Christian-Muslim Relations in History: Three Things Everyone Should Know

so my name is is Thomas Berman that you see up there on the slide and I’m kind of a newbie to Notre Dame I came here a year and a half ago after being at the University of Tennessee for 25 years and I have to tell you that I loved living in Knoxville but I’m delighted not to have to dress up like a traffic cone on on football Saturdays and I’m really joying being here at the University of Notre Dame I came here to be the director of a thing called the medieval Institute and I just want to give a little commercial and an invitation to you here at the beginning of my talk a commercial oh I got to turn this on there we go the medieval Institute is the oldest interdisciplinary Institute on Notre Dame’s campus I want to mention that because it’s amazing how few people actually know that who were students here and and I I feel like I have my job is to sell the institution the medieval Institute we’re now surrounded by Institute’s right we have the Kroc Institute we have the Keele not an Institute of Irish studies we have Institutes of every different kind but they began with the medieval Institute way back in 1946 and the medieval Institute is actually where graduate education began at Notre Dame as well the first PhD degrees were given in the medieval Institute it was founded at the time to as an Institute to study especially the philosophy and theology of the forebears of Thomas Aquinas in the 12th and 13th century and these gentlemen here are working over such texts in the year since it has grown enormous ly and we now have medievalists working on almost every conceivable topic at the University of Notre Dame we have in fact 50 faculty fellows at Notre Dame making us probably the biggest having we have the biggest single concentrate of scholars of the Middle Ages of any university in the United States and one of the biggest concentrations in the whole world we have 40 or so undergraduate majors and minors including an alumna up here who graduated a few years ago we at any given time have 25 or so PhD students doing advanced degrees in this area we have 95 thousand books in the medieval Institute library including that one right there and I want to invite you if you’re interested to come over and see them we’re holding an open house today till 3 o’clock in the afternoon go to the seventh floor of Hesburgh library there are signs on the ground floor that will point you to the elevators you can go right up and you can see some of our really cool stuff like this beautiful facsimile of the Book of Kells and many other such things so that’s my commercial and the commercial is over with okay I want to thank you all for coming to hear me talk about a topic that has been the center of my scholarly life since I was a graduate student thirty years ago the interactions between Christianity and Islam in the long medieval period and it a great pleasure for me to come and talk to you a little bit about that especially in the context of the world we live in in which Christian Muslim relations have become such a stressed and difficult topic for us to think about and yes we all know that there’s been real conflict between christians and muslims actually from the beginning of the interaction between them the map in front of you is a map that basically lays out the early conquests of the arab muslims in the late 2nd half of the 7th century into the beginning of the eighth century when islam which began right here in Mecca and Medina spread in less than a hundred years all the way to the north end of Spain and all the way into what’s now Pakistan an amazingly rapid expansion and it really was a military asset of military conquests and there’s no getting around that I want to stress some things here though they were military conquests they were not forced conversions Muslims did not convert the Christians and Jews whom they conquered I can go into a lot of reasons why that so but it’s in fact part of the Islamic doctrine that you may not forcibly convert Christians and Jews and they did not and what this means is that for literally centuries the great majority of the population in the Islamic world were actually Christians living under Muslim rule for centuries it probably took until 1100 or so three or four hundred years later before even the majority of the population had converted to Islam so that’s one of the reasons that we have this intimate interaction is that Christians and Muslims have been living side-by-side in the Islamic world from the very beginning and then there were later kinds of violence going the other directions in the crusade period when people from Latin Christendom launched campaigns to go conquer the Holy Land from Muslims these also were not conversion Airy Wars Crusaders were actually utterly uninterested in converting the people they came across they were at times though interested in killing large numbers of them and they did so there’s real violence here and I want to remind you that the only sources that we have that tell us what happened when the first Crusaders got to Jerusalem and sack to the city our Christian sources in the Latin language and the Christian sources tell us that at a minimum the blood ran ankle-deep on Temple Mount after this it’s pretty clear that the Crusaders killed every single person they found in Jerusalem and the irony is that they didn’t realize that a lot of those people were not Muslims they were Christians and Jews who were living there and had been living there all the way through you’re in the wrong room and get the aging oh well yeah make way yeah you want 138 yeah alright so this is your chance anybody else want to go yeah I mean the getting’s good right now nobody will notice yeah there’s there’s some no no no you there we go god yeah man see that’s a beautiful thing that’s a beautiful thing so yes yes there has been violence between Christians and Muslims one of the main things I want to communicate to you