Tag: islam

In Our Time: Al-Ghazali

Al-Ghazali was a leading intellectual in the Islamic world of the 11th Century AD, a philosopher, lawyer, teacher, thinker and mystic who made important contributions to Islamic philosophy and to sharia law. The experts on In Our Time who discussed his life and work were Peter Adamson (LMU in Munich), Carole Hillenbrand (Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities) and Robert Gleave (University of Exeter).

The era in which Al-Ghazali lived was one of political change. The caliphate was beginning to collapse, and the Christian Crusaders were fighting for and conquering parts of the Middle East. There was a rump of the old Umayyad caliphate in Spain, and their Abbasid replacement had for a while been a figurehead government with the Shi’ite military holding the actual power. When Al-Ghazali was alive the Shi’ites were in control in Egypt, but the Sunnis had restored the caliphate to actual power in the east (where Al-Ghazali lived). This was an intellectually rich era, with many important and influential scholars. An important piece of context for Al-Ghazali’s life and work is that he was born when the translation movement had just finished its project of translating the works of the Greek philosophers into Arabic.

Al-Ghazali was born in the 11th Century in Persia and was of humble origins. He was orphaned, and so doesn’t receive his education because of his family connections – instead he is identified as being particularly clever. He was educated in all the subjects that an Islamic intellectual of the era should be – including the Qu’ran and Sharia law. He clearly excelled as when he moves to Baghdad in 1090 he soon gets the best job in the city, when he is still only 33. During the 5 years he lives in Baghdad he is the most senior person in the biggest mosque in the city. His primary duty is teaching, but the role is also a political one – for instance he wrote a tract rebuking the Shi’ite rulers of Egypt.

During his time in Baghdad he writes a work called The Incoherence of the Philosophers which is a rebuttal of the use of Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers in Islamic religious philosophy. this sets him in direct opposition to the leading thinker of the previous generation. The main thrust of his argument is that the Greek notions of causality leave no room for the actions of God in the world. For example if you hold a flame to cotton then the Greek philosophers would say that the fire causes the cotton to burn. But Al-Ghazali believes you need to leave space for God and for miracles. So it is God that causes the cotton to burn when the flame is held to it, and God could choose that the cotton doesn’t burn (i.e. a miracle would occur).

Al-Ghazali was also influential in the field of Sharia law. His work on this topic was philosophical in nature and focussed on the principles behind the laws. These are more important than the details of the laws themselves because an understanding of the principle behind a law will allow the law to be adapted to the changing realities of the world.

After he had been in Baghdad for five years he suffered some sort of breakdown. He left the city and his high status job and wandered as a Sufi mystic. Sufism is focussed on a direct personal and mystical connection with God, and this contrasts with mainstream Islam (which focusses on obedience to the laws). Although he lived a life outside the teaching structure of Islam he continued to publish on philosophical matters – now within the Sufi tradition. At the time Sufism was not very closely aligned with the rest of Islamic thought and it was Al-Ghazali’s work in this part of his life that brought it and mainstream Islam closer together.

In their summing up at the end of the programme the experts said that although a lot of his writing concerned philosophy (and he played an important role at the time) his lasting legacy is in the field of Sharia law.

In Our Time: The Battle of Talas

In 751AD Arabian and Chinese forces met in battle at a river called Talas in Central Asia. This was to mark the end of the eastward expansion of the Islamic Empire, and the westward expansion of the Chinese Empire. Discussing it on In Our Time were Hilde de Weerdt (Leiden University), Michael Höckelmann (King’s College London) and Hugh Kennedy (SOAS, University of London).

Kennedy started the discussion by setting the scene for what was happening in the Arab Empire at this time. Since the Prophet’s death in 632AD his followers had conquered incredible amounts of territory very quickly, and by 751AD the Islamic Empire stretched from Spain & Morocco in the west to what is now Iran in the east. Until shortly before the time of the Battle of Talas the Umayyad Caliphate was in power, with their capital in Damascus. In 750AD the Ummayyad were replaced by the Abbasid Caliphate who ruled from Baghdad. The Abbasids’ power base was further east than the Ummayyads’, with particularly strong support in what is now north-east Iran. The push to expand the Empire east in both cases was not just ideological, it was also economic and born out of a desire to control the lucrative trade routes to the east.

