First Jihad: Khartoum, and the Dawn of Militant Islam (3 page)

The Koran was the holy scripture of Islam, said to be inspired by God Himself, and was regarded as the codified “will of Allah.” It assumed its finished form sometime between 644 and 655
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., as a medium-sized book divided into 14 chapters, known as “suras.” Compiled from oral and written records of the revelations, thoughts, and teachings of Muhammed, collected shortly after his death in 632
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., the Koran became the source of all Islamic teaching and law, addressing subjects as diverse as social justice, economics, politics, criminal codes, religious tolerance, jurisprudence, and civil law.
Themes emphasized in the book are Allah’s mercy to mankind, mankind’s ingratitude and misuses of Allah’s gifts, evidences of God’s creative powers in nature, the bliss of paradise after death (where every Muslim male will supposedly be given thirteen virgin girls to be his personal servants), the dead being reborn, the Day of Judgment, punishment of followers who go astray including the horror of hell, and the missions of former prophets—including Christian apostles.
It is clear that Muhammed’s teachings were heavily influenced by Judaism and Christianity, as there emerged uncanny similarities between the three religions: there is only one true God; there is a hell and a heaven; every human being must account for all his or her earthly deeds.
A number of Judaeo-Christian tales are found in the Koran, such as the stories of Noah’s Ark and Aaron’s rod.
Even the story of Creation in the Koran is strikingly similar to the older Christian account, with mankind’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden a consequence of eating forbidden fruit.

One peculiar feature of the Koran, which would have a profound effect on the religion and its followers, is that each verse begins with the phrase, “Allah has said….” Originally intended to emphasize Muhammed’s passive role as a mere recorder of Allah’s will, this phrasing, along with the short time in which the book was written and codified, would cause the Koran to become something of an inflexible, immutable document.
The repeated categorical declaration of its divine origin left little room for debate, elaboration, or adaption of its doctrines to changing circumstances in the world.
Its inflexible nature and presumed infallibility would become an essential part of Moslem tradition, which in turn would exert a powerful influence on Moslem societies, particularly those of the Arabs, who have remained far more tradition-bound than any other people in the Middle East, Asia, or Europe.

After the death of Muhammed, from a wound to the head received in battle in June of 632 at the age of 61 or 62, there was a brief period of rebellion among some of the Arab tribes, but a series of short, sharp “Wars of Apostasy”—literally punitive campaigns—soon brought them to an end, and Islam dominated every aspect of daily life in Arabia.

This was not a bad circumstance, for it resulted in a sense of unity and identity that the Arabs had previously never known.
Although originally designed to foster a religious community and to overcome the different factions and jealousies of 7th-century Arab tribalism, a system of theology and law gradually evolved.
Initially there were no sacraments, formal rituals, or priesthood in Islam, but in time the offices of the
imam
, who lead prayers in mosques, and the
mullah
, who teach the word of Allah, came into being.
A distinctive Islamic civilization was created, with
kathis
and
shariah
courts administering Islamic law, while rituals were introduced, such as the washing of hands and face, prayer five times a day (in the company of a congregation within a mosque whenever possible), alms-giving, fasting during the month of Ramadan, recital of Islamic creed to reinforce a believer’s faith, and a pilgrimage to Mecca.
While never producing the sort of political, ethnic, or national cohesion that the Western concept of the nation-state would eventually provide in Europe, Islam did imbue the Arabs with a sense of belonging to something larger than merely their tribe or locality, and provided the foundation for a culture that they had previously never known.
It would prove to be an astonishingly powerful influence.