today is that violence is by no means the only kind of interaction between Christians and Muslims in history and in fact it’s probably not the normal one we have a vision of history that suggests that it is but it’s not accurate and in this talk I want to just touch lightly on three points that I think everybody should know about the interactions between Christianity and Islam now I have to confess that in the first hour when I did this I never got to 0.3 so I’m a little bit like that preacher you know who says I’ve got three points and you know and then runs out at the end and we’ll see if I get to the third but I’ll try I’ll get through the first two at least and the first point I want to make in fact is it’s not the whole story that violence is what goes on between Christians and Muslims there are a lot of other things that go on and I want to begin that story with a very interesting ruin that still stands to this day in the modern country of Israel in a place called Shifta this is not a great map and I apologize for it but shifters right here Beersheba which is the bigger city biggest city in the south part of Israel is up here this is the Negev desert really really desert Jerusalem is way up here in Bethlehem so we’re in this part of Israel and Shifta was a city upon a hill that was occupied maybe between about 1000 BC and 1000 AD occupied mostly by Arabs at ethnic Arabs who began as pagans they were polytheistic Arabs this is a map of what’s left of Shiva in the way of ruins and you can see that these Arabs became Christians as a lot did in the late antique period because their three churches here North Church a middle church a South Church but look at this funny little thing right here a little cupola added on the side of this church that’s identified as a mosque let’s look a little closer at that at images of the place so here’s the what’s left of that big South Church I was there about three years ago this time of the year the apse down here where the altar would have been right over here is this which is a what a Baptist a Baptistery designed as late antique ones were for adult that adult adult baptisms and then right out over here is this and this is what remains of the mosque that was attached right onto the wall of the church and in fact the mosque when it was attached to the church used some of the church wall to create this little cupola thing there what’s that cupola they know that’s the prayer niche that’s the niche that tells you that Mecca is that way and you and you do your prayers you need to bow down toward Mecca in that direction and the Israeli archaeologists tell us that the church and the mosque were both being used at the same time that in fact in this Arab city of Shifta at some point after the coming of Islam some of the people converted to Islam somehow they made an arrangement with one of the big churches so they could attach their their prayer Hall right onto the church and when they prayed they prayed right through the baptistry of that Christian Church and that in some ways is the first point I want to make that Christianity and Islam are joined at the hip just as they’re joined in one structure here in all kinds of ways though modern people in the West often feel deeply estranged from Islam historically we grew out of the same land we overlapped with each other and often were intimately connected to each other in ways that go far beyond violence and let me give some examples of that the ways that were joined at the hip we go of course out of the same middle-eastern monotheistic tradition everybody knows that I think but I want to emphasize how much it is the case that Christians and Muslims speak the same religious language use the same kind of terminology to mean the same kind of things this is by the way one of the reasons thank you so much for saying this this is one of the reasons Christians and Muslims have always been able to argue so vociferously with each other because they know the same language they’re like siblings and they know how to poke at each other because they know what they’re talking about they use the same terms for stuff so for example I want to stress this this may seem shocking to some people but I want to stress this the word Allah is exactly equivalent to the words that Christians and Jews use to talk about the one God it’s exactly equivalent in meaning it’s actually equivalent genetically because the word Allah is actually genetically related to Elohim they’re both Semitic languages right the basic Semitic root for God is al h or LH and you can see it in both of those words in fact there’s a very peculiar thing about the Jewish version of this the Hebrew word Elohim what’s the really funny quirky thing about Elohim and the Hebrew Bible think of the other Hebrew words you know from kind of churchy language right Seraphim and cherubim what is it about those words that end in IM in hebrew well those the other ones are angelic they’re plural a word ending IM in hebrew is normally a masculine plural and in fact the word Elohim which is in the first line of the Hebrew Bible when God created the heavens and the earth is grammatically a plural it’s a plural that appears with a singular verb Elohim bara the gods created singular and this demonstrates in fact that it’s one of the many things that demonstrate that the ancient Hebrews at some point were polytheists like everyone around them they gradually became monotheists but they continued to use their their plural form of this verb as a singular in Arabic it is a singular by the way yes I don’t know the distinction you’re making it is it is literally a plural yeah yeah it means the multiple of things that’s what Elohim means yeah no no this is this is a grammatical plural and scholars all know this this is true well but the the point is semantically these terms all mean the same thing and one of the reasons we know this is that remember the majority of the population living in the Islamic world for centuries was actually