May religions perish of disease or only by violence? If by disease, what are its symptoms and its causes? How many diseases are there which in the past have proved fatal to religions? Are the symptoms of any of these diseases to be found in any of the present religions of the world? Are they to be found in our own?
—James Bissett Pratt
Responding to a threat of persecution, sixteenth-century Protestant Theodore Beza urged a foe to “remember that the Church is an anvil that has worn out many a hammer.” The history of all the great world faiths proves that religions are highly resilient, and difficult to eradicate. History is littered with false claims about the imminent deaths of religions, claims that in retrospect make almost comic reading. The first known contemporary reference to the Jewish people is an Egyptian inscription boasting that “Israel is laid waste: his seed is no more.” Mark Twain remarked on how often the world had turned out for the burial of Roman Catholicism, only to find it postponed yet again, “on account of the weather or something…. Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.”1
Faiths are dynamic, and periods of difficulty or persecution can have the effect of forcing believers to delve into the rich diversity of traditions they have evolved over thousands of years. Usually, they find at least some ideas and practices that prove effective in adapting to the new world, and that can in fact provide the foundation for significant revival. In the 1790s, Europe’s Catholic churches suffered a fearsome encounter with Enlightenment thought and revolutionary politics, a near-terminal crisis that was followed within a generation by the rise of an aggressively self-confident Catholic revival. Fifty years ago, most observers felt that the historical currents sweeping the Islamic world surely portended the rapid fading of that religion, at least as a relevant political force; and that seeming obliteration preceded the modern-day Islamic revival.
To varying degrees, all the great religions have scriptural resources that allow them to explain defeat, disaster, and persecution; catastrophe can even strengthen these religions in the long term. Moreover, although religions might weaken over time, and might drift toward secularism and indifference, such trends do not in themselves become sufficient to drive a religion out of existence. While some forms of faith, some denominations, might enter terminal crisis, their decline is compensated by the rise of other Christian traditions better able to adjust to changing circumstances. Even in a highly secular culture such as contemporary Europe, at least a minority will try to return to the fundamentals of the religion as they understand it, so that we see an upsurge of evangelical and charismatic groups and other neotraditional movements. Nothing so clearly indicates the imminent revival of a religion as a rising torrent of prophecies about its demise.2
On occasion, though, religions certainly do die, or at least vanish utterly from regions that they once dominated, and no great religion has proved immune from such localized disasters. As we have seen, all the world’s religions have at some point been excluded from some once-cherished homeland, however abundant the phantoms they leave behind. If Christianity has suffered more frequently from such amputations than other faiths, that just reflects its more ambitious global reach: it usually had more to lose. The frequency of religious elimination is all the more impressive when we realize how sturdy faith traditions are, and how often they have defied seemingly deadly enemies. Why, then, should attempts at destruction succeed on some occasions rather than others? And how far do religions make blunders that contribute to their own demise? Are faiths killed, or do they die?
States and Nations
Based on the experiences of Christianity through history, we must stress the primary role of the state in the elimination of churches and communities. Alliances with states pose many dilemmas for religious traditions, especially those that, like Christianity, are suspicious of worldly authority; but such a political linkage might have been the only way of surviving through the long ages when all states had some religious affiliation, and did their best to promote particular faiths. Certainly by the sixteenth century, the overwhelming majority of the world’s Christians lived in Christian states, and most of them on the European continent, where networks of Christian nations could provide mutual support and defense. Christians might bemoan the persistence of church-state affiliations, but without such alliances there might today be no Christians left to experience those regrets. Otherwise, Christianity might be a footnote in Islamic or Chinese history textbooks, alongside Manichaeanism. Conversely, lack of political power potentially posed a lethal danger when the state was in the hands of a rival determined to reshape culture to institutionalize its own ways of belief and practice. Powerlessness placed intolerable burdens upon the churches, forcing them to make daily compromises while offering rich rewards for apostasy.
