Go on, have a guess.
We're looking at the trademark colonnades and capitals of a big Roman city.
But is it Italy? France? Spain?
No. We're in Palmyra, in Syria, not all that far from the Iraqi border.
We forget that the land of the Caesars stretched from Arabia to Portugal, from Scotland to Libya.
Across this vast, pacified Roman empire people spoke the same languages,
everyone had the same chance to become a Roman citizen,
everyone had freedom of worship, under a vast and accommodating polytheism,
and everyone could marry whoever they chose, irrespective of religion or race.
Today, that unity is gone and the great Roman territory has been effectively divided in two.
There is the Christian world and the Muslim world
and for 1400 years relations between the two have been marked by rivalry,
mistrust, incomprehension and a simmering mutual antipathy that still afflicts us today.
These programmes are an attempt to discover the origins
and the see-sawing history of what some people call the "Clash of Civilisations".
What do they mean by that?
Is it true that there is such a thing?
And will it ever end?
When Rome fell in 476 AD, Western Europe was plunged headlong
into what used to be called the Dark Ages.
But was it really lights out for everyone?
Let's face it, we have a pretty Monty Python vision of the Dark Ages,
as a place of mud and illiteracy and embarrassing diseases.
A kind of cringe-making adolescence of Western civilisation in which people hurled dead cows
over castle battlements and drew endless lumpy pictures of the torments of hell.
And yet there are plenty of historians
who say that the Dark Ages were by no means as dark as all that.
And in the centuries after the fall of Rome in 476 AD, the Roman roads continued to
function and although the bridges may have been dilapidated, they could be repaired with pontoons
and the currency continued to circulate and that, effectively,
a great, unified civilisation continued to flourish about the shores of the Mediterranean.
Something did finally destroy that unity and it wasn't the Huns and it wasn't the Vandals.
It was the Arabs.
In just 80 years, they conquered half of the old Roman Empire,
colonising the grain fields of Egypt
and surging through North Africa to Spain.
And the crucial difference between the Arabs and all previous invaders
was that the Arabs were not seduced by that intoxicating Roman brand.
And they didn't adopt Christianity - they were to develop their own distinctive culture.
And this powerful and sophisticated Muslim civilisation was to be in the ascendancy for 800 years.
And that memory is important to Islamic extremists today when they
consider what they now think of as the humiliation of the Arab world.
In this series I'm going to travel around Europe, to the Mediterranean and the Middle East
to look at some of the flashpoints in relations between Christianity and Islam.
But also to see what we can learn from those precious moments of harmony and interchange.
To understand the origins of this long-running antipathy, we need to grasp a key fact of geography,
namely that Arabia, now Saudi Arabia, was never really part of the Roman world.
The Arabs traded with Rome and supplied plenty of mercenaries and even an Emperor, Philip the Arab,
and they supplied the camel, the heavy goods vehicle of the ancient world.
But unlike their monotheistic neighbours, the Christian Roman Empire
and the Zoroastrian Persian Empire, the desert Arabs remained a mostly polytheistic people.
At the beginning of the 7th Century,
the Arabs still believed in many gods and idols, until a 40-year-old man,
called Muhammad, underwent a profound religious experience.
In 610 AD, Muhammad received his call to prophet-hood, and changed the course of history.
And some have seen this as a bolt from the blue,
a new divine message for humanity without any previous source or influence.
While other Koranic scholars say, "No, you must look at the historical context."
And the context was that the Arabs were then a remote desert people,
with barely any previous literature of their own,
living on the sandy fringes of two great empires -
the Persian and, above all, the Christian Roman Empire.
Many Arabs had already converted to Christianity, and Muhammad, the well-travelled merchant,
would certainly have been familiar with the religion.
But the advantage of Islam for the Arabs was that they could adopt it
without any implicit political submission to the Christian Roman Emperor, and, above all,
as the final, superior faith, and one which appeared in the Arabic language,
it gave expression to the growing Arab sense of confidence and identity.
Islam was not a new religion.
The Muslims believed that their faith was the perfection of earlier revelations
given to Jews and Christians by their prophets.
And that's why Moses and Jesus are also revered by Muslims.
If you ask a religious person, then he will tell you that,
Abraham knew something about the true religion, then Judaism, it was a little bit better.
Then Christianity is better than Judaism because every
time God will give these prophets and these messengers more information.
Until when Muhammad came, then the original one, the final religion, was given to Muhammad.
So his idea was that he wasn't bringing a new religion, but...
No, not at all. He was just correcting and finalising an ancient
religion which can be traced right the way back to Abraham. Right.