Christian and there are lots of Jews and they all began to speak Arabic they began to write Christian and Jewish theology in Arabic they began to pray in Arabic and when they did so the God they prayed to was a lot and this is of course still true of the parts of the Christian world that use Arabic liturgically so if you go to a Christian Church that uses Arabic as a liturgical language they will pray to Allah this is the term that is the term for God in the Arabic language irrespective of what religion you’re part of it is not a sectarian term it’s just like God or Davos or Thais non-sectarian terms for the one God so they actually use the same word for God there wasn’t some sense that Islam had a different God they used the same term for it okay so a lot of terminology of a kind of a highfalutin theological kind there’s other kinds of commonalities of religious languages as well as well commonalities that go down to a much lower level like names that Christians and Muslims have traditionally given to their children naming practices tell a lot about identity about who you are you name your children because of things you value and it turns out that Christians and Muslims often name their children the same things we don’t recognize this because we often don’t know that the Arabic word actually is identical often etymologically but but otherwise is identical with one that we’re familiar with so very very common to meet Muslim men name Jakub Jakub well Jakub pretty clearly is just Jacob and I mentioned to the earlier group that it seems like about every one out of every ten male students I have right now is named Jake well their their their name their and they’re usually Christians but they’re they’re just Jakub right there just Jakub that’s their James in other words it’s a very common Muslim name as is Miriam Miriam is the name for Jesus’s mother in the Koran and Maruyama is extremely common given name for women Musa whose Musa in Arabic Moses right Musa a very common name Ibrahim is just Abraham so the common theological vocabulary on one end exemplifies the same thing that the naming practices on the other one in do and that is that there’s this immense overlap and in how we think of the world religiously and how we relate to the religious culture that we’re part of okay but it’s not just common religious languages that that join us at the hip there are other things too so I give you a an image here from a medieval Arabic manuscript from about 1220 scientific work about the nature of animals anybody have any guesses about who this gentleman is here what’s that nope nope no no it is this guy ah dese two bobbies Stu Aristotle ah dese two is the Arabic version of Aristotle whose aflatoun would you guess Plato Plato you ever notice have you ever noticed that we were all educated to think that Plato and Aristotle were on our team there are guys right Western civilization began with Plato and Aristotle then there are guys but they’re just as much part of Islamic civilization and that happened and and and it’s a it’s an amazing story that happened because remember those early conquests of Islam conquered the Hellenistic Middle East the part of the Middle East that had been thoroughly Greek a size Hellenized after Alexander the Great’s conquests in the fourth century BCE so they conquered this territory in which Greek science and philosophy had been flourishing for seven or eight centuries and soon after conquering it powerful people in the Arab Islamic world said we got to get a hold of that stuff Arabic had the Arabic tradition had no philosophical or scientific tradition at all before the time of Muhammad and they said we got to get a hold of it and so powerful people in true including the caliphs that the sort of rulers of the Empire paid translators most of whom were actually Christians to translate especially Aristotle but a whole bunch of other Greek scientists and philosophers into Arabic where they were available by say the early 11th century late 10th century now what I want you to remember is that those works were available in Arabic before they were available even in Latin and you think how can that be how can that possibly be well play though Aristotle wrote in Greek right the Romans conquered the Greeks and sort of absorbed Greek culture and happily confessed that they did it the best stuff we have mostly came from the Greeks they were they would often say but they never actually translated those great works of Aristotle and Plato and most of these other figures into the Latin language partly because educated Romans didn’t need translations they all were raised to understand Greek even though it wasn’t their native language so they never translated this stuff and that meant that the civilization of Western Europe in the early Middle Ages Latin Europe England France Germany Spain all that territory did not have access to these works at all with only a few exceptions in any form that they could read whereas the Arab Muslim world did and eventually when the Latin world after about the Year 1100 became suddenly very interested in regaining that material they said Wow and they knew somehow the Arabs had all of this stuff and they turned to the Arabs that get it back or two to get access to it for the first time and that meant that Aristotle and Plato were widely read by scholars widely thought through by scientists and philosophers in the Islamic tradition and widely built on so that a thriving Hellenistic philosophical and scientific tradition developed in the Arab world long before it did in the Latin Christian world and the Latin Christian world’s later development of it dis deeply dependent on it to start with so yes aflatoun and Arastoo are on their team as well this remains the case especially in the modern shiite tradition a great philosophical reflection we don’t know this is all hid from us note nobody in the news is interested in this and lets us know about it but there’s a vital philosophical tradition that is