A core Islamic doctrine, which shaped the course Islam would follow throughout its history, declared that there were two states of existence in the world: those who followed Islam, both people and nations, were said to be in a place of peace, while those lands and peoples outside the faith were said to be in the place of war.
It was the duty, then, of the faithful to bring those places of warfare into the peace of Islam.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries it has become fashionable among Moslem theologians–along with some Christian philosophers—in Western nations to explain away the terms “peace” and “war” as having only a spiritual, interpretive meaning, rather than a temporal, literal one.
However, during the first thirteen hundred years of Islamic history, the Moslem faithful took those doctrines very literally.
Any nation or people who did not openly embrace Islam was regarded as hostile to the faith and ripe for conversion.

The 7th and 8th centuries saw a furious expansion of Islam, as a series of holy wars carried the faith beyond Arabia and into the rest of the Middle East, then to Persia, North Africa, Spain, and India.
Eventually Islam would spread as far as Indonesia and the Philippines.
Yet, curiously, for the first four hundred years of its existence, Islam remained essentially a pure religion, untainted by the ambitions and excesses of temporal rulers and politics;
jihad
, for all its violence, was used solely as a means of expanding the faith, not as a method of aggrandizing a realm.
It was as if the leaders of Islam found a way to allow their religion to shape their politics rather than the other way around.
Yet when politics and religion meet, one or the other must give way, and that would happen when Islam ran headlong into the other great religious force in Europe and Asia Minor-–Christianity.

The first collision came when Arab Moslems surged out of Arabia and ran headlong into the Byzantine Empire in 636.
The last remnant of the Roman Empire, ruled as a separate entity since 395
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, the Byzantine Empire at the time covered much of present day Turkey, Armenia, Jordan, Syria, Israel, and Egypt, and was nominally Christian, while all other religions were officially forbidden.
By Islamic interpretation, such proscription constituted persecution, leaving Byzantium outside of Islam’s “realm of peace” and thus ripe for conquest.

The Byzantines had just concluded a long and costly war with the Persians, who themselves were exhausted and soon fell to advancing Islamic armies.
The Byzantine Empire, however, would prove more difficult for the Moslems to overwhelm–even in her weakened state Byzantium was strong.
Only a combination of unrelenting pressure applied by the Moslems coupled with disorder and discord within the Empire allowed the Arabs to gradually conquer most of the Byzantine lands, a process which took almost four hundred years.

But the great clash between the Moslem world and the Christian world which would permanently shape their perceptions of each other took place over a span of two centuries in the form of a series of military campaigns, led by the European nobility and sponsored by the Church, in the region of the Middle East known as the Levant—modern-day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq.
Driven at first by purely religious motives, these campaigns gradually evolved into a series of political wars whereby European kingdoms and principalities, as well as the Papacy, sought to extend their temporal power into the Middle East.
The two centuries of conflict left deep and lasting scars on the collective mind and soul of Islam, forever confirming the idea that the two faiths were inimically hostile, and that Moslems and Christians were fated to live in conflict.
Those campaigns became known to history as the Crusades.

The origin of the Crusades lay in the two critical events of the 11th-century Church: the Great Schism between the eastern and western churches (the result of a mutual excommunication by the Pope and Patriarch); and the collapse of what remained of the Byzantine Empire at the hands of Turks in 1071.
In 1072, the Eastern Roman Emperor, who now ruled little more than Constantinople, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, appealed to the Papacy in Rome for military assistance against the Saracens—the name given by medieval Europeans to the Arabs, and by extension to Moslems in general, whether they were Arabs, Moors, or Seljuk Turks—in return for an assurance that he would effect a reunion between the eastern and western churches.
Not much came of the original appeal, but when it was renewed a few years later, Pope Urban II announced his plan for an armed pilgrimage to the Levant, exhorting the church leaders to “Rid the sanctuary of God of unbelievers, expel the thieves, and lead back the faithful.” “
Dieu le volt!
” (God wills it!) became the rallying cry of thousands of clergymen and nobles across Europe as preparations began for what would become the First Crusade.

