Book Review

Not so easy alliances

Two Faiths, One Banner: when Muslims marched with Christians across Europe’s battlegrounds

Finding his exchequer short of cash, King John of England sent a delegation to the Sultan of Morocco, accompanied by Arabic-speaking monks from Durham. If the sultan would pay King John a subsidy he would, in return, forcibly convert England to Islam. The sultan was not deceived, and refused.

During the Second World War, a German propaganda unit headed by Adam von Trott - later to be executed for his part in the plot to kill Hitler - beamed broadcasts into India to destabilise British rule. One of their most believed lies was that Hitler had secretly converted to Islam. During the same war, British planes dropped leaflets over the Senussi tribesmen in Libya with an elaborately traced genealogy showing the descent of King George from the Prophet Muhammad, and urging the faithful to rise up against their Italian masters.

Both these bizarre, though true, vignettes belong less to the history of interfaith relations and more to secular struggles disguised in religious garb. That Christians and Muslims have combined in tactical and strategic alliances, civil and military, is scarcely news to anyone except, apparently, the author of this book. It can have escaped few that they are currently doing so in Iraq and Afghanistan. Almond examines five historical areas of temporary interfaith alliance in Europe: the eleventh-century Spain of Alfonso VI; Frederick II and the Saracens of Sicily; Turkish-Christian alliances of 1300-1402 in Asia Minor; the Muslim-Protestant alliance against the Catholic Emperor in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hungary, and the Crimean War of 1853-56.

Although he uses historical material, this is not a history book: rather, a polemic of special pleading, whose aim is to refute the "clash of civilisations" proposed by Samuel Huntington. Almond nails his colours to the mast: "It is difficult to ignore the way a ‘Muslim bogeyman' is used to distract public attention from the real threat to our society; the takeover of our public structures and resources by a small number of corporate and business elites."

His aim is to present the Christian-Muslim relationship as one of blurred and often contradictory lines in which no clear ideological or religious blocs can be discerned, and there is plenty of evidence for that view. He uses the word "presence" rather than "occupation" for the 700 years of Moorish rule in Spain, and states that while the fall of Constantinople (to which he refers as Istanbul throughout) was a tragedy for some, for others it was the beginning of the glories of the Ottoman Empire.

Almond was a teacher of English for many years at various Turkish universities, and is a decided Islamophile and Turkophile. There is, however, an economic-nationalist historical narrative which Almond ignores. The Moorish and Turkish occupations of Spain and the Balkans were colonial, based on the conquest and exploitation of a Christian sub-class which enjoyed no civic rights, could not bear arms, was taxed harshly, and was subject to pogrom, enslavement and massacre. This was resented, led to the growth of a nationalist-Christian consciousness and, under religious and military leadership resistance movements, eventually bore fruit: the colonising Muslim rulers and settlers were expelled as completely as possible, where they were not killed.

Islamic rule in occupied Europe offered Christians as unattractive a life as it currently does in Iraq, Egypt and Indonesia, where Christians are still subject to persecution and economic disadvantage. The expulsion of the Moors from Spain and the Turks from the Balkans was not a multifaith endeavour, rather it was oppressed Christian nations fighting to eject the Islamic imperialist powers, which exploited their non-Muslim subjects. Almond does not mention slavery, but the reality of Islamic rule included large numbers of Christian slaves. This only ceased with the European occupation of the Barbary states in north Africa in the nineteenth century. Historians estimate that there were more than three million Christian European slaves in Barbary alone; more in Spain and the Balkans.

Almond's methodology of selective historical exampling could be used to demonstrate that the Sudeten Germans "invited" Hitler into Czechoslovakia in 1938, and that many French, Belgians and Scandinavians willingly collaborated with Nazi occupation, and fought alongside the Nazis in Russia and elsewhere. To cite only these accurate but misleading facts and so derive a judgement that Nazi Germany and occupied Europe existed on anything other than a basis of military conquest, political oppression and economic exploitation would falsify history.

Almond finishes on a multicultural note, celebrating the vibrant Christian Greek and Armenian cultures of Asia Minor, now no more, where "Muslims and Christians ... shared village gossip with one another, read the same newspapers, danced to the same tunes ... in the same coffee houses." None of this happened, in reality. Almond should visit now-partitioned Cyprus, where I grew up: here, as in Asia Minor before 1922, Greek and Turk, Christian and Muslim lived in different quarters, read different newspapers, never went to each others' coffee shops, listened and danced to different music - and when given half a chance massacred each other. They did so under British colonial, as under Ottoman rule. There are now no Greek and Armenian villages in Asia Minor because Muslims killed or expelled their inhabitants. John Ruskin observed that "after every tyrant comes a sophist with a sponge". I once heard the Mogul conquerors of India described, in a BBC Radio 4 documentary, as "economic migrants from central Asia": perhaps Ian Almond wrote the script.

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