ongoing in the Shiite Persian world to this day still goes back repeatedly to play especially these days for inspiration okay so they’re on their team as well we have common roots in other words common cultural roots that are additional to common religious roots but there are other commonalities that are that are in ways even more surprising and less well-known than this Christians and Muslims have often shared and delighted in exactly the same stories of pretty much exactly the same holy people you will never have heard of this tale that’s called the tale of Bill dollar and Buddhist öthe which circulated widely in in Arabic in the in the medieval Islamic world but I want to tell you how it runs and connect it back to its origins and then forward to version of it that becomes a best-seller in the Latin Christian world the story of Bill devar in Buddhist f is that there was a king in India the location of the story is in India now and he was living at a time when this new religion was developing and the religion is simply called it referred to by the Arabic word Deen which just means religion it’s never never said what religion it is but this king was very worried that his son whom he loved would be seduced into this religion and so he kept his son inside the compound of his castle so we would never be exposed to this dangerous new religion but you know sons being what they are eventually he jumped the walls went out and saw the world and found out first of all that the world is often a horrible place he met sick people for the first time and saw people getting terribly old for the first time realize there’s a lot of suffering in the world and that experience of suffering in the world led him on a kind of a spiritual path that culminated him in him embracing this new Deen this religion which he did became a kind of a prophet of this new religion so effective that he eventually persuaded his father to convert and his father converted as well abandon his throne and became a hermit monk so it’s a story about and it’s thinly veiled it’s about the attraction of Islam it’s a story about how a young man jumps the fence and realizes the way the world is and and and comes to embrace this this new religion does that story remind you of anything I doubt any of you have heard that specific version but does it remind you of anything yes this is the story often told of Gautama the Buddha and in fact scholars have now worked out very precisely that the origin of the Builder waarom Buddha soft story in Islam is in fact the story of the Buddha it actually started in India probably in the early centuries of the Common Era moved west in various forms was translated into different languages eventually as translated into Arabic and turned into an Islamic tale a thinly veiled Islamic tale but the story doesn’t end there because in maybe 1100 or so some monks probably in Palestine but who themselves were Georgian and I’m not talking about the people from the my former border state I’m talking about the people from the Caucasus translated the story into Georgia very Christian society and they Christianized the story the religion that was the new religion is specifically identified as Christianity otherwise the story is the same and so the boy escapes meets the world becomes a Christian converts his father who becomes a Christian and they become known in the Christian version of the story as Barlow and josaphat and so if you’ve ever heard of Saint Barlow more st. Joseph at those terms would and those Saints which were widely admired in the Middle Ages began life as a Buddhist story that made its way into becoming an Islamic story which made its way into becoming a Christian story and they’re being translated into Georgian it was translated almost immediately into Greek and Latin and then into French and German and every other Western language including and this is the really cool part including into Old Norse now where did they speak Old Norse mostly Scandinavia but especially in Iceland the Norse traveled Iceland established Iceland in about the year 1000 and there is a saga the the Old Norse is the language that the great sagas are written in like me all saga these Dewar’s stories of a brutal revenge but there is actually a bar ylim saga a saga about saint bar l’m all right so not only we’re christians and muslims able easily to exchange and read the same philosophical in scientific texts they often loved exactly the same stories exactly the same highest tales which they were happy to repurpose for their own needs when necessary so we have common cultural roots and common religious language that’s a lot of joy niche a lot of jointed at the hip a lot of ways in which we’re just like that mosque attached to the church we joined at the hip well my second point then come on is that in addition to being joined at the hip there were centuries of amicable interactions between Christians and Muslims as well there are these moments of real violence but in fact the more common state of relations was more or less amicable interaction probably most commonly in the marketplace all over the Mediterranean all around it but especially in the East South and Far West Side’s Jews and Christians and Muslims live together in the same towns they did not live normally in separate ghettos they there might be certain areas that were more Christian than others but they often live dating lived in the same houses sometimes certainly in the same buildings they interacted daily in the same market places they usually they always had to interact economically because none of these groups was ever viable by itself and moreover there are certain kinds of trades that came to be specialties of one religion or another in fact I’ll ask you a question if you were living in a small enough town you know a little dinky place like like I you know I grew up out in Wyoming where we have towns that actually have three people in them so you know a little a little small village in the Mediterranean