ISLAM AND CHRISTENDOM

There is a section of Western Europe, of the Western Roman Empire, which suffered a peculiar fate. It was deeply wounded by Asia, and but slowly recovered from the wound. The period of Asia’s dominance is already half forgotten among the Northern peoples—it is a story of so long ago; and it seems done with. Yet indirectly the great struggle between Islam and Christendom is still moulding all our lives. Half the wealth and half the classical tradition of the Mediterranean were swamped by the enemies of our culture and of our European soul; half our civilisation was drowned under a Mohammedan deluge. The land of St. Augustine, the land of Meleager, the land of the Iliad, and the land of the Incarnation. The surge overran the islands of the sea—Sicily, the Balearics, and the rest; it roared up to the very foothills of the Pyrenees, its furthest foam passed Poitiers, and it looked for some hundreds of years as though the old and strong foundation which Greece and Rome had laid, and our Christendom which is their flower and fruit, would be destroyed.

The assault was sudden, and immensely successful; the counter-attack abominably painful, strenuous, uncertain, only most gradually making good. The Asiatics charged in one long lifetime over all the marble of the ancient world in North Africa, in Spain; cut off the great roads and the secure Roman law, and the landed system, and everything else that had made Europe Europe. But to reconquer even part of that land, to beat Islam back to the desert again upon even one sector has taken a thousand years.

Spain was recovered, in countless fluctuating cavalry charges, advances and checks, sieges, and raids: the islands, in daring sea adventures; Barbary—what to-day we call Tunis, Algiers and Morocco—only in our own time. To-day we look on the result of these struggles much as a man looks upon the wreckage revealed at low water upon a seashore flooded and wrecked at high tide under a storm.

In that enormous conflict the Europe we know was born. Out of the discipline of that conflict arose our military spirit, our loyalties, and our ballads. This beating back of the Mohammedan was the training ground of all our peoples Northern as well as Southern—for the recruits poured in from every side. It was in the heat of such a furnace, in the press of the Crusades, that we found our characteristic architecture, which has stamped all Europe with the pointed arch, our representative system (now in decay)—for parliaments are from the Pyrenees—our national monarchies, and that common loyalty to Europe which is to-day half forgotten, but which any menace immediately revives.

Any one who looks at the history of Christendom sees this armed debate with Islam as the fundamental and determining thing. We beat off the Pagan of the North and of the East—Mongol, Scandinavian and the rest—in the Dark Ages. We assured ourselves on that side, and we had raised the siege against those barbaric besiegers before the year 1000. We had beaten them to their knees in battle; tamed them and baptised them; brought them to heel and to school. But Islam was another matter. It was not pagan; it was a perversion of our own creed. It was not barbaric; it had more learning and better arts than we. It enjoyed our scholarship through its Greek subjects, and lived by a strange, warped adaptation of our own culture. Its fierce appeal to human equality and to justice, the simplicity of its doctrine, had captured great masses of our own people who continued to work for it and to support it.

The recovery of provinces lost to so powerful an enemy occupied the energies of Christian men for thirty generations; nor is their task yet accomplished.

In this struggle the combatants upon both sides of the Mediterranean were for a time exhausted. The extreme north, which had taken but little part in the tremendous affair, had the advantages of a half-neutral; it lost less blood, and could boast on that account greater reserves of energy, which it still enjoys. But those who had been on the fighting line of the struggle achieved that by which we live. The men who recovered Spain and Sicily and the Balearics, who perpetually challenged the pirate ports of Barbary, who stood to arms, century after century, upon the fluctuating frontier between the Mass and the Koran—these were the men who not only permitted Europe to survive, but who gave it its permanent character.

The belt which they recovered, which they reconquered, bears everywhere stamped upon it the signs of this millenary battle. Thus, there has been a destruction of trees in all that zone. Islam was the enemy of the tree. Where the Mohammedan conquest remained there was no re-afforesting; the wood was cut down and not replaced. A sort of bareness, which is like a phantasm of the desert, stretches to this day over all those lands which the great Mohammedan tide submerged; and it is now with difficulty and most painfully, tardily, insufficiently that Europe is attempting to re-afforest those lands which were so shaded and full of pasture in the great classic times.

You may stand on the mountain walls of Castro Giovanni in Sicily and look down, half a mile below, upon the fields where the King of the Dark Places surprised Persephone. Those fields were famous for their groves and their flowers in the old time; to-day you have nothing before you and below you but the burned and naked earth.

The tide of alien conquest makes a sort of high-water mark all along the Mediterranean lands; a line to be traced by the ruin of the greenery and by the incursion everywhere up to its limits of the blasting, southern, desert air.

