I recently read the remarks of the Pope. Everyone is focusing on the aggressive tone taken toward Islam. Muslims are reacting in a typically bestial manner. But it seems to me that Benedict is being disingenuous in pretending as if Christianity was spread purely through moral suasion. I have already noted the vandalism and violence sanctioned by Christian Emperors, starting with Theodosius, against pagans their sacred temples late in the 4th century. The conversion of figures like Clovis or Vladimir meant that their peoples entered the faith by fiat, certainly this was not the case where Christianity percolated amongst the masses of its own accord. The forced conversion of the Saxons during the later part of Charlemagne's reign, or the brutality of anti-pagan marcher lords like the Teutonic Knights, is indisputable (see The Barbarian Conversion). Of course, Islam also has the character of fiat. Forced conversions were well known in the history of Islam, and the debased and subject status of the dhimmi resulted in the slow by inexorable transformation of formerly Christian or Zoroastrian lands into Muslim ones. With Buddhism, another transnational faith, there were periods of tension, as when the first Tibetan kings chose between the indigenous Bon and the newly introduced Buddhist faith, or when barbarian warlords promoted Buddhism in north China in the 5th century, or the introduction of the faith during the 6th and 7th century to Japan. My gestalt impression is that quantitatively the violence and social stress associated with the spread of these three faiths can be rank ordered like so: Islam >> Christianity >> Buddhism. For Buddhism I wondered if I could think of a long period of time when the religion and the conversion of new populations was fraught with strain, and I did think of one period: the Chinese "Dark Ages" after the fall of the Han dynasty in the 3rd century and before the rise of the Sui-Tang in the late 6th. During this period barbarian warlords from the steppe patronized Buddhism, while the native literati clung to their Confucianism. Though Buddhism was eventually Sinicized, during this period it was a foreign and alien faith, and the subsequent Sui-Tang period saw the rise to dominance of Buddhism as the religion of the Chinese state, only to subsequently be dethroned and removed from the temporal realm around 850 during a massive anti-foreigner pogrom. I bring this up to offer something which I think is relevant:
the tension emerged from the fact that an alien ruling caste promoted the new religion
. In contrast, in Southeast Asia, Tibet, South Korea and Japan a native ruling caste promoted Buddhism (though in these cases these native ruling elites had important interfaces with the outside world, as in Tibet where a Tang princess made Buddhism popular at court). The same problem with Buddhism cropped when the Mongols began to promote a form of Tibetan Buddhism at court in China. Or, more obscurely, when the Khara-Khitai began to promote Buddhism amongst the Muslims of Eastern Turkestan in the early 13th century. I am thinking about these things because I recently read Robert Pape's Dying to Win. To simplify, Pape's argument is that suicide terrorism needs several necessary preconditions, and a religious difference between the "rulers" and the "ruled" is a major parameter. In the case of "Islam as spread by the sword," I think it is instructive to note that in the 7th and 8th centuries Islam spread as the Arab religion. In the 10th centuries the slave soldiers of the Arabs from the Turkic realms came to the fore, and for much of the next 1,000 years Turks were the imperial people of Islam, spreading the faith far and wide and ruling dhimmis from India to Europe. In the Balkans "Turk" and Muslim became nearly synonymous, despite the eventual conversion of large numbers of Slavs (outside of Bosnia they are called Pomaks) and Albanians. In India the Muslim rulers were by and large not of the native ethnic stock, but Turks and Persian (Persian through the matriline). Their armies were filled with foreign Muslims, from Central Asia to Arabia to East Africa. In Spain the Muslims were notionally Berber and Arab, and they ruled over a Romance speaking population. In India, the Balkans and Spain the Muslims retreated, alien rulers who took refuge in their "homelands." But the memories of oppression remain. Where is the Christian analog to this? When Constantine converted to Christianity, initiating the century long process of transforming the imperial government from a pagan to a Christian institution, Rome was a state in stasis or retreat. Christianity came to the fore precisely when the old temporal order was in decline, and Roman Christian power withdrew from vast swaths of Europe which were re-paganized by barbarians. In what became England the 6th century saw the extinction of Christianity so that a second conversion had to be attempted early in the 7th (this was successful). And when this conversion was initiated it aimed at winning over local rulers, and offered them the legitimacy of international contacts, divine legitimacy as the vice-reagent of God upon earth, one king for one God. The Carlognian assault on the Saxons and their forced Christianization, or the Ottotian blackmail of the Danes, and the later centuries long Crusade against the Balts, were exceptions. All across northern and eastern European ambitious monarchs accepted Christianity to secure their position, gain outside contacts, and bring their nations into the congress of civilized nations. On the level of the individual peasant there was likely no practical difference, insofar as their shrines were destroyed, their shamans persecuted, their idols burned. But with the ruling caste converted the fall of a dynasty did not mean de-Christianization. In the case of Islam the roots were never deep enough in places like the Balkans and Spain, and local Christian warlords served as a reservoir of resentment and anti-Muslim religious feeling that could fill the vacuum when the alien rulers retreated. While Christians spread into "pagan space," which seemed not to have "bounce back" capacity, Muslims spread into the space of higher religions, that of Chrisianity and Zoroastrianism. Though the Zoroastrian battle against Arab rule is forgotten today for the first several centuries of Arab Muslim rule from the Persian heartland deep into Central Asia there were rebellions under the banner of the old religion and the old families. In India the Muslims were never able to convert more than 1/3 of the native populace, and a non-trivial reservoir of elite Hindus remained. With the decline of Muslim power in the 18th century Hindu states quickly rose to fill the vacuum. As the Muslims were marginalized the memories of oppression and victimization by the sword were inflammed. And yet one must remember, it is precisely in some of the areas that Muslims are dominant, as in the Punjab and Sindh, where Muslim atrocities seem to have been most concentrated. But the citizens of Pakistan do not look to their non-Muslim past and feel bitterness...because now they are Muslims. This is not to argue that Islam's lighting spread was not quantitatively more violent than the more paced diffusion of Christianity or Buddhism. But, it is to suggest that the rapid nature of the spread resulted in ethnically alien castes ruling over non-Muslim populations. In the cases where the natives eventually converted there is no great resentment. In areas where they did not, the rollback of Islam has resulted in strong memories of oppression and victimization. In contrast, Christianity, like Buddhism, tended to spread more with local elites. Additionally, both Buddhism and Christianity expanded into "virgin lands," Europeans before Christianity and Asians before Buddhism were not familiar with a systematic and philosophical transnational religion. Islam on the other hand displaced already established higher religions, and so the tensions were heightened across the transitionary period (which reversed in several cases). My point in bringing this up is perhaps suggesting the role of historical contingency here. If Christianity had been promoted by the late Republic, and been part of the ruling ideology of the Roman state as it spread into lands where Zoroastrianism was dominant, I have no doubt that after the Roman retreat harsh memories of Jesus' faith of the sword would be common today. As it is, both Christianity and Buddhism spread during times of chaos, decentralization and civilizational fragment (between the 3rd and 6th centuries). And all the better.
