Philip Jenkins’ “The Lost History of Christianity” is about the largely extinct Christian churches (principally the Jacobites and Nestorians) that ranged from Africa to China, and are regarded now by the surviving small-o orthodox as heretical sects that may even deserve their extinction due to their welcoming of conquering Muslims. That’s perhaps a caricature of the view Jenkins is arguing against, as he aims to show there was a genuine loss of something distinct, accomplished and important in an historical sense. The interesting bit to me (and for the most part, I don’t find the subject interesting) is how the extinction came about. One might expect it happened almost immediately after the Arab conquests, but that appears to only have been the case in north Africa (Egypt not included, the Coptic church has proved to be surprisingly durable). Alternatively there could have been a long gradual process of attrition as Christians converted to avoid things like the jizya and other demerits of dhimmitude. But instead Jenkins argues that it largely occurred in a couple centuries around the year 1300. There a number of factors that caused everything to fall apart. There were prolonged wars of Turkish conquest (in contrast to the quick Arab absorbtion of weakened Byzantine and Persian territories, largely leaving literate locals in charge and unmolested), a series of Crusades that made Muslim vs Christian conflict more salient, and eastern Christians pinning their hopes on the initially relatively Christian-favoring (and practically genocidal) Mongols only for their imagined saviors to themselves convert to Islam. But additionally Jenkins finds that things were going from bad to worse in Europe as well, with Jews being expelled from England & France (the latter of which had a crusade against the heretical Cathars) and the witch-hunts being launched. For the material determinists out there he offers the cooling of the planet, with ensuing crop failures and epidemic outbreaks as the reason for everything going wrong around the world. So perhaps global warming will help lead to more world peace.
Some quotes from that section of the first chapter:
“Even today, jihadi extremists look back to the hard-line Muslim scholars of this very era as their role models in challenging the infidel world.”*
“Anyone who believes that boundless aggression and ruthless tyranny over minorities are built into the DNA of Islam needs to explain the quite benevolent nature of Muslim rule during its first six centuries; but advocates of Islamic tolerance must work just as hard to account for the later years of the religion’s historical experience.
So extensive, indeed, were persecutions and reductions of minority groups, from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century, that it is astonishing how little they have registered in popular consciousness, or how readily the myth of Muslim tolerance has been accepted. One factor distorting memory has been the total oblivion into which the non-European Christian communities have fallen, and the assumption that the familiar realities of the present day must always have existed.”
*I would have assumed that Muhammad himself and the rightly-guided caliphs are the only ones your genuine fundamentalist should approve of. Islam totally sold out in its later years.
I’d also like to include this quote on the myth of suppressed gnostic Christianity.
“In recent years, accounts of the early church claim that scriptures and gospels were very numerous, until the mainstream Christian church suppressed most of them in the fourth century. This alleged purge followed the Christian conversion of the emperor Constantine, at a time when the church supposedly wanted to ally with the empire in the interests of promoting order, orthodoxy, and ecclesiastical authority. According to modern legend, the suppressed works included many heterodox accounts of Jesus, which were suspect because of their mystical or even feminist leanings.
The problem with all this is that the Eastern churches had a long familiarity with the rival scriptures, but rejected them because they knew they were late and tendentious. [...] The deep conservatism of these churches, so far removed from papal or imperial control, makes nonsense of claims that the church bureaucracy allied with empire to suppress unpleasant truths about Christian origins.”
November 21, 2011 at 10:10 am
I think moldbug is right. The best explanation for why the shoe is dropping now is that its really Islam-flavored communism
November 21, 2011 at 6:07 pm
“The quite benevolent nature of Muslim rule during its first six centuries” is largely a myth. Dhimmitude and the collection of the jizya were severely enforced as to “peoples of the book,” and those deemed pagans were given the choice of converting or being put to the sword.
An interesting example is that of the people of Harran, who were discovered by the Abbasid caliph Al-Mamoun as he passed through their city. Observing their peculiar habits, their tight coats and long hair, he questioned them as to their religion. Partington (Hist. Chem. I, 332) writes: “Not satisfied, he told them that if, on his return, they had not become Muslims, he would exterminate them. They consulted a Muslim lawyer, who, for a large fee, advised them to tell the Khalif that they were the Sabians mentioned in the Qur’an and that they ha a holy book. They did this and they were tolerated.” They stated that their scripture was the Corpus Hermeticum and their prophet Hermes Trismegistus (“Hurmus”). In fact they were “a pocket of Syrian heathens who obstinately retained their old Babylonian religion… although since Alexander’s time they were under Greek influence..” (ibid., I, 331).