Because the Arabs have this relation with this area, with Syria and Egypt and Iraq,
they were influenced by Christianity and Judaism, and it seems to me that they wanted a religion of their own.
And the way to prove the supremacy of that religion was war.
In 637, only five years after Muhammad's death, the Arabs conquered Jerusalem.
Not only the most important city in Judaism, but also the place where Christ preached and was crucified.
Where Constantine, Rome's first Christian Emperor,
had ordered the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
And what did Muhammad's successors do when they got there?
They set about visibly demonstrating that Islam was the culmination of Judaism and Christianity.
This is al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary.
After Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD this whole area was just rubble.
The first thing that the Caliph Umar, Muhammad's second successor
did when he got here was to order the whole area to be cleared.
And here was built this celestial golden Dome of the Rock.
It's not a mosque, but its true purpose is still unclear.
The rock inside the Dome is this small, lunar patch of limestone,
upon which there used to rest the Arc of the Covenant itself.
If you think of the "Clash of Civilisations" in geological terms, then this is the San Andreas fault.
It was on this rock that Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac, Jacob had his vision of the angel ascending,
somewhere around here Solomon built the first Temple of the Jews
in 950 BC and, of course, here too, Jesus is supposed to have overturned the tables of the moneychangers,
and here too Muhammad ascended into heaven, where he saw Abraham, and Moses, and Jesus.
Muhammad's "Night Journey" is celebrated by this mosque, the Al Aqsa, or Farthest Mosque.
The importance of these heavenly encounters,
and the location of the mosque, is that they cement Muhammad's status as the last Prophet.
Am I right in thinking that when Muhammad ascended to the seventh
heaven on the night flight he meets Abraham, and Moses, and Jesus?
It's not just a matter of meeting.
It's more than meeting them.
It is the Muslims who really believe that Muhammad led a prayer.
He was the imam, he was the preacher, he was the leader for a prayer when
he was joined by Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Jesus, and the rest.
Solomon, David. So this is important from a religious point of view, that Muhammad is the last true prophet.
And when Muhammad began his preaching,
they first prayed in the direction of Jerusalem and not Mecca?
Yes, you are quite right, and that took place for 17 months.
For this reason also Jerusalem is considered important to Islam because it is the first qibla.
Qibla is the direction, among other factors, why Jerusalem is important, so it is the first qibla.
The qibla is the direction in which Muslims pray.
Now, of course, towards Mecca.
When you think of the hostility that now seems to exist between Islam and
Judaism, it's extraordinary to remember that there are believers in all three religions
who hold that this holy hillside, the Mount of Olives,
is the place where the resurrection of the dead will begin.
And the dead of all three faiths lie in close proximity, waiting for God's great wake up call.
But whatever reconciliation takes place in the afterlife, we must deal with the present
and the historic resentments fuelled by the occupation of each other's territory.
The annals of military history have nothing to match
the speed and success of the Arabs' lightning conquests in the 7th and 8th century.
The Prophet died in 632,
and four decades later they settled in Egypt and Central Persia.
They stretched from Toledo, in al-Andalus, medieval Spain,
to the Sindh Valley in Pakistan today.
The most prevalent and popular view is the classical one that
Islam was programmed for success.
And the fact that it so rapidly swept
all over the Mediterranean world,
and the conquests,
are regarded as a special miracle
granted by God in order to confirm the truth
of the Islamic religion and the Islamic message.
And this is why you have a revivalist movement,
that if you revive your commitment to Islam
then the divine favour will come back,
will again prove that our God is the true and correct one.
Arab horsemen carved huge tracts from the enfeebled empires of Persia
and the Eastern Roman Empire, known as the Byzantine Empire to those in the West.
And as they swept through the eastern Roman empire they found Christian heretics
who had at least this in common with Islam
that they denied Orthodox teaching about the divinity of Christ.
There were all sorts of sects holding all sorts of positions.
Enophysites, Monophysites, Nestorians, Copts.
And these heretics were increasingly persecuted
by the middle of the 5th century by the Orthodox Church in Byzantium.
Fed up with being bossed about by their Byzantine overlords,
they may have been attracted by one aspect of Islam in particular.
There is no clergy in Islam.
Any Muslim who just adopts Islam
has no middle-man between him or her and Almighty God.
So it was not like Judaism or Christianity.
That encouraged many people to adopt this simple, direct religion.
From the very beginning, Islam was so much more than a private relationship between man and God.
Muhammad was a political and military leader, as well as the conduit of his faith.
And the faith he propounded wasn't just about the cultivation of your immortal soul.
It was about creating the perfect society on earth.
