“But that means Christians were saints, right?” That was one of the comments I saw in the recent video Destroying Muslims’ Greatest Myths on my Coat of Arms YouTube channel. That’s the way it is. A silly comment indeed. It’s like thinking that saying communists are “bad guys” means saying Nazis are “nice guys”. It is better not to try to understand what is going on in the brain matter of certain people. Life is too short for that. But despite the video’s controversial subject matter, according to YouTube metrics, the video has a 99.5% approval rating so far. And it was really good to see the positive reaction from people and even to surprise with some of the myths that I presented there. The video was so good and enlightening for so many people that I thought: why not share these myths with my readers here at Gazeta?
As I said in the previous column, in the last century medieval Muslims have been promoted to supernatural figures, veritable beacons of freedom, tolerance, science, technology, philosophy and all the other things that can be added to this beautiful oriental heritage. Now to doubt that medieval Muslims made a very positive contribution to science would be utterly foolish: history confirms this fact. But suddenly, many people (and even scholars) “forgot” the great atrocities they also committed wherever they went. I’m here to remind you that Muslims were just as human as any other human being. So it’s time to deliver on the promise I made to you in last week’s column: Get the kids out of the room because this is where it gets ugly. For this we go to the other side of the Atlantic about 1,300 years ago: the Iberian Peninsula.
Even in death, Christian Arabs found no rest: Islamic authorities sometimes dug up dead Arabs, realizing posthumously that they had become Christians, and crucified the poor devil’s corpse.
From a social and geopolitical point of view, there is no better place on earth to see the myth of the good Muslim being shattered. Because you know very well that what was then the largest Muslim empire, the Umayyad Caliphate, ruled practically the entire Iberian Peninsula, then called AlAndalus. And with this empire begins the propaganda of religious tolerance and peace that reigns throughout the peninsula. This period, which began in 711, even got a nice name: the paradise of Andalusia.
In his book The Myth of Paradise in Andalusia, historian Dario Fernandez Morera mentions that crucifixion, impalement and the typical beheading were among the atrocities committed by the Moors of the Umayyad Caliphate. Even a chronicle of the time describes how Emir Abd alRahman III. Beheaded 100 Christian prisoners to set an example and sent all the heads to the city of Cordoba, which was always trying to rebel. Incidentally, even Muslim heretics who became Christians were left behind: the chronicler Ibn Hayyan describes a series of crucifixions of apostate Muslims in a public square.
Even in death, Christian Arabs found no rest: Islamic authorities sometimes dug up dead Arabs, realizing posthumously that they had become Christians, and crucified the poor devil’s corpse. Perhaps the bestknown example is that of a Moorish convert named Ibn Hafsun who suffered this fate.
And if today women still suffer and are dehumanized under many Islamic laws, imagine it then. Just like today, women were subject to the terrible law of Sharia. Cases have been reported of women burning their faces, such as that of a caliph who burned the face of a woman who resisted his sexual advances. A collection of Islamic laws called “Muwatta” shows that women were often “circumcised,” which is just a euphemism for female genital mutilation.
And when the Umayyad Empire fell came the Almohads and Almoravids, who can tell you by name what a good thing it wasn’t. According to Professor Mark Cohen in his book Under Crescent and Cross [Sob o crescente e a cruz], on page 117, they spread terror across the peninsula: mass beheadings, crucifixions, church burnings, and forced conversions of Christians and Jews to Islam marked decades of oppression. Interestingly, by the way, the same author is very benevolent towards Muslims in general.
It is obvious that it is impossible to know the frequency and duration of this violence, just as it is impossible to know the duration of periods of peace. But both happened and are very well documented: to generalize to one period or another is to oversimplify such complex dynamics. Many people suffered during this time and this is testified to in Christian Martyrs under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World [Os mártires cristãos sob o islã: A violência religiosa e a construção do mundo muçulmano]. Professor Christian C. Sahne shows us in this work how “violence against Christians laid the foundation for the antagonism between ChristianMuslim relations in the centuries that followed” and how leaders of the struggle against Muslims and their supporters were brutally murdered, leaving a terror in their wake Reconquista itself and the seven centuries of struggle of the Europeans to expel the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula show this ingrained antagonism, and that if they fought for it and died for it, they must have had for strong reasons, that is, this Paradise in Andalucia was more of a stressful hell, and unfortunately there is more… much more!