Madeleine Bunting has a point when she says that discussion of Islam should be grounded in knowledge. (No-one that I ever heard of suggested that it should be grounded in ignorance, but let it pass.) The trouble I have with her ilk is that one knows from the outset that only a certain type of knowledge will be permitted in Buntingworld: knowledge that fits her agenda. What we need is history, which means neither demonisation of an entire religion nor airbrushing of the record. Where there is beauty and grace, acknowledge it frankly and do not try to downplay its value as being really due to external factors. And where there is a case to answer, let there not be any special pleading – by which I mean the use of an argumentative tactic by one side which is not allowed to the other (e.g. ‘you started it’ being considered a valid argument for one party but not for their opponents).
The medieval world is awash with rulers who displayed on the one hand culture and open-mindedness and on the other hand outrageous duplicity or cruelty. Charlemagne encouraged a revival of learning, employing the great English scholar Alcuin and even trying to learn to read and write himself. He also launched military campaigns against the Saxons that would today be called genocidal. Then there were the repeated campaigns against the Avars. Who? Quite.
Harun al-Raschid, everyone’s favourite Caliph, with whom Charlemagne exchanged compliments and presents (each untroubled by the fact that the other was an infidel), presided over the most brilliant court of the age. He also had his chief minister beheaded and bisected for being too generous and consequently too popular.
One can multiply examples. Mahmud of Ghazni was a ruler who employed Hindus and was celebrated for centuries afterwards by poets (by Farid ud-din Attar, for instance, a saintly Persian mystic) as a patron of the arts. He also raided north-west India repeatedly committing atrocities on a spectacular scale, the worst, from the point of view of his victims, being the desecration, plunder and destruction of Hindu temples and the slaughter of Brahmins. (Although this happened a millennium ago it’s a hot-button issue in the subcontinent: Hindu nationalists like to refer to his activities, and those of his successors, as a ‘Hindu holocaust’.)
There are some rulers, though, at whom one looks more or less in vain for redeeming features. William the Conqueror was one: Hulagu Khan another.
Baghdad was the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, the central Muslim power of the medieval world, which thrived from the eighth century to the thirteenth. Harun al-Raschid ruled there. But anyone who has watched the news lately will have noticed that the place today looks modern. There don’t seem to be any medieval buildings. There’s a reason for that.
In the 1250s the Mongols turned their efforts to the rich civilisation of the Muslim Middle East. Earlier in the century they had established themselves in central Asia and then Iran, overthrowing the pre-existing Muslim dynasties there, and destroyed the Assassin sect in a long grim campaign in the mountains. Then in 1257 Hulagu Khan demanded the submission of Caliph al-Mutasim. Our primary source for the events that followed is the Jumi'u't-Tawarikh (‘Compendium of Chronicles’ - and many thanks must go to Ghazan Khan, who commissioned it, Rashiduddin Fazlullah, who wrote it, and Professor Thackston, who translated it).
Mutasim refused to pay homage – the Abbasids were not used to doing homage to anyone, rather the reverse - and Hulagu invaded Mesopotamia in overwhelming force, first ravaging the Kurds and advancing on Baghdad from all sides. Mutasim then conceded what Hulagu had previously demanded, to be told that this was now insufficient. Hulagu wanted it all.
The Mongols proved unstoppable, as always previously. The key to their success in empire-building was that they could beat all comers in the field but could also take fortified places, largely through the services of Chinese siege engineers. In Europe at this time, siege warfare was much less advanced, which was why warfare was so often inconclusive: besieging armies typically had to reduce strong places by starvation rather than storm, but found that starvation cut both ways.
Having received promises of safe conduct, the defenders surrendered. The soldiers came out, ‘hoping to find safety, but they were divided into units of thousands, hundreds, and tens and killed to the last.’ This was normal, since the Mongols had already fought their way onto the walls and into part of the city, which – under the rules of war – meant that the garrison could expect no mercy.