An Islamic programme for the human race.
Year one of the Muslim calendar is based on that essentially political moment when Muhammad
and his followers left Mecca to set up a new Muslim society in Medina.
Even though Islam for the first 10 or 12 years was a persecuted group in Mecca,
when they moved to Medina in the year 622,
in the famous Hijra,
the famous emigration from Mecca to Medina, Muhammad becomes...
A militant figure? He's a religious leader and a political leader from the very beginning.
This is why Muslims don't believe in separation between state and church.
I myself believe that there was a separation between state and church.
Because when we read the Koran, the Koran speaks almost only about religion.
It doesn't speak about the state and how to run the state.
I believe there was even
a separation between the church and the state even in the time of Muhammad.
How to appoint a caliph, how to run the state, how many ministers to be there...
everything. Everything is secular.
But for some reason the theologians insist that this was part of the religion.
Religion and politics are inextricably mixed
in the notion of sharia, the Islamic code of religious law.
This has been developed over centuries by religious and legal scholars.
It's based on the Koran and the life of the Prophet
and it has rules for just about every aspect of daily life.
Theoretically, Allah is the governor.
And he put sharia, or what we call the law of Allah.
The Government is
obliged to guard,
to defend, the sharia.
But they are not above it, they are submitted, they are subjected to the sharia also.
And it was up to the people to decide who is good to rule over them.
But if the ruler, and there are many examples of this in Islamic history,
if the ruler insulted their faith, by any way,
they had to revolt against him.
We have seen even in our own time how militant Islamic groups
can target rulers of Muslim countries
for not adhering to sharia, and we have seen how those leaders can pay a terrible price.
Like the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, assassinated in 1981.
The very same accusations, of a certain worldliness,
a willingness to compromise, were made about the Umayyads,
the first dynasty to rule the Muslim world.
The Umayyads took control less than 30 years after the Prophet's death
and here was the first sharp contradiction
between political expediency and the purest demands of Islam.
There were tensions between the ruling class and the ulema,
the religious leaders of the community.
That was there from the very beginning, and ultimately it's what
caused a split between Shia Islam and Sunni Islam.
This is a split that goes back to whether or not you believe that
the ruler of the community needs to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad or not.
And here exactly is a split between religion and politics.
The Shia eventually became more of a religious tradition and less of a political one.
And the Umayyads went on and carried on as they had before.
As so often, the doctrinal split was really about power.
The Umayyads were certainly Muslims,
but their real interest was in ruling.
Having a new territory is one thing.
Controlling it, administering it is totally another.
They penetrated,
conquered, but settlement took centuries.
They really acquired the administration
of the Byzantines, their palaces, their guards, their weaponry.
It took them more than a century until the administration became really Arabic.
They didn't live with the rest of the population.
They established military camps, and there they spoke Arabic.
So everybody from the cities and from the villages who went there, they had to speak Arabic.
Because they are the leaders, and they have the money, and this and that.
So by doing that, slowly the other people learned Arabic.
And slowly they lost their languages and they spoke Arabic.
Arabic replaced Greek and Latin as the language of the imperial class.
And soon the Arabs were developing their own structures of government,
complete with the universal expression of their economic and political mastery.
Arab currency.
It must have been an amazing shock for the Byzantine Empire.
They'd had 700 years of thinking the Roman Empire would never fall,
and suddenly they have these coins circulating which don't have the Emperor's head on them.
Is that right? Yes. And this is really what proves that the Arabs didn't only have
the military ability, but also the administrative, economic, and cultural ability.
Surrounded by populations that were overwhelmingly Christian or Jewish,
the new Arab rulers behaved with subtlety and intelligence.
Many non-Muslims did eventually convert to Islam.
Those that didn't paid a special poll tax, called the jizya.
But there was no compulsion to convert, and no ban on the Jewish and Christian faiths.
It's a myth to think that the Arabs converted people to Islam at the point of sword. That didn't happen.
It was not completely unheard of, but it was rare.
And usually it was a decision that people made themselves for a whole variety of reasons.
It was a combination of personal, political, social, cultural...
When we look back at the history of this fabulous Umayyad Mosque in Damascus,
we have a tantalising glimpse of a brief shining moment
when Christians and Muslims were even prepared to share the same house of God.
People have been worshipping on the site of this Umayyad Mosque for 3,000 years.
First they venerated the Aramaean god Hadad, then it was the Temple of Jupiter,
then the Christians converted that into a basilica,
and when the Muslims arrived here in 636 AD, it became part mosque, part church.
With the Christians coming in one door, and the Muslims entering the other.