But there is much more than this to mark the battlefield. Throughout that world you may discover, in a myriad details of human effort, the three great strata remaining.

First comes that of the old Mediterranean civilisation from which we all descend, the Roman and Greek world. The columns of its temples, the tiers of its amphitheatres, the great flags of its roads, the Roman-Greek town with its forum, the Roman or Greek name degraded and transformed: all are there.

Next above come the centuries of Islam; the Mosque and the minaret, the bulging dome, the waisted horseshoe arch, all that Islam adapted from the later Greek world and touched with its own spirit; the perpetual intricacy of pattern, the vivid delicacy of colour, the worship of seclusion and silence.

Then you get the last, superimposed, layer of Europe returning. Our Gothic in the place of their horseshoe arch, our Roman script in the place of their Arabic script, which is but debased Greek, our masterful stonework in the place of their weak plaster, our permanence in the place of their ephemeral though burning moods. You get the cathedral of Palma in Majorca, standing out like a fortress into the sea; or the cathedral of Seville, perhaps the noblest of human achievements, still overlooking that Moorish court which was the entry to the Mosque the Christian church has replaced.

Indeed, the Giralda, the Bell Tower of Seville, is the very symbol of the combat and victory. The main shaft was of Islam. I have already written of its counterpart which still stands over the sea in Morocco by Rabat, called there ‘the Tower of Hassan.’ But the Giralda bears a Christian top, and is the belfry of that cathedral which is the greatest monument we have in Christendom, of Christendom, to-day.

From the victory of Lepanto onwards you get the recovery of the Roman and the Greek spirit in the lines of stone impressed upon the Mohammedan detail beneath, and at last, all our modern grandeurs and folly of ironwork, of great ports thrusting long arms into the sea, of solid, dull, official buildings; our machines, our roads, our commerce, out vices and our triumphs, are now imposed upon that which once had so nearly defeated us. Rome has taken root again from Carthage to the Atlantic.

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Therein lies the profound appeal of all the recovered country and its towns. In Palermo, in Palma, in the ruined Roman towns of Timgad, Lamboesis, Volubilis, Leptis and a score of others; in the still continuing towns such as Constantine; in the transformed old centres such as Sousse, you see before your eyes in a vividly apparent pattern the interweaving of those three great epochs of our race. You have present to the sight that antiquity wherein the Christian church was founded; then the new, thin, piercing spirit of the Mohammedan horseman; then the re-entry of Europe.

It is in the buildings, the dress, the very animals, the landscape, is that triple contrast, that triple stratification. Nowhere else in the world, I think, does history still remain alive, so tangible, visible: two thousand years of it.

You stand on the huge stones of a coliseum at sunrise, seeing nothing but the mass of an enormous Roman theatre, and between you and the sky only distant, burning, white mountains and the flats of the sea. You turn, and at your side is the costume of Islam; you walk into the evening and find yourself in the modern French streets of Tunis.

In succeeding chapters I will discuss this land that Islam has dominated, picking out particular points where a man may see, side by side, the three eras of our race; its founding, its peril, and its triumph.

So strong still is the subtle remaining influence of Islam, that you find it far up north, in a wall of Tarragona, in the gateway of a Saragossan building, in a popular word of the Pyrenees. So enduring is the older Roman foundation which we, its descendants, have restored, that you may watch the Mohammedan peasant in his market bargaining in the Arabic words of the old invasion, but using in his talk the terms of the French currency and of French weights and measures of to-day; and that market is held in the forum of a Roman town, with the pillars of the temples of the gods overlooking the Berber as he moves. He drives his cattle to market by great roads which modern Europe has made, he registers his purchase in the European offices of the new governors. If he is well-to-do he drives off home in one of those new horseless machines of ours. But at sunset, he lifts up his hands in prayer from his fields, a ritual of Islam.

In those towns where the religion of Islam has at last died—the Spanish, the Sicilian, the Balearic towns—yet is the spirit of Islam chiselled and carved in everywhere, marking the whole.

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In the countrysides where the Mohammedan conquest was complete, the majestic ruins of the Roman World stand clearest. There is nothing of classic antiquity more living than these still remaining colonnades, triumphal arches, aqueducts, theatres; Segovia, Cherchell, El Djem. It is more arresting to see these survivals of Rome on the African and Spanish soil than in northern Italy or Provence, in Verona, or in Pola, or in Nîmes; for in Africa and Spain the Roman ruins were not cherished by a continuous culture. They survive as heroic veterans which stood the storm and outlived it until the descendants of their builders returned.