This political element forced Christian churches to make difficult decisions. As state protection was so critical to the survival and influence of a faith, it was desirable to make political allies. Yet at the same time, a church that allied with the wrong nation or faction could make its own position much worse as it became identified with the wrong side. This is what happened with those Christians in Mesopotamia and China who came to be seen as tools of the Mongol conquerors. Japanese Christians were targeted as potential allies of European imperialism; Latin Christians in the Levant, as the advance guard of the crusader movement.
This emphasis on state power may seem surprising if only on the grounds of plausibility. At least before modern times, few states possessed the organized strength and willpower to mobilize the kind of long-term enterprise that could annihilate a minority religion. Also, as we have seen, all but the most intolerant Muslim societies had a notional commitment to tolerating the existence of Christian and Jewish populations. Yet somehow the old Christian world of the Middle East and North Africa become the core of dar al-Islam.
The severity of persecution or enforcement varied over time but was at its worst when an established religion faced a real or perceived danger to its own existence. When such threats did occur, even premodern states could mobilize significant resources against minorities that were seen as allies of external enemies: at least in their rhetoric, ethnic and religious persecutions are usually defensive in nature. The worst period for Middle Eastern Christians followed the social and religious revolution introduced by the Mongol regime in the thirteenth century; and the later Japanese state faced a genuine threat from predatory European colonial powers. In such circumstances, states launched brutal and enduring persecutions, which over decades or centuries could not fail to take their effect. The question of time frame is also important. Although Communist regimes devastated churches and other religious bodies, they had only a few decades to impose their will. In contrast, Christian communities suffered sporadic persecutions over many centuries. Rare indeed is the religion that can withstand a full thousand years of extreme maltreatment.
In considering the role of violence, we would not have to assume that massacres and pogroms need be frequent or regular, or indeed that they need occur more than once every generation or so. Although not necessarily frequent, such outbreaks leave memories that create a pervasive atmosphere of intimidation. These memories instruct the minority community about their inferior status and the vital necessity of not overstepping proper bounds. We might draw an analogy to the effects of race riots and lynchings in the American South before the civil rights era, when sporadic incidents combined to institutionalize fear and submission among African Americans. The difference, of course, between the racial example and the religious is that members of minority faiths always had the option of escaping their lot by conversion, and over time, an ever-greater number took this course.
We also see what we might call a ratchet effect, taking the name of the mechanical device that limits movement to only one direction. For Christians under Muslim rule (and for Jews in Christian Europe), the minority community could expect to exist for decades or even centuries without the outbreak of major violence or persecution, even though petty restrictions and insults were commonplace. On occasion, though, large-scale persecution erupted in response to some natural cataclysm, or to the rise of a particularly zealous regime. Following such an event, the minority community would be reduced or scattered still further, and the survivors of the shrinking minority could then expect peace until the next cycle of intolerance began. The ratchet turned another notch, and the minority moved closer to ultimate elimination or exile.
Beyond Persecution
Even more important than individual acts of intimidation was the long-term process of demographic restructuring and population transfer that states could and did organize. Throughout history, demography has played a crucial role in the rise and fall of religions, and in modern times differential birthrates do much to explain the shift of Christian numbers to the global South. In the Middle East also, higher education and better access to contraception have resulted in Christian communities having much lower birthrates than Muslim neighbors, so that Christians have progressively lost their share of population. Even in the contemporary United States, some believe that differential birthrates go far to explaining the decline of liberal mainline denominations and the growth of evangelical churches.