And even when the Muslims razed that building to create this enormous mosque,
it still physically expressed the organic inter-relationship between the two religions.
There's a shrine to the head of John the Baptist with real skin and hair,
there's a minaret of Jesus, and Justinian II sent, from Constantinople,
Byzantine craftsmen, to help create these fabulous golden mosaics.
But as time went on, restrictions began to tighten around the Christians,
even though they were in the overwhelming majority.
They weren't allowed inside the mosque, they weren't allowed to build new churches, or to repair
old ones, or to go out in the streets without a zunar, a special identifying belt,
or to beat their gongs too loudly, or to build their houses higher than Muslim houses.
You could not imagine a more effective system of cultural dominance.
No, the Christians didn't have anything like equality under the Muslims in Damascus.
But if you compare their position to the grisly fates of the Jews or heretics under Christian rule
then you could argue that the Muslims were really quite generous.
And I think today there's a lazy prejudice about Muslim imams, the leaders of religious services.
An assumption that they're all hook-clawed fanatics, preaching hatred against other religions.
One way to correct that prejudice is to go on a Friday to the Damascus mosque
where Dr Muhammad al-Habash pours forth a mesmerising gospel of tolerance.
SUNG PRAYERS
As in all mosques, and indeed in all synagogues, men and women worship separately.
Dr al-Habash notes repeatedly that Allah is the god of all men,
and highlights positive moments in the treatment of Jews and Christians
by the caliphs who succeeded Muhammad.
We believe there is wisdom in Christianity, there is wisdom
in Judaism, there is wisdom in Hinduism, there is wisdom...
Every place around the world there is wisdom.
And this is our message, to search for wisdom.
Now, Dr al-Habash is also a Syrian MP and it may be that he's telling me what he thinks I want to hear,
but it sounds sincere enough.
Our message is God created all of humanity.
All of humanity are like one family.
This is a family of God.
We believe God is one,
but his names are many.
Reality is one, but its ways are many.
There is something in al-Habash's open-minded approach that recalls the Golden Age of Islam,
the intellectual adventurousness of the new dynasty that took over the leadership of the Muslims in 750.
They were called the Abbasids and they moved the centre
of gravity of Islam eastwards to a new-built city, Baghdad.
Baghdad was the major administrative and economic capital,
and cultural capital, and the intellectuals,
the thinkers resided there, and they were patronised by the State.
Scholars and artists and scientists could travel freely
across the territories that the Abbasids controlled, and they went
specifically to search for teachers.
So they were in pursuit of knowledge.
This is al-Azhar University, founded in 975 AD at a time when Oxford
was still a place where an ox forded a river.
While the people of Oxfordshire were living in huts of wattle and daub,
Arab scholars were poring over translations of the classics,
from Persian, Chinese, Sanskrit and, above all, from Greek.
Anything scientific or philosophical was preserved, studied, and then passed on round the Arab world,
through North Africa and back to Europe.
This second-hand learning apart, there were precious few contacts
between Muslims and Western European Christians.
In so far as the Europeans knew anything it was derived from the Arab sorties into their territory.
Some of the early western stereotypes of Muslims that resulted from these struggles
are still lurking in our collective unconscious, even now.
Within 80 years of the death of Mohammad, the Arabs landed in western Europe.
Here then was the beginning of a clash of civilisations and it took place in Spain.
I'm here in Tarifa, on the southernmost tip of the European continent.
Called after Tarif who came here in 710 on a reconnaissance mission.
A year later, they came back, mob-handed, captured the whole of Spain up to the Pyrenees
within seven years, and within about 20 years they're only a couple of hundred miles short of Paris itself.
Today, Tarifa is a kite-surfers' hangout.
And if you want to know why the wind is so strong, it's because this is the Atlantic coast.
The Arabs started at the Red Sea and within 80 years,
they'd come as far west as it's possible to go.
Or is it?
It was in 711 that a Moorish general, Tariq Ibn Ziyad, came here, and having given his
name to the rock of Gibraltar, Jabal Tariq,
he then urged his horse into the waves and cried,
"Unknown land to the West, if I could find thee, I would convert thee to the true faith."
Now that has to be one of the greatest "what ifs" of history.
Imagine if a Moorish general, and not a Spanish sponsored navigator,
had discovered the New World.
Instead, they pushed on north into France,
and in 733, there took place a battle
that has loomed large in the fevered imaginations of western Europeans.
Because it was only at Poitiers, less than 200 miles south of Paris,
that the Muslim armies were finally halted by Charles Martel.