With all strength gone, the Caliph then made his submission to Hulagu, surrendering on 10th February with his three sons. 'He approached Hulagu Khan, and the padishah did not exhibit any anger but asked after his health kindly and pleasantly.' It was all a show: as usual utter ruthlessness hid itself behind civility. First Hulagu deceived the Caliph into ordering the remaining defenders, armed civilians, to surrender: ‘The people disarmed themselves and came out in droves, and the Mongols killed them.’
It wasn’t over. ‘On Wednesday the 7th of Safar [February 13] the pillage and general massacre began… the army went into the city and burned everything except a few houses belonging to Nestorians and some foreigners… Most of the holy places like the caliph's mosque, the Musa-Jawad shrine, and the tombs in Rusafa were burned.’ The estimates for the death toll range from 80,000 to 2 million. Medieval chroniclers, Middle Eastern no less than European, were very fond of exaggeration, and as a rule of thumb it’s a good idea to drop a zero from the end of any numbers they give. But a sack of a major city like Baghdad could hardly have had a death toll lower than 80,000. Such a toll would be entirely consistent with Mongol practice elsewhere, and is not inherently implausible given the usual absence of any sense of restraint under these circumstances.
Hulagu then ordered a halt to the sack and left. ‘Hulagu Khan decamped from Baghdad on Wednesday the 14th of Safar [February 20] on account of the foul air’, a phrase that reads today as an exceptionally bleak sort of joke.
Hulagu then summoned Mutasim before him again. ‘…the caliph despaired of his life and requested permission to go into the bath to renew his ablutions. Hulagu Khan said he could go in with five Mongols. "I don't want the companionship of five myrmidons of hell"’ was the Caliph’s last defiance, and one hopes that he did actually say it.
‘At the end of the day on Wednesday the 14th of Safar 656 [February 20, 1258], the caliph, his eldest son, and five of his attendants were executed in the village of Waqaf.’ According to one story, Hulagu had been warned against killing Mutasim, on the grounds that he would be damned if the caliph's blood touched the earth. Therefore he had Mutasim and his sons sewn into carpets and trampled to death by cavalry. Another story, more inherently plausible, is that the Caliph was strangled. ‘On Friday... the caliph's middle son was dispatched after his father and brother, and the reign of the House of Abbas… came to an end. Their caliphate lasted five hundred twenty-five years, and there were thirty-seven of them’.
Two points come out of this, one moral, one historical. Morally, it is simply beyond the pale to suggest that all of this might be justified by the Mongols having a different code of ethics. Sensitivity to cultural difference does not mean acceptance of any and every outrage. If one believes that civilisation is a term that means anything, one can hardly avoid sympathising with the Caliph against the Khan. It is – and I can’t ultimately prove this rationally, only assert it as a belief - natural for us to do so, and in reality even the toughest cultural relativist would find it difficult to say ‘but it’s cultural’. Of course, the universities and media, the places where cultural relativists are most likely to be found, are also the places where reality is least likely to intrude.
The historic point: the psychological shock of all this can hardly be over-estimated. It was as though thirteenth-century Europe had seen the obliteration of Paris (intellect), Rome (faith) and Florence (culture) all at once. After this disaster, the Arabs were dominated for centuries by a variety of foreigners: Mongols, Mamluks, Turks. It is good to recount that the Muslims got a sort of revenge two years later, when the Mongols were defeated for the first time at Ain Jalut: they were never such a menace again. But even this victory was won by Mamluks, Egyptian slave-soldiers of central Asian Turkish origin. (The Mamluks had assistance from the Crusaders at their capital city of Acre, as the Pope had declared the Mongols to be unspeakable heathens: the Muslims were the lesser evil. Thirty-one years later, an army led by Khalil, Sultan of Egypt, took Acre itself, ending the Crusader States. Gratitude is not a negotiable currency in international relations.)
The Arabs, meanwhile, had to wait until the twentieth century to start finding heroes again, and the dearth in the meantime meant that their ability to choose heroes wisely had atrophied somewhat.