The Hellenised Assyrians of Harran were the principal source of the so-called golden age of Islamic science, though they were neither Arab nor Muslim. In fact this supposed golden age was but the last flowering, the Indian summer, of classical antiquity. Partington states, ibid., that the Harranians “were then practically the only preservers of Greek science, Hellenistic literature, and philosophy…” Their numbers included Thebit ben Corath, Albategnius (al-Battani), and possibly Geber (Jabir ibn Hayyan). “Many lived in Baghdad as astronomers, physicians, and secretaries to khalifs, and acquired great celebrity” (ibid.). In the early eleventh century, the Sabian temple at Harran was destroyed by an uprising of nearby rural Shi’ites and urban Muslim militias (cf. Wikipedia article “Harran”). The end of the “Islamic” golden age followed in due course.
Islam benefited during its early years because as Mahomet’s hordes came up out of the Arabian peninsula, they conquered what had been the oldest, most civilised, and most prosperous parts of the ancient Alexandrian and later Roman empires – their civilisations in fact antedating both those. Western Christendom, by contrast, got the backwaters: Gaul, Hispania, Britannia, and Germania (including parts the Romans never conquered). Islam burned through its rich store of capital plundered from classical antiquity, adding nothing to it – while Christendom built on what little it had until it rediscovered the classics in the fifteenth century, and then the Renaissance resulted. Two cultures, two results – and the latter do not speak at all well for Islam.
November 21, 2011 at 8:58 pm
josh, the other shoe-dropping is not right now. It’s around 1300, although there was another wave around the time of the first world war. And (nominally) Christian Arabs were important figures in Arab nationalist movements like Ba’athism and the early Palestinian terrorist groups. You would probably benefit from reading Jenkin’s book.
Michael, the non-Muslim (principally Christian, as far as this telling goes) scholars of the “golden age” are a big part of Jenkin’s book
November 22, 2011 at 12:59 am
TGGP, it would be worth your reading the chapter on the Sabians of Harran in J.R. Partington’s History of Chemistry, vol. I, part 1, at the pages cited. It is dense with detail and was written by an old-fashioned polymathic British scholar at a time (mid-1960s) before the modern development of politicised Islam. Partington was writing as an historian of early science and not as a religious polemicist, which Jenkins is.
A popularising but reasonably good account of the Harranians may be found in chapter 3, entitled “Hermes meets Islam,” of “The Golden Builders” by Tobias Churton (Lichfield, Staffordshire, 2002: Signal Publishing). This may be more accessible than Partington, whose work could probably be found in a good university library, but is now out-of-print and rather scarce (Antiquariat Gerhard Gruber in Heilbronn lists the set at 600 euros in his recent catalogue 175, “Von Glauber bis Kekule”).
November 22, 2011 at 5:54 am
From Samuel AM Adsheads ‘China in World History’
“Early Islamic society was anthropophagous. By its polygamy which lowered the birth rate, by its land system which produced chronic anachoresis; by its massive but parasitic urbanization which raised the death rate; by its militarism and mobility which did the same, early Islamic society dissipated its human resources for pleasure, work or war. Consequently it was a tolerant society religiously: the toleration of demographic deficiency. “
November 22, 2011 at 11:05 pm
Jenkins is religious, but “polemic” is not the right word. He’s not out to stir controversy or to posit some religions are better than others. The excepts I quoted are not really representative of the overall (more boring) book. There is some mention of other extinct (or nearly so) religions like the Manicheans, Zoroastrians, and middle eastern (Mizrahi, though he doesn’t use that term) Jews. But the title being what it is, they receive less attention than the Nestorians & Jacobites.
spandrell, I haven’t read that book but I have a hard time taking the quotes at face value. Very early Islamic society did not introduce polygamy, it limited it. The monogamy which we westerners find normal is a legacy of Rome, not the pre-Islamic middle east. I have never before heard the claim that polygamy lowers the birth rate, animal breeders who are nearly trying to maximize that rate typically induce effective polygamy. There is some connection between Islam and urbanism (the cities of Mecca & Medina are very prominent in its history/mythology), but I’m not sure if it’s distinctive. Jenkins describes some of the transition to a more Muslim middle east occurring when cities were devastated and reduced to desert, leading more people to adopt the nomadic Bedouin lifestyle. He does later on discuss a decline in the Muslim relative to (small-o orthodox) Christian world population. This occurs around the Industrial Revolution, when the west was urbanizing much more, although one can call that a consequence of the population increase. Within muslim societies, Christians have had a lower birth rate for some time.
I followed the link to your blog and read your first post. It seems you believe in some variant of “Bare Branches” theory, which is actually opposite of the truth. You claim “Islam is catnip for chics”, a claim I’ve seen from other MRAs without any evidence given. Instead I’ll predict that most converts to Islam are men. And of course polygamy is not something permitted in all majority Muslim countries but something the victors of the revolt in Libya claimed they would re-introduce in contradiction of Ghadaffi’s laws. Same deal with Tunisia.
