually no reference to the iqlims and they seem to have occupied no place in the corporate self-awareness of Muslim peoples.
The division of the world into countries and nations, so important in the Western world's perception of itself and definition of its loyalties, is of comparatively minor importance in the world of Islam. Territorial designations are of so little significance that many countries even lack a specific country name. A remarkably high proportion of the names borne by the modern states into which the Islamic world is divided are new creations. Some of them, like Syria, Palestine, or Libya, are exhumed from classical antiquity; some of them, like Iraq or Tunisia, the names of medieval provinces; some of them, like Pakistan, entirely new inventions. Arabia and Turkey, despite the antiquity of the countries and, for that matter, of the peoples which they designate, are modern introductions from the West. Arabic has no territorial term for Arabia but is compelled to make use of such locutions as the Land or the Peninsula of the Arabs. The name Turkey, although used for many centuries by Westerners, was adapted and adopted into Turkish only in the twentieth century to designate a country which had been previously called by dynastic or regional names. Often, the same name serves in classical usage for the country or province and its main city-usually the name of the city being applied to the country around it. At no time before the nineteenth century was any sovereignty defined in territorial terms. On the contrary, a territorial designation applied to a monarch was seen as belittling.
The same is true, though to a lesser extent, of ethnic terms. Such ethnic entities as the Arabs, the Persians, or the Turks figure prominently in Islamic literature, and membership of one or other of these groups defined by language, culture, and sometimes descent was an important part of the self-awareness of individual Muslims. But it was rarely of any political significance. Muslim monarchs did not normally define their sovereignties or formulate their titles in terms of nations, nor was the ethnic, linguistic, or territorial nation seen as a natural basis of statehood.
In the Muslim world view the basic division of mankind is into the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the House of War (Dar al-Harb). The one consists of all those countries where the law of Islam prevails, that is to say, broadly, the Muslim Empire; the latter is the rest of the world. just as there is only one God in heaven, so there can be only one sovereign and one law on earth. Ideally, the House of Islam is conceived as a single community, governed by a single state, headed by a single sovereign. This state must tolerate and protect those unbelievers who are brought by conquest under its rule, provided, of course, that they are not polytheists but followers of one of the permitted religions. The logic of Islamic law, however, does not recognize the permanent existence of any other polity outside Islam. In time, in the Muslim view, all mankind will accept Islam or submit to Islamic rule. In the meantime, it is a religious duty of Muslims to struggle until this end is accomplished.
The name given by the Muslim jurists to this struggle is jihad, an Arabic word meaning effort or striving. One who performs this duty is called mujahid. The word occurs several times in the Qur'an in the sense of making war against the unbelievers. In the early centuries of Islamic expansion, this was its normal meaning. Between the House of Islam and the House of War there was, according to the shari'a, the Holy Law as formulated by the classical jurists, a state of war religiously and legally obligatory, which could end only with the conversion or subjugation of all mankind. A treaty of peace between the Muslim state and a non-Muslim state was thus in theory juridically impossible. The war, which would end only with the universal triumph of Islam, could not be terminated; it could only be interrupted for reasons of necessity or of expediency by a truce. Such a truce, according to the jurists, could only be provisional. It should not exceed ten years and could, at any time, be repudiated unilaterally by the Muslims who, however, were obliged by Muslim law to give the other side due notice before resuming hostilities.
Even during such periods of relative peace, traffic with the infidel was discouraged. Muslim law distinguishes between those actions which are actually forbidden (haram) and those which are regarded as reprehensible (makruh). Travel to the House of War belonged to the latter category, and the jurists for the most part agreed that the only legitimate reason for a Muslim to travel to the House of War was to ransom captives. Even trade was not an acceptable purpose, though some authorities permitted the purchase of food supplies from Christian lands in case of dire necessity.