that had Jews and Christians and Muslims living in it what religion was the butcher what’s that know who said Jew yes why you’re right mm-hmm yeah yes so what is it about that because because Christians can eat any of the meat the the the Jews are bound by the laws of kashrut what about Muslims they they they they have dietary restrictions as well called the hello rules they have to eat meat that is butchered in halal forms and it happens and everybody knew this that whatever is kosher for Jews is automatically halal for Muslims not necessarily the other way around and so it was in fact the case that if the town was sufficiently small the butcher was almost always Jewish because that’s that made market sense for that to happen so in in all kinds of ways Christians and Muslims and Jews are interacting over and over day after day after day throughout the Mediterranean region now I’m a kind I’m my kind of history is called intellectual history I’m interested in the in the history of ideas and and why people hold one view rather than another and how they shift over time so I want to give some examples of this interaction that have more to do with the world of science and philosophy but I could give many examples like this this sort of economic marketplace one of the making the same point but I want to move here to some examples from science and philosophy I mentioned earlier that Arab rulers went out of their way to make sure that Greek philosophy and science made its way into Arabic well then it was studied intensively in the Islamic world and in the early Middle Ages especially in in Baghdad in what’s now modern Iraq where there were thriving groups of scholars and in particular a group I want to say a few words about who were called these days the Baghdad Aristotelian ‘s a group of scholars in Baghdad in the ninth and 10th century who were zealous cultivators of Aristotle’s philosophy which they cultivated entirely in Arabic and the point I want to make about them is that it was an ecumenical group they wouldn’t have used the term but there were Jews and Christians and Muslims who are all part of this group they studied with each other they taught each other they debated with each other they read each other’s works one of the more celebrated members of this group this is not a name you will know he had to be a real geek you know real kind of geeky weird professor like me to know this is a man named Yahya Eibon Adi now yoga is one of those interesting names anybody know what Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo is in the Koran Yaya is John the Baptist in the Koran and and Yahya therefore is a name that that both Christians and Muslims used very commonly in the Middle Ages and Jews by the way who were Arabic speaking Jews and this yaja is actually a Christian one of these he was a Christian Aristotelian in Baghdad he was known in his day as al Montek P which means the logician because he was a brilliant teacher of logic of the philosophical uses of logic he himself was as a suggested student of both Muslims and and Christian philosophers and theologians and he did all kinds of interesting stuff wrote a number of really interesting works that modern scholars are just sort of beginning to explore in the in the last 40 or 50 years the one I want to mention here is one called the Reformation of morals which is as you could guess an ethical treatise about how to live the good life and this thing became a best-seller it’s a it’s a thoroughly philosophical treatise it’s not it doesn’t it doesn’t it calls strictly on the uses the the the authority of reason to construct a model for how to live a good life just as Aristotle would have it doesn’t say live a good life because the Bible says it’s not a theological work it says live a good life because reason shows us that if you do the following things you’ll live a good life so it wasn’t sectarian it wasn’t specifically Christian and it became a best-seller including him on Muslims very very widely read in among Muslims and in fact it became convenient very clearly to leave off the fact that the author of it was a Christian yeah and eventually his name gets separated from the treatise because later on it’s better that we not notice that this was actually a Christian scholar whose work we’re reading for advice as Muslims okay so they studied with each other they read each other’s books their books travelled across these boundaries very easily indeed but so did their technologies and I want to say a few words then about one of the great technological marvels of the Middle Ages a thing called the astrolabe anybody tell me what an astrolabe is what’s that it kind of includes that yeah yeah what else yeah it is a way to do very precise calculations using the Stars that could allow astrolabes to be used in navigation at sea although they usually weren’t in there reasons why that so but they can be used for all kinds of other reasons as a result I like to think of the astrolabe in fact as the cellphone of the Middle Ages and I say that because remember that the cellphone does a whole bunch of stuff right it’s not just one thing it’s a whole bunch of things I mean I I answer email on it I send tweets on it I search the web on it I take photos with it I listen to music on it I mean every once in a while like once every 2 or 3 weeks I actually make a phone call with the thing and the astrolabe was similar it was a device that did a number of different connected things remarkably well yes no no they did a lot of real math to me to make it yeah but you can well I would disagree with you there it’s real math but you can you can you can navigate the globe perfectly well yeah yeah you can you can navigate the globe perfectly well using a model of the universe that actually is is Earth centered and it is very sophisticated math that makes it work properly yeah astrolabe works looks like this this is an astrolabe from about the 1300s now in Toronto this one made in North Africa or