Before they could set out for Constantinople, however, a number of the lower-ranking clergy, notably an itinerant monk of particular eloquence who styled himself Peter the Hermit, took Urban’s call to the common people, gathering some fifteen thousand followers in less than two years and setting out for the Holy Land.
Resembling an undisciplined rabble more than an army, this mob reached Constantinople in August 1096, where the Emperor Alexius saw them across the Bosporus and into Turkey.
Poorly armed and lacking leadership, they were ambushed by a Turkish army near Nicaea (modern Iznik), and slaughtered.
Only a few thousand survived to return to Constantinople, those left behind alive being captured and sold into slavery.

Meanwhile, from late summer 1096 through the following May, masses of European chivalry gathered at Constantinople.
As each force arrived the Emperor Alexius pressed their leaders to take an oath of fealty to him in order to guarantee that any former Byzantine territories they captured would be returned to him.
This was a development of profound significance, for it began the process by which the emphasis of the Crusades would shift from being a Divinely inspired mission to become a means to various political ends.
That this was the case was revealed the following June when the Crusaders attacked Nicaea.
Following the accepted customs of war, the city yielded rather than face the prospect of a successful assault and sacking: the Turks made the point of surrendering to the Byzantines rather than the Crusaders, denying the Europeans the booty to which they would have been entitled.

The following month the Crusaders defeated a Saracen army under Killij Arsian at Dorylaeum, and began besieging the city of Antioch.
The city fell to treachery, but no sooner had the besiegers occupied it than they became the besieged, as a Turkish army marching to Antioch’s relief took up the Crusader’s former positions outside the city walls.
Starvation and disease weakened the Turks and Christians alike during the nearly year-long siege, but the Crusaders were able to mount a sally in early June 1098 and route the encircling Turks.
Five months later, in November, the Christians began their march on the Crusade’s stated objective, Jerusalem.
After laying siege to the Holy City for six weeks, the Crusaders stormed the walls and Jerusalem was taken.
In an orgy of bloodlust, nearly every man, woman, and child in the city was massacred, “purifying” the city in the blood of the “defeated infidels.”

The fall of Jerusalem and the slaughter of its people was a fearsome shock to the Moslem faithful—here was an enemy as ruthless and determined as any army of Islam at its most furious.
Equally apparent was that both sides, superficially at least, were driven by spiritual motives: each referred to the other as “infidels,” each regarded itself as the defender of the “true faith” of the “one true God.” Curiously, both claimed to worship the same God, yet each refused to acknowledge anything in common in their doctrines or beliefs.
The possession of Jerusalem was a particular point of contention, as the city was sacred to both faiths: to the Crusaders it was the cradle of Christianity; to the Moslems, it was the site of Muhammed’s ascension to heaven.
It was a situation that left little room for compromise and none for tolerance.

A Moslem army marching up from Egypt to retake Jerusalem was defeated at Ascalon (modern Ashquelon in Israel) in August 1099, effectively bringing what came to be known as the First Crusade to a close.
Following the capture of Jerusalem, the Crusaders established four states in the Levant: the Kingdom of Jerusalem; the County of Tripoli, on the Syrian coast; the Principality of Antioch, in the Orontes Valley; and the County of Edessa, in eastern Anatolia.
Godfrey de Bouillon had been nominated by the Pope to be the King of Jerusalem, but Godfrey had no desire to be called the king of the city where Christ was killed, so instead he assumed the title of
Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri
(Defender of the Holy Sepulcher); however, his successors would be crowned Kings of Jerusalem.

The First Crusade was the only one that would accomplish the goals it set out to achieve–specifically, the taking of Jerusalem and other sites holy to Christendom from the Moslem “infidels.” There was to be no peace between Islam and Christianity, however, as the Turks, Arabs, and Egyptians all strove for the next five decades to drive the Europeans from their newly acquired conquests.
The first real success the Moslems had was at the siege of Edessa, which fell to them in 1144.
Having not forgotten the treatment the populace of Jerusalem had received at the hands of the Crusaders, the Moslems slaughtered the Christians
en masse
as they stormed the city.