The law relating to jihad, like the greater part of the shari'a, received its classical form during the first century and a half of the Islamic era, when the Arab armies were advancing on France, Byzantium, China, and India, and when there seemed no reason to doubt that the final and universal triumph of Islam was not only inevitable but imminent. Thereafter, in this as in other respects, a gap began to appear between legal doctrine and political fact-a gap which rulers and soldiers ignored and jurists did their best to hide. The single Islamic universal state, which had existed in reality as well as in principle in the first century or two, broke up into smaller states. The irresistible and perpetual jihad was brought to an end and, in time, a relationship of mutual tolerance was established between the world of Islam and the rest. The latter was still perceived and designated as the House of War, but its subjugation was postponed from historic to messianic time. In the meanwhile, more or less stable frontiers came into existence between Muslim and non-Muslim states on which peace rather than war was the normal condition. This peace might be infringed by raiding, the frontier might from time to time be displaced by war, but from the age of the Reconquest and the Crusades onwards such displacements of the frontier could mean the withdrawal as often as the advance of the boundaries of Muslim power.
These changes and the consequent development of diplomatic and commercial relations with the outside world posed new problems for the jurists. They responded in this as in other fields with skillful interpretations. The duty of holy war was qualified and reinterpreted. The cessation of hostilities with the House of War could indeed only be accomplished by a limited truce, but such a truce could be renewed as often as required and thus become, in effect, a legally regulated state of peace.
Some jurists even recognized an intermediate status, the House of Truce or House of Covenant (Dar al-Sulh or Dar al-'Ahd) between the House of War and the House of Islam. This consisted of certain non-Muslim states which had entered into a contractual relationship with the Muslim state by which they recognized Muslim suzerainty and paid tribute but retained some autonomy in their own form of government. By choosing to regard gifts as tribute, Muslim rulers and their juridical counselors could extend the scope of the covenant ('Ahd) and cover a wide variety of arrangements with non-Muslim powers concerning political, military, and commercial matters. A non-Muslim from the House of War, might even visit the Muslim lands and be given a safe conduct, called aman. According to the jurists, any free adult male Muslim could give an aman to one or several persons. The head of the Muslim state could give a collective aman to a larger entity such as a city, the subjects of a sovereign, or a commercial corporation. The practice of granting aman greatly facilitated the development of commercial and diplomatic relations between Muslim and Christian states and provided an Islamic legal framework for the rise of resident communities of European traders in Muslim cities. One of the determining differences between the two sides was that there was no aman for Muslim visitors, still less residents, in Christian Europe. Aman was a purely Muslim legal formula for peaceful contact. However, with the growing shift in the balance of real power, these relations were to an increasing extent regulated not by Islamic law but by European com- mercial and diplomatic practice.
In both ideal and legal terms the House of Islam was a single entity, and despite the many sectarian, regional, national, and other differences that arose between Muslims, there always was and still remains a strong sense of common identity. It was natural, therefore, that Muslims tended to attribute a similar unity to the House of War. According to a saying sometimes ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad, "Unbelief is one nation." Both the attribution and the content of the statement are patently false, but it does express a common attitude reflected in Muslim writings and practice. The really significant division of mankind is between Muslims and unbelievers. If the divisions among Muslims were of secondary importance, the parochial subdivisions of the unbelievers and, particularly, of those who lived beyond the Islamic frontier, were of even less interest or significance.