Spain an astrolabe consists mostly of a couple of things one is a larger plate usually made of brass and it’s called the tympanum and you can and then you see an overlaid plate that is like a web and that thing is usually called the Rhett a or the network and on the tympanum underneath the upper plate there is a map a three-dimensional map of the heavens projected into two dimensions an idea the Greeks had in late antiquity and began to put in the place and then the Arabs perfected this in amazing ways a three-dimensional map of the heavens on the Rattay we have all of these points and those are points that point to the position of fixed stars and using a third part of the astrolabe which is you see a tab there and a tab there those connect to a thing on the back which is a site called an Adelaide you can hold the temp and the astral a by the hook at the top and you can look at a star that you can identify or a planet you see Venus up there you can use that site on the back to find the elevation of Venus and then you can use that information along with tables on the back to tell you how to rotate this plate the upper plate so that it shows you the map of the heavens where you are right now so you rotate that and it shows you where you are what that allows you to do is a whole bunch of things you can tell what the local time is very precisely you can navigate by it you can use the same instrument to survey so when Baghdad was laid out in the 8th century they used astrolabes to survey the city of Baghdad you can use an astrolabe to tell you how far away an army is that’s marching toward you if you all of this is using trigonometry to accomplish all that they are various sites this one is about that big but you’ll see some that are that our this baby this one communicates so beautifully the way in which the astrolabe jumped across every religious and linguistic boundary because if we look closely at it we see that it has from by design Arabic terminology on it right beside Latin terminology on it it was designed for either Latin Christian or Arab Muslim users and this particular one is unique in that there are places where a Jewish scholar was using it and he or she may be scratched in Hebrew writing onto the brass so this is an astrolabe that went among all three communities and the perhaps the culmination by the way of the astrolabe technology is the following normally you have to have a different tympanum for every degree of longitude so if you move very far east or west you have to have a whole new tympanum put in and so a lot of them were designed with five or six timpani that you could switch out but eventually in North Africa in the 13th 14th and 15th century Arab astronomers invented Universal astrolabes that were designed from the beginning to be able to be used anywhere on the planet almost none of those survived but that’s that’s how far astrolabe technology went and it easily crossed all of these boundaries now what’s that know these would have to you’d have to have a different projection of the southern heavens for a for one in the southern hemisphere yes um now see it’s already 17 after I’m still I’m in point to I’m at the end of point 2 talking about amicable interconnections I didn’t get to 0.3 I’ll just mention what point three was and ask you to dwell on it a little bit we live in a day when when people are asking the question over and over and over what it what’s behind the violence that seems to be directed at non-muslims by Muslims and I just want to say a couple things about that and one is that there are all sorts of things going on in that violence they don’t have anything to do with this long and don’t have anything to do with what Muslim authorities who are in a position to comment say constitutes Islam at all many of the things that groups like Isis are doing are transparently heretical in the eyes of mainstream Muslims and are identified as such repeatedly as heretical it has not ever been legitimate in the Islamic tradition in any legitimate form to say that is the duty of a Muslim to kill Jews and Christians wherever he meets them that is utterly heretical and so there is a connection I suppose between people like Isis groups like Isis who say they are Muslims who are doing violence there is a connection with Islam but it’s a very it’s the same kind of connection that radical radical Christian groups who use violence have with mainstream Christianity and I really think it’s important in our day that we not fall into a simplistic trap of saying that because someone identifies themselves as a Muslim who is doing violent things that that is somehow representative of this tradition and I think we certainly don’t want to fall into the trap of not recognizing that Christianity and Islam have this long long deep intimate connection it’s not always been comfortable it’s not always been easy but there is there are piles and piles and piles of evidence that it has enormous potential for peace ability amicability and I just ask you to dwell on that and I’ll stop and and you can make your whatever comments you can Bronx cheer you know hoop me out whatever bye thank you for coming and thank you for your attention and we have about 10 10 minutes or so for any questions that okay so here’s a good question was there intermarriage the answer is yes but it’s a complicated answer the answer is that Islamic law allowed for Muslim men to marry non-muslim women so it was in fact and to have non-muslim women as concubines so it was in fact very common for Christian women to be married to Muslim men it was not legal to do the reverse a Muslim woman could not marry a Christian man the same is true if we switch who’s on top so in medieval Spain in the High Middle Ages after Christian monarchs had conquered a lot of Islamic Spain and Christians now ruled over Muslims in large numbers it was legal for Christian men to marry Muslim women but not the other way around so there was always a gendered dimension to the law and that