In earlier times, migration played a much greater role than birthrates in altering the balance between religions, and governments did much to manipulate migration trends. In some cases, as in twelfth-century Spain, this involved population transfers deliberately aimed at undermining religious minorities, and Muslim rulers were particularly anxious to remove Christian populations from the Arabian Peninsula. Over time, though, immigration proved at least as important to religious change as was deportation. Successive governments brought in Muslims to outnumber Christians, and imported Berbers to use against restive Arabs. From the earliest days of the Muslim expansion, new regimes sponsored the migration of Arab and Muslim peoples into what had been Coptic or Syriac territories, reducing the relative power of older-stock populations and their cultures—and their faiths. Over time, intermarriage with these newer groups helped push older families toward accepting Islam. While many native Egyptians did accept Islam on its merits, the presence of these new populations contributed mightily to giving Egypt the strongly Muslim coloring that we find by the late Middle Ages. Between the ninth century and the eleventh, Sicily was another recipient of heavy Arab and Berber immigration.3
In Asia Minor, too, Islam grew after 1200 by means of the immigration of new Turkish populations with their different social and economic structures, not dependent on the traditional urban systems. Often, they moved into lands vacated by older-stock people (mainly Greeks) fleeing the constant warfare. As in Egypt or Mesopotamia, Asia Minor gained a Muslim majority less by forcing existing residents to convert than by importing Muslim populations. As Turkish populations reached a critical mass, the remaining old-stock communities no longer needed to conduct their dealings in Greek and to keep up Greek lifestyles and aspirations. Christianity became marginalized. So successful were these policies in Asia Minor that the Turks used a similar immigration strategy to remodel the Balkans in the Muslim image. Inevitably, the Greek counterattack against Turkish Muslim influence during the 1820s brutally targeted these imported communities.4
The fact that a particular faith enjoyed established status also permitted it to withstand disasters that annihilated subordinate religions. Premodern societies occasionally suffered disasters on a scale that modern observers find difficult to contemplate. We think of the destruction wrought by warfare in medieval Asia Minor, the catastrophic impact of the Mongol or Timurid invasions, or the great plagues of the fourteenth century. To find modern parallels, we would have to look to the destruction and social dislocation experienced by Europe by 1945, with the difference that medieval societies could expect no assistance from benevolent external powers: there would be no Marshall Plan.
War and plague would have a similar impact on all religious communities, but only the dominant faith could expect official assistance in reconstructing, in rebuilding structures, reestablishing networks of clergy and charitable institutions. Consider, for instance, the devastation that plague wrought in the structures of the Christian churches of France and England, which suffered long vacancies in bishoprics and other offices. These effects were not repaired for decades, but at least the Christian state and Christian patrons were ultimately there to rebuild, which was not the case for Nestorians in Mesopotamia or Copts in Egypt. Subordinate faiths were all the more likely to be crippled by general disasters if, as so often happened, minority believers had been blamed for the catastrophes, if they were punished as allies of the external attackers or as agents spreading plague.5
Over time, the fact that a given religion held power in a particular state was likely to mean an ever-growing numerical majority for that faith, due in part to population changes, voluntary or otherwise. And when states following rival ideologies came into conflict, they made life ever more difficult for minorities by penalizing internal dissenters. Dominance reinforces dominance.
The Power of Islam
Throughout history, Christianity has found Islam to be its most persistent and, often, most successful rival. Quite setting aside the issue of violence and coercion, Muslim regimes over the centuries succeeded wonderfully in creating societies and cultures that exercised overwhelming pressures toward religious conformity, in establishing the faith of Muhammad as the natural default religion, which permeated the whole of culture. Full membership of society was open only to Muslims, while all others faced burdens of varying intensity. Islamic regimes first created a society in which being Muslim was natural, meant being part of the social and cultural mainstream; and then built a world in which being a Christian or Jew consigned one to the status of a despised outsider.
In understanding the appeal of Islam, we should not focus just on the negative burdens imposed on unbelievers. In any society, powerful forces draw subject peoples to assimilate to the ways of their masters. As the fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun observed, “The vanquished always want to imitate the victor in his distinctive marks, his dress, his occupation, and all his other conditions and customs.” Yet the cost was potentially immense, as “a nation that has been defeated and comes under the rule of another nation will quickly perish.”6 The Muslim message was all the stronger because of its profoundly attractive theme of brotherhood, of bringing all believers together into a new human family. This message carried special weight during times of social turmoil, when existing structures were under severe stress.