In fact, of course, Muslims did recognize certain important divisions among the generalized mass of unbelievers. One of them was between those who possessed and those who did not possess revealed religions. For atheists or for polytheists the choice was clear-Islam or death. For Jews and Christians, possessors of what were regarded as revealed religions based on authentic though superseded revelations, the choice included a third term- Islam, death, or submission. Submission involved the payment of tribute and the acceptance of Muslim supremacy. Death might be commuted to slavery. Those who submitted, according to Muslim law and practice, could be accorded the tolerance and protection of the Muslim state. The resulting relationship was regulated by a pact called, in Arabic, the dhimma. Those benefiting from it were known as ahl al-dhimma, people of the pact, or more briefly as dhimmis, This was the term commonly applied to Jews, Christians, and some others who became subjects of the Muslim state. Under the rules of the dhimma they were permitted to practice their own religions, maintain their own places of worship and, in many ways, run their own affairs, provided they gave unequivocal recognition to the primacy of Islam and the supremacy of the Muslims. This recognition was expressed through a series of restrictions imposed by the holy law on the dhimmis, affecting the clothes they might wear, . the beasts they might ride, the arms they might bear, and similar matters. Most of these disabilities had a social and symbolic rather than a tangible and practical character. The only real economic burden imposed on unbelievers was fiscal. They had to pay higher taxes, a system inherited from the previous empires of Iran and Byzantium. Above all, they had to pay the poll tax known as jizya, levied on every adult male non-Muslim.
The term dhimmi was used only for Jews and Christians living in Muslim territories and subject to the rule of the Muslim state. Christians remaining beyond the frontier were called harbi, i.e., dwellers in the House of War. Those who came from the House of War to the House of Islam as visitors or temporary residents, with safe conduct, were known as musta'min, i.e., holder of aman. The information about non-Muslims available in the Muslim world was, not surprisingly, fullest and most accurate about dhimmis, considerably less about musta'mins, and limited and unreliable about the denizens of the House of War.
The broad outlines could, however, be seen. The main classification, as already indicated, was by religion. Jews and Christians were seen as religio-political communities, like Islam itself, but inferior. Indeed, it has been argued with perhaps some exaggeration that the notion of religion as a class or category, of which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are individual examples, originated only with the advent of Islam and the ability of Muslims to perceive and recognize two distinct predecessors to their own form of religious revelation and polity. No such awareness can be found among earlier Christians or Jews nor among any of the other cults of the ancient world. For a Muslim, the advent of Muhammad and the revelation of the Qur'an marks the last in a series of similar events through which God's purpose was revealed to mankind. There had been a number of prophets whom God had sent on a mission to mankind as bearers of a revealed book. Muhammad was the seal of the prophets and the Qur'an the final and perfect revelation. All that was of value in earlier revelations was contained in it. What was not contained in it was due to the corruption or distortion of earlier revealed texts.
Neither Jews nor Christians were strangers to Islam. Both religions were represented in pre-Islamic Arabia. Both were known to the Prophet and both figure in the Qur'an and in the most ancient traditions. Islam, in a sense, defined itself against the previous beliefs against Judaism and Christianity as much as against the pagan Arabian cults with which Muhammad fought his main battles. When the Qur'an (Sura 112) proclaims that "He is God, unique, God alone, He does not beget and is not begotten, none is equal to Him," it is rejecting Christian theology. When it says (Sura 16:115) "Eat from among what God has assigned to you, what is permissible and good. Thank God for His Benefaction . . . " it is discarding some Jewish dietary laws. The principle of separateness and coexistence is usually justified by citing Sura 109. "Say: 0 Unbelievers! I shall not worship what you worship. You do not worship what I worship. I am not a worshiper of what you have worshiped and you are not worshipers of what I have worshiped. To you, your religion. To me, my religion." This was a new notion, without antecedents in either Christian or Jewish belief and practice.
After the Islamic conquests the Muslims found themselves as a ruling minority among predominantly Christian populations all the way from Mesopotamia to Spain. They therefore had ample opportunity to observe large parts of the Christian world at work, at worship and at play. A certain amount of information concerning Christian beliefs and practices became part of the common knowledge of educated Muslims, and some aspects of Muslim doctrine and usage were even influenced by Christian example. An occasional Muslim scholar made some study of Christian and Jewish religion and scripture. Sometimes this was for purposes of refutation, though this motive is usually to be found only among new converts from these religions to Islam. Sometimes the interest is scholarly rather than polemical, and some discussion of Christian and Jewish scripture and belief was included in Muslim books on the classification of religions and doctrines-a subject and a literature which seem to have made their first appearance in medieval Islam.