thing had real consequences and we can’t wish them away the real consequences of that system where that it was a pipeline for the gradual conversion of the population to Islam because the children of a mixed marriage were always Muslims if your mother was Christian you were legally still a Muslim because your father was Muslim right so yeah there wasn’t her marriage and so there was that level of deep intimacy as well going on yes what what there’s so much about the differences between Sunni and Shiite yeah and there are lots of differences but in your mind what are the essential differences when why is there conflict yeah well that’s nice that would take me a whole that was a whole other lecture and and but but out but I’ll just say two things about about the Sunni Shiite split this goes back to the earliest period of Islam to the seventh century it began fundamentally as a political split and it was a dispute over who could be Khalif or the successor to the Prophet in his political rule rule and within a generation of the death of Muhammad one group who were called the Shiite Ali the party of Ali or the partisans of Ali who was a relative of them of Muhammad said the Khalif should be from our family tree and Ali himself wanted to be called leaf and he was for a while and he and the partisans of his view felt that the Khalif should always be in that family the mainstream the much bigger group that became known as the Sunni Muslim said no the Khalif doesn’t have to come from that branch and so there was warfare over that and then this originally political dispute then took on religious a religious character as well in other words there were developments in the Shiite tradition and then the Sunni tradition that made them move a little bit away from each other and one of the principal ones is this that in the Shiite tradition to this day the real leaders of Shia Islam the Imams and these days the great ayatollahs like the Ayatollah Khomeini have a special kind of divine power that comes to them by virtue of being an imam they have the right and the capacity to interpret the Quran for today’s needs in a way there’s kind of a prophetic power that they have Sunni Islam doesn’t allow that power to anyone so that the Sunni tradition religious authority develops just as it does in rabbinical Judaism that the religious authorities are the people who are deeply studied in the religious tradition and who collectively over time come up with what is proper Sunni doctrine and what is not and so that charismatic Authority that she I tradition allows doesn’t exist in the Sunni and then on top of that there are other sorts of things but I think those are the two things I think are seminal yes oh absolutely yes absolutely if you go if you get out the zoomit so the question was did Thomas Aquinas turn to Jewish and Muslim authorities in the Summa or any of his other works because you wrote piles of stuff right and in fact he did over and over and over we could say it’s not it’s not an exaggeration to say that Aquinas was infatuated with Arab philosophy he was absolutely infatuated with it and he went very far farther than most people in his day remember acquaintance was a radical in the 13th century in a lot of ways in using Arab and Aristotelian sources to interpret Christianity so Aquinas was busy at this project of showing that Aristotelian Greek thought and Catholic Christianity somehow fit together in a complementary way and so he was reading tons of Aristotle but when he read Aristotle he read Aristotle right alongside the great commentaries of the Spanish Muslim commentator of arroway’s he read them interchangeably their Airways was so admired as the commentator on Aristotle in the 13th century in the Latin world that you didn’t have to mention his name you just said the commentator says and that meant air verily says that what Aristotle meant here was the following and so if you get out almost any page of the swimmer Theologiae you’ll find that he is citing of Airways Avicenna he’s citing somebody called rabbi Moses who’s rabbi Moses Moses Maimonides who’s a Jewish Arab philosopher over and over and over and over and it’s not just in the Summa Aquinas like everybody in of his ilk wrote a commentary on the basic textbook for theology in a medieval University and this is a textbook called the four books of sentences from the 12th century and to become a doctor of theology like he was you had to write a commentary on this thing and if we get out Aquinas as commentary on the sentences as it’s called we’ll find that he cites Everson at NAVAIR weighs dozens and dozens and dozens of times in a commentary on a Christian theological textbook think about that for a while so yes indeed absolutely well yeah so Socrates Socrates is that was the teacher of Plato right who was the teacher of Aristotle Socrates though like Jesus never wrote anything so what we know about Socrates we mostly know from what Plato said about him in his dialogues and from of some other sources so everybody knows about Socrates including the Arab Muslims they all Socrates is a name they know because he comes up a lot but he’s not he since he didn’t write works himself he’s not nearly as seminal in many ways as Plato and Aristotle yes yes is the development of the second-class citizenship that’s a good question so where does the because what I’ve described for Christians and Jews in the Islamic world is a kind of second-class citizenship and the origins are both it the short answer is this what the Quran and Islamic tradition prescribes about it but I think the bigger and more interesting answer is that this was a kind of a normal mode of the Mediterranean going way farther back than the time of Islam that is if you were part of a religious tradition that was different from us we can find ways to accommodate you but usually you’re going to be in a second-class position they’re going to be legal liabilities that you have the best example of this is Jews in the late Roman