Outside this family, though, nonmembers faced real difficulties. Even under fairly tolerant regimes, rival religions were strictly limited in their activities, in ways that had a painful impact on Christians who had enjoyed preferential status for several centuries. Clarence Darrow famously noted that the great lesson he had learned in his life was that “[e]very advantage in the world goes with power.” Historically, much of that advantage involved the control of the built environment, of the cityscape. Under Muslim rule, churches were tightly constrained in their ability to project their presence physically into the landscape, by the public display of icons and images or statuary, by bell ringing or public processions. It was no longer possible to use the liturgy and the spectacular external decoration of church buildings to offer believers a taste of the ultimate. Even today, the lack of prominent structures or pageantry contributes to the Western neglect of Christian traditions in the Middle East: when painters or photographers or filmmakers wish to portray the region’s cities, they focus on dominant Islamic imagery—mosques and minarets. By implication, any Christian presence must be extraneous.7
Far from dominating and sanctifying the public landscape, as they might have done in Mediterranean countries a century ago, Christian structures and rituals were forced into varying degrees of concealment, which grew all the more discreet following waves of riot or violence. Over the centuries, for instance, Nestorians abandoned what had once been their common use of icons, and had few opportunities to use the wooden clappers they employed in place of bells. Nor, of course, could Christians do anything that might be interpreted as evangelizing among Muslims. Progressively reducing the conspicuous display of signs of faith reduced the number of reasons for minority believers to maintain their stubborn dissidence, and encouraged conformity.8
Just how thoroughly the different faiths internalized these restrictions is suggested by an almost comic incident narrated by the traveler Ibn Battuta, visiting a Genoese settlement in the Crimea about 1330. “We stayed at Kaffa in the mosque of the Muslims. An hour after our arrival we heard bells ringing on all sides. As I had never heard bells before, I was alarmed and made my companions ascend the minaret and read the Koran and issue the call to prayer.” They were stopped only by the intervention of fellow Muslims, who feared a religious civil war. But the initial statement is astonishing: in all his vast travels, Ibn Battuta had never heard church bells. The affair had clear symbolic implications. Cities could have a sound-scape based on the Muslim muezzin or Christian bells, but not both. Several times a day, the call to prayer sent a straightforward message about who held political power. In 1378, Egyptian authorities destroyed a church at the behest of a man who “had heard the sound of the wooden gongs with which, on the Friday night, announcement was made in that church”: the old church thereupon became the site of a mosque. When Al-Maqrizi described the crusader capture of coastal Palestinian towns in 1243, he particularly mentions their attempt to annex the sound waves: “They expelled Muslims from the mosque Aksa, made a church of it, and hung bells in the minaret.” So emotive was the battle between bells and muezzin that, when Greece was liberated in 1829, the first targets for destruction were the minarets that proclaimed Muslim hegemony every few hours.9
Control of the landscape involved positive steps as well as mere restrictions, as the official faith of a state decided who would receive the patronage needed to erect fine buildings and foster great art. In the first century after the Arab conquest, Muslims in Syria and Egypt lived in cities dominated visually by Christianity. Only gradually did wealth pour into the construction of mosques and minarets, great Muslim palaces and libraries. The need to challenge the Christian landscape was the explicit reason for building the Dome of the Rock, and other Muslim states soon followed suit. Egypt’s Ibn Tulun Mosque, completed in 879, covers a seven-acre complex. As the cathedrals and temples of Roman Africa decayed, there emerged a new sacred landscape centered on the splendid new mosque of Kairouan. These were the glories that struck the traveler approaching a city, not the discreet churches or synagogues. We can appreciate the power of such landmarks if we think of the prominent older features that strike us in a European medieval city, whether architectural or artistic—virtually all of which suggest a Christian background. In Islamic countries, by contrast, the city was just as assuredly Muslim space. Sacred buildings were still more dominant in smaller communities: again, think of the churches around which medieval villages clustered.10
Also over time, the dominant faith placed its imprint on the historical landscape beyond the cities. The Arab invaders entered a countryside signposted everywhere by churches and monasteries, by Roman and Byzantine remains. Many of these places were celebrated for the spiritual power believed to reside there, and became centers of pilgrimage that tied a particular locality into much wider webs of regional and international connections. Over the centuries, Muslims created their own landmarks, their own pilgrim shrines and historical monuments, which were scattered across all Muslim lands. The Mamluk dynasty (1250–1517), which so persecuted Christians, made heroic efforts to create a whole new landscape of Muslim devotion and pilgrimage, aimed especially perhaps at new converts. Everywhere, they built or restored many shrines, mosques, and madrassas. Just in and around Damascus,