For a long time, it was seen as the turning point of European destiny
and in the words of Gibbon,
"The Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates and the Arabian fleet
"might have sailed without a naval combat
"into the mouth of the Thames.
"Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford
"and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people
"the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad."
Now I'm a big fan of Edward Gibbon,
but is he still thought to be sound, 200 years on?
Myriam, tell me about the Battle of Poitiers.
I've always been told it was a real key moment
for the history of Europe.
Charles Martel, had he not won,
the whole of European history would have been different. Is that right?
No, it's not. That's not right? That's not right at all!
Wrong again! Yes, totally wrong.
In fact, this battle is one battle inside all the battles.
In fact, we are at the moment
when Muslims could not go further into the north.
You see, at that time, they began to be...
SHE SPEAKS FRENCH
To be beaten. Yes, they began to be beaten.
In fact there is Poitiers,
but there are all the battles. They were starting to lose anyway.
Exactly. You mean they were reaching the natural limits of their advance?
Yes, that is the idea. OK.
They had settled in Spain,
and also in the south of France,
so I think that they wanted to stay, they wanted to consolidate.
Consolidate that particular territory? Yes, what they had.
In France, Poitiers became part of a national myth as historians looked back at the 7th and 8th centuries
and concluded that this first clash between Islam and Christianity was genuinely decisive
in the creation of modern Europe
and in the destruction of the Ancient World.
For centuries, indeed, the greatest historical minds have puzzled
over why the Roman empire declined and fell in the first place.
In 1935, the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, supplied a revolutionary answer.
It wasn't the Germanic tribes who wrecked the unity of the Roman empire, said Pirenne. Oh, no.
They may have had wacky Germanic names like Gondebaud and Clodomir,
but they still used Roman coins,
they still spoke Latin of a kind, they still aspired to romanitas.
And in fact it wasn't, said Pirenne, until the middle
of the seventh century when suddenly, the Arabs arrived.
And with lightning speed,
they swept through some of the richest territories of the old Roman empire.
And it was then, he said, that the economic unity of the Roman system was destroyed, and the sweet, slow,
sunset of the Roman empire gave way to the Middle Ages.
And instead of a great whole, you had
two opposed civilisations with little understanding of each other,
and not even much interest in each other.
What is so sad is that the same could still be said today.
Let's look at Spain, where the Moors, as the Arabs here were known, were established for 900 years
and where the glories of medieval Muslim and Jewish culture
are still five star items on the tourist trail.
Here's Maimonides, the Jewish sage, born in Cordoba,
the foremost doctor of his age, a polymath
whose career was only made possible by the Muslim Enlightenment.
Though his toe is still stroked by reverential tourists,
and though this very flamenco music may have Muslim roots,
there are some Spaniards who are a little resentful
of the touristic obsession with Spain's Moorish past.
Take the Great Mosque at Cordoba.
You'll find plenty of Spaniards keen to point out that it's now
a Roman Catholic cathedral, built on the site of an even earlier
Christian church, dating from the time of the Visigoths,
whom the Moors had superseded.
And somehow that misses the point - that this mosque
is one of the most extraordinary religious buildings on Earth.
It's structures like this that gave medieval Cordoba
the name, "the Ornament of the World."
With its fountains, its thousands of libraries, its well-paved,
well-lit streets, it made places like London look, frankly, barbaric.
And 10th century observers came back stunned with tales of this city
of 900 baths and its library with 600,000 volumes
and everywhere, men devising new techniques for irrigation,
silk manufacture, algebra, astronomy,
before knocking off a quick lyric in which they likened their beloved to a pomegranate or a persimmon -
on the new paper they were introducing from Andalusia to the rest of Europe.
And if they were really lucky, the visitors might be admitted
to the enchanted world of Madinat al-Zahra,
a 10th century summer palace built by the Muslim caliph of Cordob
and still being excavated today.
This is only a tiny fraction of the 112 acre,
10th century Muslim Versailles,
complete with bowery nooks, and fragrant jasmine-scented walks.
And if you're asking yourself why the caliph built this here on the hill overlooking Cordoba,
it wasn't just because it was cooler,
or because they could make use of the running water.
It was so that the people for miles around could see this
great white city, this symbol of Muslim power and luxury.
In fact, the whole thing was so deeply civilised that recent
commentators have been tempted to idealise Moorish al-Andalus.
They have seen it as a social paradise, a lost Eden in which Moors, Jews and Christians
lived in the kind of perfect harmony you associate
with a glutinous song by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder.
They call it "convivencia" -
living together.
Western historians have long had a tendency to idealise al-Andalus,
Muslim Spain, as a kind of dream world.