China at this time was ruled over by the Tang dynasty. Under their rulership the Chinese Empire reached its largest extent (before the Qing era), extending up to Central Asia. The Chinese were looking to protect their lucrative land trade routes – the Silk Road. So they not only had troops on their western borders, but also formed alliances with key leaders of regions along the Silk Road. What I’m refering to as Central Asia is the region that includes modern Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. During the time period in question this was not really an area with nations or any sort of cohesive state – instead there were several princes & chiefs who ruled over particular areas or tribes. The Chinese had alliances with the ones through which the traderoutes generally ran. The experts characterised these are not quite conquest, not quite alliance – in that the Chinese pretty much left the princes to rule as they pleased but had troops stationed nearby to make sure it was suitable.

So that’s the set up for this battle – the area was a volatile one with several leaders vying for power and influence. Some of these were allied with the Chinese, some of these looked more to the Arabs. Neither the Chinese nor the Arabs really wanted to extend centralised control over the region, but did want to continue to influence it. They are drawn into conflict, because one of the Chinese allies has some sort of falling out with another chief. Said chief appeals to his Arab allies for protection, and now the Chinese and the Islamic Empires are in a situation where they need to fight each other in order to hold up their own ends of their alliances.

The battle itself took place on the river Talas in July 751, I think they said it lasted five days. The Chinese forces suffered a humiliating defeat, with much of their army captured or killed. Sources on both sides give what the experts think are likely to be highly inflated casualty rates for the Chinese. The Arab sources make their own army sound small, against a larger Chinese force of around 100,000. And the Chinese sources reverse that, saying they had 30,000 (10,000 Chinese, 20,000 mercenaries) and the Arabs had 200,000. Both would be exaggerating to suit their own propaganda needs, the experts said a few tens of thousands on each side sounds plausible. The Chinese were actually defeated in large part through treachery. The actual Chinese forces were about a third of their army, the rest was made up of mercenaries from one of the Turkic peoples. During the battle these mercenaries betrayed the Chinese who were then surrounded with the Arab army on one side and the mercenary army on the other. Arab sources imply this wasn’t pre-planned.

In the aftermath of this battle many many Chinese prisoners were brought to Baghdad and other parts of the Islamic Empire. One of the Chinese sources for this battle is a man who was captured and later made his way back to China, and wrote a book about his time in Baghdad. This event is sometimes credited with bringing paper-making technology to the Islamic Empire because of these prisoners. Two of the experts (Höckelmann and de Weerdt, I think) weren’t convinced by this, Kennedy (I think) was more keen on it.

The battle can be held up as a big clash between East & West, and at first glance might seem to cause the halt in expansion of both these Empires. However that doesn’t appear to be the case. More important is the political situation in China. Four years after the Battle of Talas was the An Lushan rebellion, which nearly deposed the Tang dynasty – so troops were called back from the frontiers and politics in China became more inward facing for a while. The land trade routes were also less lucrative because the sea ones were becoming more important. The Islamic Empire’s interest in the region lessened because it was no long as economically important. So a battle that at first seems a key moment in global politics is really just a footnote.

The Making of the Modern Arab World: Episode 3

In the third episode of The Making of the Modern Arab World Tarek Osman looked at the rise of political Islam since the 1970s. He started by reminding us of the context for this, which he talked about more in the previous episode (post). As of about 1966 Nasser was both the leader of Egypt and the most prominent public face of Arab Nationalism. The state and politics were secular in nature, and to some degree so was the general population – women generally did not go veiled, for instance. Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood were repressed, and their leaders and activists imprisoned, brutally treated, and potentially executed. The regime was also fairly left wing, and pro-Soviet. Then in 1967, with the defeat of the Arab armies by Israel, Arab Nationalism lost a lot of face. Nasser died in 1970 and his successor, Anwar Sadat, changed the focus of the state.

Sadat liked to see himself as “the pious President”, and took pains to present himself as a good Muslim. He backed off on the repression of Islamist groups, releasing many of their members from prison and permitting them to openly take jobs at universities. At the same time he was swinging the political compass of the regime towards the right, and towards the USA and capitalism. He also started to shrink the state involvement in the welfare of the poor. As the country embraced capitalism Sadat removed the subsidies that were artificially keeping the price of bread low – after riots from students and workers who could no longer afford food the subsidies were reinstated.