one could visit a variety of shrines, many revered by Muslims and Christians alike: the Mosque of Moses’ Footprints, the birthplace of Abraham, the Cave of [Abel’s] Blood, Adam’s Cave, the Hunger Cave, the refuge of Mary and Jesus, Elias’ oratory, and the Cemetery of the Prophets. Within four miles of the city were the cemeteries of holy men and women and numerous mausolea of multifarious venerables, such as the founder of the Umayyad caliphate, Mu’awiyya, and his sister, Umm Habiba; various Companions of the Prophet…and “People of the House” of the Prophet (Umm Kulthum, Ali Talib’s daughter; the children of Hasan and Husayn, the sons of ‘Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet); the “Martyrs”…; Seth, Noah, and Moses; and numerous other luminaries.11
Nor were such centers exclusively religious in nature. Once, Christians knew Tikrit as the site of a great monastery and fine churches. From the twelfth century, though, it was famous as the birthplace of Saladin, and the modern city stands in Salah-ad-Din Province, which was named for him. In the thirteenth century, a mosque was built over the remains of the monastery.
Religious emblems also marked the coins that were the main tokens of official power that most people ever saw. From the end of the seventh century, Umayyad rulers began striking their own Islamic coins, marked with the Muslim profession of faith, while Byzantine coins were strictly proscribed. Public transactions involved these Muslim symbols, and never the cross-marked coins of Eastern Rome.
Muslim societies restructured everyday life so that at every point, the so-called Umaric code made ordinary lay unbelievers conscious of their inferior status, and of the severe limits imposed on their life-chances. Restraints became steadily tighter after the fourteenth century, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the source of horrifying injustice. One eighteenth-century Egyptian sheikh comprehensively listed the burdens that should be enforced upon non-Muslims:
They should not be allowed to clothe themselves in costly fabrics which have been cut in the modes which are forbidden to them, in order that they may not offend the sensibilities of poor Muslims…. They should not be permitted to employ mounts like the Muslims. They must use neither saddles, nor iron-stirrups, in order to be distinguished from the true believers. They must under no circumstance ride horses because of the noble character of this animal…. They are forbidden while going through the streets to ape the manners of the Muslims, and still less those of the cities of the religion. They shall only walk single-file, and in narrow lanes they must withdraw even more into the most cramped part of the road…. The absence of every mark of consideration toward them is obligatory for us; we ought never to give them the place of honor in an assembly when a Muslim is present. This is in order to humble them and to honor the true believers…. It is no longer permitted them to put themselves, with respect to their houses, on an equal footing with the dwellings of their Muslim neighbors, and still less to build their buildings higher.
Systematic discrimination limited the rights of non-Muslims in all their interactions with Muslims. In legal disputes, unbelievers could not testify against believers. One wrenching restriction involved the basic right of retaliation against insult, which was the basis of enforcement within a society founded on honor. The fact that non-Muslims were forbidden from responding accordingly against Muslims made life extraordinarily difficult. Persistent reminders of inferiority extended into everyday speech, where non-Muslims were forbidden from using the forms of speech reserved for the majority. Depending on the time and place, a Christian who used the greeting “Salaam aleikum” risked getting a beating or worse. Peace was reserved for brothers, for Muslim believers.12
These rules were not enforced universally, but they were certainly imposed at particular times and places. “As late as 1820, no Christian in Damascus could wear anything but black, or could ride a horse.” A nineteenth-century visitor to northwest Persia remarked that
[t]he Nestorian is not allowed a place in the bazaar; he cannot engage in commerce. And in the mechanic arts, he cannot aspire higher than the position of a mason or carpenter; which, of course, is not to be compared to the standing of the same trades among us. When our missionaries went to Urumia, a decent garment on a Nestorian was safe only as it had an outer covering of rags to hide it.13
Without an organized police force, Islamic states varied greatly in their enforcement of the various rules, but the idea of religious superiority became deeply ingrained within the Muslim community, so that clergy and ordinary believers often felt impelled to enforce proper standards. The obvious presence of deviants—of wealthy Christians riding horses, for example, or speaking and living like Muslims—always offered the potential for popular rabble-rousing. At such times, even tolerant states might feel the need to support persecution as a means of defending their power.