As the Christians and Jews living under Islamic rule gradually adopted the Arabic language in place of their previous idioms, they began to produce their own literature in Arabic, including translations of the scriptures. Often these Christian and Jewish writings, though in Arabic, were in other scripts-Syriac for the Christians' Hebrew for the Jews- and thus inaccessible to Muslim readers. Even, however, when they were written in the Arabic script, they seemed to have attracted little attention from Muslim scholars. In general, while granting some measure of tolerance to Christians and Jews, they accorded them little respect. For the Muslim, convinced of the perfection of Islam and the supremacy of Muslim power, these were followers of superseded religions and members of conquered communities. They could, therefore, offer little of interest or value to him.
Some of the same considerations also determined Muslim attitudes towards the infidel living beyond the frontier. But in this respect other considerations were also at work. During the early centuries the Islamic Empire and community expanded principally eastward and westward. To the north and south of the Muslim lands, the empty plains of Eurasia and the jungles and deserts of Africa offered little attraction, and the advance of Islam in these regions was slow and late. The main effort of conquest and conversion was directed to more populous and more rewarding regions, westward to North Africa and thence into Europe; eastward across Iran to Central Asia and the approaches to India and China. On both sides the Muslims met formidable adversaries; in the east, first the great Empire of Persia, beyond that the warlike peoples of the steppes and forests and the great powers of India and China; in the west, the Byzantine Empire and beyond it the remoter kingdoms of Christendom.
From the Muslim point of view there was a major difference in quality between the war against the Christians and the wars on the other frontiers of Islam. Among the peoples of the steppes and the jungles, even in the great civilizations of China and India of which they had limited knowledge or understanding, they saw no recognizable alternative to Islam. A Muslim advance in these regions was part of the inevitable Islamization of the pagan peoples. It encountered no major military adversary and no serious religious alternative. The struggle in the west, in contrast, was against a rival religious and political system which denied the very basis of the universal mission of Islam and did so in terms which were both familiar and intelligible. The Muslim conviction of their own predestined final victory did not blind them to the significance and the uncertainty of this wide-ranging and long drawn-out conflict between two faiths and two societies. In Muslim writings, the Christian world becomes the House of War par excellence, and the war against Christendom is the very model and prototype of the jihad.
Between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries, the retreat of Islam and the advance of the Christian reconquest in Italy, Portugal and Spain brought large and old-established Muslim populations under Christian rule. In all these countries the reconquest was followed-sometimes after an interval of tolerance- by a determined effort on the part of Christian rulers to convert or else evict their Muslim subjects. In these efforts they were, in the long run, successful.
In general, Christian unwillingness to tolerate Muslim subjects was matched by Muslim unwillingness to remain under Christian rule. Most Muslim jurists held that it was impossible for a Muslim to live under a non-Muslim government. If an infidel in the lands of the infidels was converted to Islam, it was his duty to leave his home and country and travel to a land where Muslims ruled and Muslim law prevailed. The scriptural authority for this doctrine was the migration (hijra) of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions from Mecca to Medina-the event which marked the birth of the Muslim state and the beginning of the Muslim era. Where the Prophet had led, others were expected to follow.
The loss of Muslim lands to Christian conquerors raised the question in a new and acute form. This problem was first confronted by jurists of the Maliki school, which predominated in North Africa and in Muslim Spain and Sicily. Maliki jurists in their discussions of the legal questions posed by the loss of Muslim territory to infidels were divided. A few argued that if a Christian ruler allowed the free practice of the Muslim religion and permitted Muslims to live according to the prescriptions of the Holy Law, then Muslims might be permitted to stay. Some even went further and were willing to allow Muslims subject to intolerant infidels to conceal their own religion in order to survive. The prevailing view, however, was that at least some and preferably all of the Muslims of a country conquered by the infidels should do as their forebears in Mecca had done, and go on a hijra from heathendom to Islam. A classical formulation was given in a ruling by the Moroccan jurist al-Wansharisi, who held that it was the duty of all Muslims to emigrate rather than to remain under infidel rule. If the infidels were tolerant, this made the need to depart more rather than less urgent, since the danger of apostasy was correspondingly greater. Even Muslim tyranny, says al- Wansharisi, is better than Christian justice.