A happy community of poets and scholars
with women's writing circles,
and important astronomical discoveries, as though 10th century Cordoba offered a beacon of hope
to us from 1,000 years ago,
about how Christians and Muslims can still live together happily.
And yet, of course, it wasn't quite really like that.
What sticks in the mind is not just the occasional persecutions in which
both sides indulged, it's the stand-offishness of one religious community toward the other.
The lack of interest. The refusal properly to mix.
Convivencia may have meant living next to each other,
but it wasn't a multicultural melting pot.
For one thing, the Arab overlords conducted their usual policies of
discrimination against the non-Muslims in their midst.
They had to accept second class citizenship.
They had disadvantages, like not being able
to hold power offices.
They could not be superior to Muslims in any way.
Say, to have a Muslim slave, was impossible.
Whereas a Muslim could have Christian slaves, or Jewish slaves.
And were they encouraged to convert to Islam?
Yes, they were. There was a proselytising process in all the areas conquered by the Muslims.
Of course, the Muslims
thought that the rest of the people were wrong in their beliefs.
And so, they wanted the rest of the population to become Muslim.
But there was no compulsion.
No compulsion, perhaps, but plenty of common sense reasons to get with the winners.
Gradually, al-Andalus became mostly Muslim.
And even the Christians who maintained their faith became thoroughly Arabised.
They were called Mozarabs, wannabe Arabs.
These very reduced Christian minorities were also losing Latin,
because of the pressure of Arabic on them.
So, for instance, we have that by the 10th century in Cordoba,
for instance, the gospels were being translated into Arabic.
That's amazing. The psalms were also being translated into Arabic.
Into Arabic? Yes, because the Christians were losing Latin.
For some Christians,
this inexorable Arabisation was a cause of deep dismay.
By 850, some Cordoban Christians could take it no more.
Take the case of Isaac, who turned up one day
at the office of the qadi, the local religious chief,
and announced that he wanted to become a Muslim.
The qadi instructed Isaac in Islam, at which point Isaac flabbergasts
the qadi by insulting Muhammad and abusing Islam.
The qadi, of course, strikes Isaac.
Isaac then says, "How dare you strike a face that resembles the image of God?"
The qadi gives him one last chance -
Are you drunk, having a bad day, something going wrong at home? Is there anything I can do?
And Isaac says, no, no, no, he's absolutely determined to die for Christianity.
Which, of course, he duly does.
In a 9 year period, 47 further Christian martyrs followed Isaac's lead.
We interpret this movement
of the so-called voluntary martyrs as a movement of frustration from
people who were losing their social power at that time here in Cordoba.
Because the rate of conversion was so high that these people just couldn't
stand the idea that Christianity was becoming a minority religion.
So it was a kind of desperate movement in desperate circumstances.
Now, there's no real analogy between the Cordoba martyrs
and the Muslim suicide bombers of today -
the Christians didn't set out to kill innocent people.
But the two groups are alike in at least one respect.
I think the kind of spectacular terrorism we are seeing in the Islamic world is very much,
in my interpretation, very much a product of a sense of desperation.
Rather than of self-confidence.
All other means have been used, and there's nothing left except
this kind of destructive, spectacular terrorism.
In the history of Spain,
religious communities have taken it in turn to suffer despair.
First the Christians experienced the erosion of their religious
and cultural identity and responded with fanatical protest.
Then it was the turn of the Jews and the Muslims, expelled in the 1600s.
And under the Catholic monarchs and General Franco,
it was the Muslim contribution that was airbrushed out
of history, and Catholicism became a state-sponsored religion.
I was born in a generation, under the Franco regime,
where everybody was forced to be Catholic.
When any other religion,
different from Catholicism, was forbidden.
And even you could go into prison if you have any outward manifestation of any other religion.
Even today, when Spain's Muslim heritage generates so many millions of tourist dollars, you can detect
a certain local sniffiness about our Moorish obsessions.
"Don't forget the Visigoths", they cry,
and they point to the few defaced lumps that remain from the era
of the Christian barbarians,
as though the 900-year Arab presence was a kind of aberration.
THEY SPEAK LOCAL LANGUAGE
You think much of the culture is Islamic?
No! No?
No! No, no, no!
It derives from the ancient Visigoth,
from the ancient Christian culture?
Yes. Here, the Visigoths and in the North, the Celtic.
The sheer ignorance that exists in this country about Islam
and about the Islamic past, I mean, that's a pity.
It's surprising to what extent people ignore the richness
of the Islamic civilisation in this country.
People want to somehow stress this Visigothic heritage,
but obviously, the Visigothic heritage is, I mean...