November 23, 2011 at 10:25 am
Well the book is not about Islam, it just makes a claim about it which I found plausible. I don’t really have enough data to defend it or not. He is not talking about the Middle East only though, but about the early caliphates, which were very urbanized, at least more than what came before them.
About my post I’m not making any claim about crime rates. Nor about polygamy per se. Bare branches exist for many reasons, and the lack of access to women for easy sex produces very weird results. Burkas are not in the Koran, so its some particular social dynamic that caused them.
About converts, aren’t most of them women who married Muslim men? That should be easy to confirm.
November 25, 2011 at 6:34 pm
Not having read the book, I did not mean to imply it was a polemic. Jenkins writes, or at least used to write, for “Chronicles,” and that is where I formed my impression of him.
November 26, 2011 at 7:56 am
Perhaps, the idea is that big men can afford a lot of wives, but not to support as many children as those women would have (in total) if they were married to other men, e.g. a big man marries 6 women, supports each of them having 1 child, while 5 men go childless, for 6 children in total, while in the monogamous population, each man and woman pair off, with the big man having 3 children from one wife, and 5 other children being born from the other marriages, for 8 children in total. Obviously, there is no real biological limitation.
The above would seem to be unsustainable, demographically, without constant religious conversion from mono to poly or suppression of monogamous fertility through other means, if true.
November 27, 2011 at 2:56 pm
spandrell, I’ve done a bit of googling for data on the demographic profile of converts, but it’s not as easy as you might think. My guess was based on the fact that women tend to be more “rooted” in community/religion. Men are more likely to immigrate and adapt to local norms, with a more mundane example being ambitious young men in America moving to the northeast and adopting Episcopalianism/Congregationalism. Women are also more “racist” when choosing mates. Finally, a lot of Muslims in America are black prison converts (I’m not sure which portion are actually N.O.I), but perhaps that shouldn’t count for our purposes.
Matt, there are many animal species where male reproduction is more skewed than among humans, so indeed it is biologically feasible. But I think in classic polygamous marriages there are more than two children per adult woman.
November 24, 2011 at 4:42 am
[...] last post about Arab sexual dynamics has been criticized (here by TGGP), for asserting the Bare Branches theory. That’s the theory that says that a surplus [...]
November 27, 2011 at 8:18 pm
tggp writes:
“I’d also like to include this quote on the myth of suppressed gnostic Christianity”
Let’s not rush to the opposite extreme and say there was no such thing. In this very book, Jenkins talks regularly about gnostic Christianity and the survival of its ideas, both in eastern Christianity and in illuminationist Islam. See forexample page 9, page 75, page 190-191 (this is in the first edition; in which the passage tggp quotes is on page 87).
I am vaguely reminded of Daniel Pipes’s book “Conspiracy”. Having received my original education in conspiracy theory from popular counterculture like the Illuminatus trilogy, I was used to thinking of conspiracy theory as lying somewhere between JFK assassination theories, David Icke’s reptilian cosmology, and the all-embracing Conspiracy of the SubGenius church. So it was a dour revelation to have Pipes hammer home the point that in real politics and history, conspiracy theory was mostly about how a particular race or a particular class is plotting to screw over everyone else, that these beliefs provided a significant rationale for totalitarian states, and that conspiracy theory reaches its apex in the internal culture of such states, because the state is run by a counter-conspiracy (the Nazis conspire against the Jews, the Communists conspire against the capitalists), and the counter-counter-conspiracies against the state make the original ideology into a self-fulfilling prophecy…
In the same way, when people today talk about suppressed forms of early Christianity, they prefer to focus on racy alternative versions which involve mysticism, feminism, gnosticism, and so on. But the truth as revealed by Jenkins is that many of the “forgotten Christianities” are doctrines just as unappealing to the antinomian modern spirit as any of the One True Christianities that survived to this day. Also, of course, Jenkins talks about the suppression of various regional Christianities by Islam, and not just the suppression of rival Christianities by orthodoxy.
Nonetheless, it is a mistake to infer from Pipes’s book that there is nothing to the conspiracy theories which dominate western discourse on that subject, and similarly one should not infer from Jenkins’s book that there is no such thing as a suppressed gnostic tradition. One may suppose that the orthodoxy we have today, *and* the “heterodox orthodoxies” that were its rivals for state power, were equally against the gnostic doctrines. A truly nuanced statement about how it all was would require scholarship and knowledge that I do not possess, but I wanted to correct the impression I got from tggp’s little snippet.
December 1, 2011 at 9:00 pm
I suppose it was wrong for me to talk about a “myth of suppressed gnostic Christianity”, as if there was no gnosticism or that it was not suppressed. His point was that state power is not the reason for the marginality of gnosticism.
I don’t recall Jenkins discussing much about Muslims highlighting particular Christian cults for persecution, just ones linked to enemy regimes (i.e Melkites, like Robert Spencer).