Empire Christianity developed the teaching fairly early on that Jews needed to be protected in Christian society they couldn’t be forcibly converted they had to be left alone but they never had nobody really had rights as we understand them in the pre-modern world but they didn’t have the same legal rights that Christians did and so Jews living in the Christian Roman Empire were in very similar position they’re taxed differently than Christians are there certain things Jews can’t do and so in many ways what Islam did is build on a tradition that was already there that actually goes back even farther than the Romans and then the Christians just did the same thing when Christians conquered Islamic territory from Muslims they then they put Muslims and Jews in a second-class kind of citizenship so it’s kind of a and in some ways it’s a it’s a cultural thing but it’s also something you see throughout world history and we don’t want to admit it do we but we’ve done it for the most part to Native Americans in many ways Native American reservations function they have separate legal traditions of their own these days Native Americans are mostly recognized as equal before the law but for much of American history they have not been and it’s true for Canada and many other places as well so there’s something in the American and the human personality that can seize on a solution like this and in the case of Islam it became part of Islamic law to treat things that way yeah there was a question yeah so the question is another very endless of seminal question where where did Wahhabism come from waha BISM is the strand of Sunni Islam that flourishes and is really the official version of Islam in Saudi Arabia began in here’s where I can say I’m a pre modernist beyond my area of expertise which is true Wahhabism is a is a relatively recent phenomenon from the late 18th early 19th century mostly it’s a strand of Islam that claims to be you know going back to the very basics of Islam but like so many movements that we identify as fundamentalist are going back to a vision of the past that never really existed and most critics of mohab ism would say that that it’s a vision of Islam that never really quite existed but it does flourish in this in in Saudi Arabia has great political power and you know here’s where I will say something pull it politically you know Saudi Arabia is supposedly our ally but Wahhabism is the biggest enemy of of Western religion that there is in the Middle East in in some fundamental ways it’s it’s Saudi Arabia that’s been building all of these schools all over the Islamic world that teacher wah ha bite version of Islam that is very very hostile to other religious groups and we’re in this close connection with them and it is one of the great irony of the present that this is so so it’s a modern kind of very radically conservative I’m sure there is and I just don’t know the answer we need we need an expert on modern Arab in Islamic politics maybe one more question you people are you don’t want to leave what’s wrong with you what’s wrong with you yes sir what role does the hadith what’s the call the tradition of Islam or the tradition of the Prophet play in how the Koran is interpreted especially on the in questions of the role of violence and and non-violence in religion well in general I should say that the hadith plays an enormous role in every part of Islamic life the hadith is a big collection of the sayings and acts mostly of the Prophet Muhammad that are not in the Koran which were collected very early in the Islamic tradition written down in the ninth century and if you read any kind of work about Islamic belief or practice or anything you’ll find the hadith cited as frequently as the as the Quran and if you read quranic commentaries you’ll see that they over and over appealed to the hadith that ways to help understand what the quranic passages say so the hadith plays a fundamental role in every aspect of Islamic thought including and then the in the law on jihad what is legitimate jihad what is not legitimate jihad and and and by the way if you’re wondering the lawns you’re hot actually if you look at it closely alongside what we think of as the Christian doctrine of Just War and I have had my students do this many times that they’re really surprisingly similar many many similar elements in other words we can find passages in both the Christian and Jewish Bible and in the Quran that seemed to advocate enormous violence but the Christian tradition and the Jewish tradition and the Islamic tradition have perfectly effective ways of explaining why this is not a command for individuals to go out and do violent things it’s not even a direction for the community so we might say that the hadith plays a a limiting role just as real it’s tradition almost always does I would I wouldn’t I wouldn’t say that I would simply say that that every aspect of Islamic thought is as affected by hadith really as as the Quran is I I I think the more relevant question is can you find it among Christians and there are plenty of examples yeah and remember that these Crusaders going on crusade they were very very pious Catholics and in fact they thought that what they were doing was a holy act so in some ways the question is not what’s in the holy texts the question is what do people think is in the holy texts and what do people think is legitimate activity and when you look at the long history of Christianity and Islam side-by-side you’ll find almost equal amounts of violence in the name of religion of extraordinary brutal bloody levels so in a way I’m not going to say it doesn’t matter that it’s not in the in the in the New Testament but because it’s been in the minds of Christians plenty of times yeah you can but remember that 80% of the Christian Bible is the Jewish Bible and it’s authoritative stuff and go get out the hundred and forty ninth Psalm and and see what you think okay all right I’ve got a stop thank you all for coming yes [Music]