It's pretty difficult to work out what it is.
It's pretty difficult to work it out, yeah.
Many people are proud of the Moorish past.
But that's not to say they look forward to a Moorish future.
We make the difference. Not we, but people in general,
make this difference that the Alhambra was made for
another Moorish people, but not this Moorish people right now.
Not the Moroccans who come and live in modern Granada. Exactly.
The illegal ones. Maybe they have a problem with these people. It's a question of patriotism.
People think Spain is, like, my country. Mi Corazon.
And they want very white and perfect people.
They don't want no Muslim or not anyone to come here.
But maybe half of Spain thinks that it's all right, and the other half
of Spain is like, afraid of this. Maybe they're just scared.
The Spanish are, of course, not alone in suffering from the odd bout of racism or xenophobia.
But if you put the Spanish nation on the psychoanalyst's couch,
it's easy to see how history has conditioned their subconscious.
It is a history of bloody battles between Moor and Christian.
The Christian kings in the north were increasingly warlike and their determination to repel the invader
was fuelled by an increasingly religious fervour, which made life
tricky for the Christians still in Moorish territory in al-Andalus.
Even though legally speaking, they had the same status as Jews,
they were never considered the same as Jews
because they were a fifth column.
They were a military threat?
They could be in contra, they could be spies, they could be seen as
spies or people who had alliances with the Christians of the North.
And yet, it wasn't the Christians
who destroyed this palace of flowers, Madinat al-Zahra, in 1010.
It was Muslim Berber tribesmen.
And this Muslim civil war gave the Christians their chance.
After centuries on the back foot,
Christians were advancing in Spain,
Sicily had been recaptured for the cross,
and now Christian eyes were turning east as they contemplated
a grandiose plan of reconquest.
The Crusades.
Now, it would be fair to say that in the West
these days the word "Crusade",
does not carry its full weight as an unrelenting military operation
actuated by specifically Christian fervour.
For instance, the other day, I heard a colleague of mine call for a "crusade"
to ensure that rubbish skips were installed with flashing lights as well as reflective signs.
I can't imagine that 1,000 swords are going to leap from their scabbards to fight for that one.
And yet when George Bush called for a "crusade" after 9/11,
he started a global panic, because he seemed to be alluding backwards to an epoch
in which Christians fought Muslims, and Muslims fought Christians,
for the sake of religion,
and sometimes for the sake of religion alone.
It began in 1095
with the most bellicose Christian sermon of all time.
Pope Urban II appeared before a vast crowd in Clermont, France,
and called for an armed pilgrimage
against the Muslims in the Holy Land, the place the Muslims had conquered 400 years earlier.
And you may wonder how western Europe plucked up the courage to challenge Muslim supremacy.
On the face of it, we've got a mystery.
For centuries, the Arab world has been firing on all cylinders.
They've been charting the heavens, investigating the circulation of the blood,
and cracking complicated algebraic equations, and they've been
full of intellectual and military confidence, while western Europe
has been sunk in lethargy -
a world of stumbling ox carts and mumbling monks and homicidal popes.
And yet it's western Christendom
that manages to shake itself out of its lethargy, and mount these extraordinary expeditions.
It's partly a function of the relative unity of the two civilisations.
At the height of their powers in the 9th and 10th centuries,
the Muslims were united, but western Europe
was plagued by the feudal system,
with power contested between barons and counts and lords.
Jonathan, you know that film Pulp Fiction, where this guy
called Marcellus says "I'm going to get medieval on your ass"?
And that immediately connotes
ideas of barbarity and violence and very, very nasty practices.
Is that fair on the Middle Ages?
It is, and it isn't. Violence is a very clear and powerful feature of 11th and 12th century Europe.
The reason why it's such a violent society is that order has broken down.
You've got these small lordships, castellans, and these guys are laws unto themselves.
They can charge around attacking peasants, churches, the vulnerable, the weak.
They take money from them, they take their cattle, their crops and they enrich themselves.
At this stage, the popes in Rome were happily
assassinating each other like minor characters from the Sopranos.
But as the 11th century progressed,
the Catholic hierarchy began to get its act together.
The Church decides it has a moral responsibility to do something about this.
It needs to try and steer its flock, if you like, in a better moral direction - violence is bad.
And so one of the things it tries to do is initiate something called the Peace of God.
And what this is, is the Church telling and making knights and people in society swear on an oath
that they will not harm certain groups of people.
The poor, or churchmen. Or the Truce of God.
That for certain periods of time, there will be no violence.
So one of the things it's got to stop people doing is sinning.
And what was the Church's main weapon in the fight against sin?