Over time, the pressures on Christian communities grew ever stronger as their faith moved ever closer to marginal status—a creed for the old and politically irrelevant. Such a perception would be all the stronger for the younger generation, who always had the ability to escape their disabilities by conversion.
The Language of Faith
Language was critically important to the religious transition. The rise of Islam meant not just the eclipse of Christianity but the near annihilation of what had hitherto been the commonly spoken vernaculars of the Middle East and the Mediterranean world: of Syriac, Coptic, Greek, and Berber. Already in the eighth century, Arabic was the language of politics and administration from Spain into central Asia, although Persian and Turkish would both become critical vehicles for Islamic thought and culture.
From the earliest years of the Muslim era, the Arabic language and its attendant culture exercised a magnetic pull for non-Muslims, even for church leaders. As early as 800, Christians like Theodore Abu Qurrah, a Melkite bishop born in Edessa, were publishing their treatises in Arabic. The greatest Eastern Christian philosopher of the tenth century, Yahya ibn 'Adi, wrote in Arabic and lived in a thoroughly Arabized intellectual world. Even in the self-confident world of Syriac literature, ninth-century hymn writers began introducing the Arabic poetic device of rhyme.14
In ninth-century Mesopotamia, Muslim exclusivist al-Jahiz denounced the Christians not just for their worldly success, but for their immersion in Arabic culture, even to the point of taking familiar Arabic names: “They are called Hasan and Husain and Abbas and Fadl and Ali, and they take all these as surnames; and there is nothing left but that they should be called Muhammad and be surnamed Abu 'l-Qasim!”15 Such wholesale absorption allowed wealthy and successful minorities to parade their success without any obvious sign of their religious taint, any hint of inferiority, and such overassimilation in all matters except the religious provoked Muslim regimes to enforce the symbolic badges of the Umaric code. But such cultural boundaries did not limit the spread of Arabic, and an Arabic-speaking world had already made a massive leap toward the possible adoption of Islam. As Peter Brown remarks, “[U]ltimately, it was the victory of Arabic which opened the doors to Islamization.”16
The older languages of the subject peoples fell increasingly into disuse, sometimes because Muslim regimes limited their use in the public sphere. At the start of the eighth century, the caliph Walid I took the historic step of replacing Greek by Arabic in the language of official documents at his court at Damascus. Muslim acquaintance with Greek declined still further when the caliphate moved to Baghdad. Greek also faded early in Egypt, its disappearance made easier by its association with unpopular Byzantine power.17
Yet even when such languages did not face direct official sanction, speakers of older tongues knew that they had little chance of getting on in an Arabic world. By the eleventh century, Coptic and Syriac were declining as major languages, and the compiler of the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria translated the work into Arabic because “today Arabic is the language that the people of Egypt know…most of them being ignorant of Coptic and Greek.”18 Vernacular Coptic faded steadily until it was almost entirely replaced by Egyptian Arabic, probably around the seventeenth century. Today, it is spoken by just two or three families. Syriac lasted rather longer as a mainstream language, but the transition was accelerated by the horrors of the Mongol invasions, and Arabic largely replaced it during the fourteenth century.
In Muslim-dominated Spain, the condemned minority language was the Latin spoken by the Visigoths and the old Roman peoples, and this swiftly fell out of fashion. A ninth-century Spanish Christian lamented,
Alas, the Christians are ignorant of their own tongue, and Latins neglect their language, so that in all the College of Christ there is scarcely to be found one who can write an address of welcome to his brother intelligibly in Latin, while numbers can be found competent to mouth the flowery rhetoric of the Chaldeans [i.e., Arabs].