In general, however, Christian justice was not on offer. There were exceptions. Muslims stayed for a while in reconquered Sicily, under the relatively tolerant rule of the Normans, and in those parts of Spain which had been reconquered by the Christians. But their -survival depended on the continued.presence of Muslim states in the South, which exacted mutual tolerance from the Christian north. After the final Christian victory in 1492, such tolerance was no longer needed, and the edict of expulsion followed very shortly afterwards.
The problem arose again in eastern Europe, with the Russian conquest of the Muslim lands north and east of the Black Sea, and with the loss of successive Ottoman provinces in the Balkans. New groups of Muslims came under Christian rule, and some of them found the same answer-emigration. But in the age of European imperial expansion this could no longer be a solution. With the rise of the Russian, British, French and Dutch empires, Christian rule was finally extended to the main centers of the Islamic world, where great Muslim populations perforce remained where they were, under infidel domination.
Despite its importance for them, Muslims showed remarkably little interest in the world of Christendom. The part which they knew best was, naturally enough, the Greek Christian Empire of Byzantium. In Muslim annals, this empire, known as the land of Rum, was the chief adversary of the Muslim State. It is frequently mentioned in the history of the wars of Islam, and its provinces, particularly those immediately beyond the border, are discussed in some detail in Muslim geographical and historical writings.
In the year 1068-that is, two years after the Battle of Hastings and thirty years before the arrival of the Crusaders in Palestine-a certain Sa'id ibn Ahmad, Qadi of the Muslim city of Toledo in Spain, wrote a book in Arabic on the categories of nations. In his introduction he divides the nations of the human race into two kinds, those that have concerned themselves with science and learning and those that have not. The nations that have contributed to the advancement of knowledge are eight in number-the Indians, Persians, Chaldees, Greeks, Romans (a term which includes the Byzantines and eastern Christians generally), Egyptians, Arabs (including Muslims in general), and Jews. These nations form the subject of the rest of the book. Of the remainder of humanity he singles out the Chinese and the Turks as "the noblest of the unlearned peoples," who are worthy of respect for their achievements in other fields, the Chinese for their skill in handicrafts and in the pictorial arts, and for their endurance; the Turks for their courage, their skill in the arts of war, their horsemanship, and their proficiency in the use of the lance, the sword, and the bow. The rest of mankind Sa'id dismisses contemptuously as the northern and the southern barbarians. Of the former he remarks:
"The other peoples of this group who have not cultivated the sciences are more like beasts than like men. For those of them who live furthest to the north, between the last or the seven climates and the limits of the inhabited world, the excessive distance of the sun in relation to the zenith line makes the air cold and the sky cloudy. Their temperaments are therefore frigid, their humors raw, their bellies gross, their color pale, their hair long and lank. Thus they lack keenness of understanding and clarity of intelligence, and are overcome by ignorance and apathy, lack of discernment and stupidity .... "
In these remarks, Sa'id was expressing the generally accepted view of Muslim scholars of his time. The center of the world was the lands of Islam, stretching from Spain across North Africa to the Middle East and containing within itself almost all the peoples and centers of ancient civilization. To the north the Christian empire of Byzantium presented an earlier, arrested stage of that civilization based on dine revelation which had reached its final and complete form in Islam. o the east, beyond Persia, there were countries which had achieved s me form of civilized living, albeit of an inferior and idolatrous kind. Apart from that there were only the white and black barbarians of the outer world in the north and south. It is with the growth of Muslim knowledge about some of these northern barbarians that we are here concerned.