The promise of eternal damnation, everlasting torment.
And we're not just talking about Heathrow on a bank holiday.
As we can see from this famous carving in Moissac in south-west France.
Now, when did you last hear a Christian mainstream cleric
warn his congregation that they were going to fry in hell?
Is there anyone in the Church of England who still believes in
the great crimson, licking tongues of hellfire,
with grinning demons toasting your spleen on forks?
The last pronouncement I heard from the Church of England was
that even if hell does exist, there may be no-one in it.
Compare that feeble, milky theology
with the genuine terror in the hearts of 12th century Europe.
Look at Luxuria here, the Wages of Sin.
Her breasts have been devoured by serpents, and a toad wreaking some unmentionable vengeance.
We find it difficult to think ourselves back into the minds
of people who were genuinely terrified of hell.
And yet for a medieval churchman, that terror was full of political possibility.
"O peccatores transmutetis nisi mores iudicium durum vobis scitote futurum."
Oh, sinners, unless you shape up, something nasty is going to happen to you.
That was the gist of what the priest said.
Sin was a powerful tool of religious and political control
because the Church could decide what constituted a sin.
And the Church could let you off.
As we'll see, this once in a lifetime chance
to Get Out Of Hell Free was a crucial component in the Crusades.
To see how sin was used to order medieval society,
I've come to the French village of Conques.
Here's the famous tympanum, giving it the full medieval monty.
There's heaven, on one side, painted blue.
And Hell, replete with ghastly torments, painted red, on the other.
This is a portrait, not just of the hereafter,
but of the hopes and fears of medieval Christian society.
It's a hellfire sermon in stone, isn't it?
It is. It's a cartoon with words and pictures.
And in the middle, you've got Christ in majesty, delivering the Last Judgement.
If you end up on the wrong side,
you get pushed through the jaws of hell. There.
An enormous creature with a pair of feet disappearing down its mouth.
Great big dog in a kennel.
You have to admit that hell is more interesting to look at.
There's a heck of a lot more going on.
But it's the peace, the calm, and the order that people
are aspiring to, that the church is trying to direct them to.
There's so little of that in their disordered, violent, medieval lives? Yeah, exactly.
The genius of Urban II in 1095 is to come up with the idea of the Crusade.
Men who'd been sinning all their lives through these misdeeds
that we can see, through this penitential act -
taking the cross and going to the Holy Land, will get remission of all their sins. Bingo!
The slate will be wiped clean.
Pope Urban's masterstroke was to solve two problems at once.
To export the violence of the troublesome medieval knights out of Europe, and to strengthen
to power of the papacy as the leader of the Western Christian Church on the other.
He had the idea that if Christians
from the West could go to Jerusalem
to free Christians from the East
from the dominations of Muslims in general,
so he could recreate the unity of the world.
The unity of the Roman world, as it was. How amazing.
So that was part of his conception?
He was sure that he was the only one
who could rule over Christendom.
And also the Pope in the Middle Ages,
in the centre of the Middle Ages, had become a prince.
It was one thing for the Pope to send out crusaders to capture the Holy Places.
It was quite another to hold onto them.
When Urban II makes his speech at Clermont, he promises the crusaders "the land of milk and honey".
And what he's doing there
is being realistic.
OK, they've got to go for the right reason, the religious intention, cleansing Jerusalem and all that.
But he's not stupid. Because of course,
if they do that, then all come home, it's pointless, self-evidently.
Some people have got to stay, and they will be promised that land.
Add to this the long-lasting Christian antipathy towards Muslims,
and a powerful resentment of their occupying Jerusalem, and you have
a recipe for the extraordinary combination of pilgrimage
plus violence that was the Crusades.
Some 60,000 persons set off for the Holy Land.
Not only knights, but also peasants, preachers and assorted misfits.
The main body of knights arrived in Constantinople in July 1096.
Three years later, after a long series of arduous and bloody sieges,
they arrived in Jerusalem.
Here they slaughtered between 20,000 and 30,000 people -
Jews as well as Muslims.
It's not surprising, then, that for many Muslims today,
the Crusades are seen as an ominous symbol of Western aggression.
Some people say that the Crusades have never ended.
And yet in the West, they've tended to be seen either as
a glorious adventure or an admirable religious sacrifice, or both.
The way the Crusades are viewed by many in the Muslim world today
is at the heart of the current crisis.
To understand why,
we need to see these struggles in their true context.
In the next programme,
I want to look at the impact of those Crusades on the Muslim world,
and I also want to look at the way that word has become, today,
even more menacing to the Muslim mind than it was 1,000 years ago.
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