Was it accidental that a civilization centered on Islam
played this
role in the history of Eurasia? Or did the religion itself possess
featuresover and above the traditional intransigence of
monotheismthat helped the civilization to achieve its remarkable
expansion and maintain its cultural unity over unprecedented distances?
One relevant feature was the salience of holy war (jihad)
in the
Islamic heritage. The Koran, though not by any means a pacifist
manifesto, is somewhat ambiguous in its treatment of armed struggle
against the infidel. Some passages seem to enjoin only defensive
warfare: "fight in the way of God with those who fight you, but aggress
not: God loves not the aggressors" (Koran 2:190). Other passages,
however, suggest aggressive warfare: "slay the idolators wherever you
find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at
every place of ambush" (Koran 9:5). Likewise Muhammad is quoted as
declaring, "I have been commanded to fight people till they testify
that there is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God, and
perform the prayer and pay the alms-tax." Yet, at one point in the
course of his struggle with the pagan Meccans, he made a truce with
them, and he is also said to have told his followers, "Leave the Turks
alone as long as they leave you alone."
On the basis of such materials, the medieval Muslim
scholars worked out
an elaborate legal doctrine of holy war. They endorsed the fundamental
idea of aggressive warfare aimed at extending the dominion of Islam,
but at the same time hedged it about with a variety of ifs and buts.
Normally the infidels were to be called to accept Islam before they
were attacked, women and children were to be spared, enemies were not
to be tortured nor their bodies mutilated, truces could be made, Jews
and Christians who submitted to Islamic rule were to be tolerated, and
so forth. On the other hand, there were many matters on which the
scholars disagreed: whether other categories of noncombatants could be
killed, whether the enemy could be slain with fire, whether mangonels
could be used, whether the livestock and fruit trees of the infidel
could be destroyed, whether non-Arab pagans who submitted to Islamic
rule could be tolerated, and the like.
The fact that Islam espoused a doctrine of holy war
against the infidel
was obviously no guarantee that Muslims would actually engage in it.
Granted it had worked like a charm to mobilize the anarchic tribesmen
of seventh-century Arabia. But humans regularly fail to live upor
downto their principles. Nor is lacking such a doctrine any guarantee
that people will abstain from conquest. The Mongols, for example,
conquered more territory than the Muslims, and slaughtered many more
people, without being inspired by anything that could pass for a
doctrine. Yet the central place of the value of holy war in the Islamic
heritage certainly made available to Muslims a moral charter for the
continuing conquest of infidel lands, and one they invoked often
enough. In that sense there clearly was something about Islam that lent
itself to the creation of a global culture.