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offer you a little relief from the mighty flood of comment about
what happened, what's happening, what should now happen, and what
might actually happen, let me take you on a little trip down the
byways of history to explore something that, long ago, did not
happen, but that, if it had, might have changed our world beyond
all imagining. It might have spared us the horrors of September
11th, too, though probably — in so far as it is possible to
calculate these things — at a very high price.
A number of wits have suggested that a simple solution to all our
problems with the Moslem world would be for the United States to
convert to Islam. (Though a sardonic friend, when he heard this
proposed, said: "From the point of view of the fundamentalists,
that would just mean that instead of being infidels, we would be
heretics.") Well, we might have been saved the trouble if matters
had worked out a little differently 800 years ago. What follows
is a true story. I came across it in some random reading a few months
back. The actual book I was reading was Gabriel Ronay's The
Tartar Khan's Englishman, a fascinating little curiosity
of historical research. Ronay himself took this particular incident
from a history of the world titled Chronica Majora, which
was written by the 13th-century English monk Matthew Paris.
The relevant
events took place in the year 1213. The King of England at that
time was a fellow named John Lackland, and he was in the 15th year
of his reign. He was the only king England ever had named John,
and it was the cause of some chagrin to me as a child to learn that
the one English king to have borne my own name was the worst king
we ever had. The sheer awfulness of King John was impressed on us
by our schoolmasters, and we used to chant a silly little ditty
about him:
King John
was not a good king;
He had his little ways.
And sometimes no-one spoke to him
For days and days and days.
A revisionist's
school among modern historians has been a bit more kind to King
John than my teachers were, telling us that he was a man of great
capability and energy, although of low tastes and few scruples,
who confronted impossible tasks.
Be that as
it may, there is not much doubt that King John had, in the words
of historian Norman Davies, "a genius for making enemies."
By 1213 he had alienated practically everybody it was possible for
a medieval English king to alienate: His barons, the guilds, the
knights, the peasantry, the Church, the Emperor, the King of France.
He had previously alienated the Pope, too — was under a decree
of excommunication from 1209 to 1213 — and to save his crown
had made a humiliating submission to papal authority that rankled
bitterly.
Desperate to
hold on to his position and confound his numerous enemies, John
decided on a dramatic course of action: He would embrace Islam and
turn England into a Moslem country! He thereupon dispatched a delegation
to the most powerful Moslem ruler he knew of. This happened to be
the Emir of Morocco, who rejoiced in the name Abu Abdullah Mohammed
al-Nasir and was the fourth ruler of the fanatically Shi'ite Muwahid
dynasty.
Mohammed was
not in the best frame of mind to receive John's ambassadors. As
well as his dominions in North Africa, he held a swathe of land
in southern Spain. However, the Christian Spanish had inflicted
a crushing defeat on him the previous year at the battle of Las
Navas de Tolosa, and he was plotting his counterattack. At this
difficult point in his fortunes, three Englishmen showed up at his
court: the knights Thomas Hardington and Ralph FitzNicholas, and
Master Robert, a London cleric. (A tonsured monk in a habit, padding
into the presence of a ferocious Islamic warrior! I wonder what
Master Robert had done back at the abbey to draw that short
straw!) The envoys told Mohammed that John "would voluntarily
give up to him himself and his kingdom, and if he pleased would
hold it as tributary from him; and that he would also abandon the
Christian faith, which he considered false, and would faithfully
adhere to the law of the prophet Mohammed." Hardington also
gave a glowing account of England, of the richness of its soil and
the skill and industry of its people.
Having done
my bit this past few weeks to whip up some pride in our civilization,
and corresponding scorn for lesser breeds without the law, I am
now sorry to have to tell you that the hero of this tale —
the only one who comes out of it showing honor, dignity, and good
sense — was Mohammed. After hearing John's peititon, he ruminated
briefly on it. (Though sensationally cruel, he seems to have been
an intelligent and thoughtful man. In one of those little touches
of detail that make history spring to life, the chronicler tells
us that Mohammed was absorbed in reading a book when the emissaries
were brought in to him.) Then he delivered his judgment.
Said Mohammed:
"I never read or heard that any king possessing such a prosperous
kingdom subject and obedient to him, would voluntarily ... make
tributary a country that is free, by giving to a stranger that which
is his own ... conquered, as it were, without a wound. I have rather
read and heard from many that they would procure liberty for themselves
at the expense of streams of blood, which is a praiseworthy action;
but now I hear that your wretched lord, a sloth and a coward, who
is even worse than nothing, wishes from a free man to become a slave,
who is the most miserable of all human beings." Mohammed concluded
by wondering aloud why the English allowed such a man to lord over
them — they must, he said, be very servile and soft —
and by declaring that John was unworthy of any alliance with a Moslem
ruler such as himself. He thereupon dismissed the envoys, warning
them never to let him set eyes on them again: "For the infamy
of that foolish apostate, your master, breathes forth a most foul
stench to my nostrils."
Whatever those
revisionist historians say, it is hard to quarrel with Mohammed's
estimation of John's character; and considering the difficulty he
was having holding on to his Spanish domains, just a few miles away,
it's not easy to see how Mohammed could have conquered and held
down a remote and climatically inhospitable cluster of islands a
thousand miles to the north. Still, just imagine what our world
might be like if John's scheme had worked. The pilgrims who took
ship to North America 400 years later might have been not Christian
Puritans but the adherents of some severe Islamic sect — Wahabis,
perhaps. Speaking English but carrying the Koran, they might have
brought the word of the prophet to the prairies, canyons and forests
of the New World. My imagination fails me at this point, but I've
read very few stories that give such a feel for the weirdness and
unpredictability of human affairs. You can't make this stuff up.
Islamic footnote. I increasingly see the name of the Islamic holy
book written as "Q'uran, " "Q'urân," or
some such gibberish. How on earth is any English-speaking person
supposed to cope with spellings like this? Why is it that when some
foreign culture comes into the news we are all expected to run off
and take seminars in graphetics and comparative phonetics? If a
foreign word or name is forced on our attention we are entitled
to anglicize it in any way we please, as we always have done —
and as foreigners freely do with our words. (My hometown of Northampton
appears on Chinese atlases as "Beianpudun.") A pox on
these lisping pedants! These are the same nuisances
that want me to say "Mumbhai" for "Bombay,"
"Livorno" for "Leghorn" and "Xiamen"
for "Amoy." Until Osama bin Laden wins his war and has
us all learning Arabic (in yo' dreams, Fat Lips!) it's "K?O?R?A?N."
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