The Mozarabs who at their height constituted perhaps 30 percent of al-Andalus were Arabic-speaking Christians, who succeeded the older Latinate generations.19 Reinforcing such cultural trends were the long-term demographic effects of immigration, as newcomers everywhere reinforced the Muslim presence.
The long-term religious consequences for Christianity were grim. The texts and liturgy of the faith were all available in languages that, though venerable, were clearly associated with fading cultures—literally, the words of the very old. Worse, when members of a faith are unable to express their ideas except in a language that is primarily associated with a rival religious system—can use only the words and intellectual categories of another creed—that minority religion is en route to oblivion.
Success Succeeds
In a Muslim-dominated world, it was difficult to avoid the sense that Islam had triumphed, and that that victory was irreversible. Until modern times, the vast majority of people in the Muslim world had limited access to information about life in other cultures, and knew little about advances in Western societies. For much of the history of Islam, moreover, the Christian world was not noticeably ahead in political or economic power, or in culture. When Muslims recalled the crusading era, they remembered a series of wars that they had won, decisively. At least until the eighteenth century, there was little reason to question the assumption that the Muslim world was the heart of civilization, that Islam had won globally and was continuing to win.
Worldly success was a potent force in the growth of Islam, and in the shriveling of Christianity. That fact may be troubling to Christians, whose faith so often extols the triumph of the meek and humble while rejecting worldly success, and who are so familiar with the concept of defeat as the root of long-term victory. In practice, though, Christians often had used material successes as proofs of their faith. As we have seen, church writers pointed to miracles and healings to vouch for the power of Christ, and such events often explained important conversions. Though such claims continued to be made, they were increasingly outweighed by the obvious successes of Muslim states and armies. At several critical moments, Muslim victories proved enormously damaging to the Christian cause, from the early triumphs over the Byzantine Empire onward. As the early Islamic convert 'Ali Tabari explained, “[Muhammad’s] victory over the nations is also by necessity and by undeniable arguments a manifest sign of the prophetic office.”20 If God had not been on his side, how could Muhammad’s followers possibly have won such stunning victories over ancient empires?
Another turning point just as ruinous for Christians occurred in 1291, at a time when the Mongol rulers of much of the Middle East were subject to several competing influences—Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist—and elite families were divided between representatives of the rival faiths. Victory might easily have gone in other directions, but the decisive point in Islam’s favor was the capture in that year of the Christian fortress of Acre, which ended the crusading venture that had begun with such messianic hopes two centuries earlier. The defeat ended any serious chance that the Western powers might use Acre as a bridgehead to launch new assaults on the Levant. As we have seen, other factors certainly contributed to the more intolerant religious atmosphere of these years, but Acre ensured that in much of the Middle East, it was the Christians who would be the recipients of official persecution. As a Muslim author crowed a few years afterward, Christianity was self-evidently the religion of losers: “[Islam] has blotted out their strong and well defended kingdoms, and their lofty and towering fortifications, and has turned them into refugees in hiding.” When Latin Christians invited Kublai Khan to convert, he scoffed: “How do you wish me to make myself a Christian? You see Christians in these parts are so ignorant that they do nothing and have no power.”21
Other Muslim contemporaries noted that the greatest military victories went to those Islamic states that most rigorously enforced the laws against unbelievers, and recommended that all future rulers emulate them. After the fall of Acre, the long sequence of Ottoman victories meant that it would be over four centuries before Muslims ceased extending their power over new groups of Christians, or until Christian states and forces once more gained the upper hand in their struggles against Muslim forces. Any acquaintance with recent history made nonsense of any claim that God was on the side of Christian states. As one scholar suggests, what turned Christians to Islam was “the common acceptance by Muslim and Christian alike of the error that the favor of God is shown by worldly success.”22
Self-evidently, Islam represented growth, expansion, and success, in contrast to the tattered shreds of Christianity. Any traveler could see the splendid mosques rising amid the landscape of ruined churches and deserted monasteries. The heart-breaking consistency of defeats, generation after generation, carried a deadly message.23