The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups took advantage of both the perceived corruption of the state, and the gap opening up in care for the poor. Islamist rhetoric held out the hope that if Islam was fully integrated into the state then politics would be more honest & less corrupt. There was also a prominent notion that the reason the war against Israel had failed was that the Arab states had turned away from religion and so God was no longer on their side. The Muslim Brotherhood were also involved in widespread charitable works – providing for the poor who were being failed by the state, which encouraged people to regard them as a viable alternative to the authoritarian state.

1979 was a year containing three events that were to lead to increased support for Islamist groups across the region. One of these was the revolution in Iran – this might’ve been Shia rather than Sunni but it was proof that an Islamist uprising could overthrow a secular state. Another was the signing of a treaty between Egypt and Israel, which was taken as evidence of the state’s corruption and decline. And thirdly the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets pitted Islamist forces (such as the Taliban) against the Soviets – by Cold War logic this meant that the US and other Western groups saw the Islamist groups as their potential allies, and hence worth funding and training.

Another growing influence on the Arab region was the Saudi Arabian regime. The balance of political and economic power was shifting away from places like Egypt and towards the oil countries. Many Egyptians and nationals of other countries went to work in Saudi Arabia, and many of them became more religious and more conservative under the influence of the culture they were now living in. When they returned to their native countries after several years they kept contact with people they knew in Saudi Arabia. Along with funding suitable Islamist groups this was a conduit for Saudi Arabian influence in the politics of countries like Egypt.

Osman talked about how over the next couple of decades (the 80s and the 90s) the Islamist groups were struggling against the “near enemy”, i.e. the regimes of their own states. After the end of the Soviet presence in Afghanistan at the end of the 80s many of the groups that had been involved in that jihad felt flush with success – they felt they had brought down the Soviet Union and the time was ripe for success in their own countries. This was not to be. A Muslim Brotherhood led uprising in Syria was brutally dealt with at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, and the breaking of the back of the Muslim Brotherhood organisation in that country. The Algerian civil war, sparked after the army overturned the election of an Islamist leader ended in defeat for the Islamist forces, after the loss of many lives. And in Egypt Mubarak had come to power after the assassination of Sadat by Islamist soldiers (in the early 80s), and brutally cracked down on Islamist groups. Violent protest was undertaken by extremist Islamist groups during the 80s and early 90s, but the Luxor Massacre in 1996 actually caused that to die down. Osman said that public opinion, and opinion of mainstream and even somewhat radical Islamist groups, was appalled and shaken by the massacre and the extremists who’d carried it out were denounced.

So towards the end of the 20th Century the radical Islamist groups were failing in their struggle at against the near enemy. Osman said that this is why their attention began to turn to the “far enemy”. The USA and other Western powers were involved in propping up the secular and authoritarian regimes that the Islamists were struggling against. So groups like Al Qaeda turned their attention outwards towards these foreign powers.

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Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities; Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History

Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities was a series about the history of Byzantium aka Constantinople aka Istanbul presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore that we watched in December last year finishing just before Christmas. Montefiore seems to be specialising in serieses about holy cities – his previous ones have been about Jerusalem (which we watched before I started writing blog posts) and Rome (post).

Byzantium started out life as a strategically well placed Greek town at the eastern periphery of the Greek (and later the Roman) world. It rose to greater prominence as the centre of gravity of the Roman Empire shifted towards the east, and Constantine moved his capital there at the same time as establishing Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. The Greek pagan past was swept very much under the carpet as the newly renamed Constantinople was positioned as the Christian centre of a Christian Empire which it remained until 1453AD. Something easy to forget from the way the subject was taught to me as a child is that the Roman Empire continued in the East long after the fall of Rome – seamlessly becoming what we now call the Byzantine Empire. Montefiore talked about how Constantinople came to be regarded as associated with and under the protection of the Virgin Mary, one-upping in their minds the association of Rome with St. Peter. And he finished up the first episode with a discussion of the rising tensions between the Western Church and the Orthodox of Constantinople, culminating in the excommunication of the Patriarch by the Pope and the Great Schism.

The second episode covered the period between the Great Schism in 1054AD, and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453AD. This is a period characterised by decline from former glories, punctuated brutally by the 4th Crusade. The Crusades started off because of the worries of the Byzantine Empire over the rise of Islam and how this new faith had conquered vast swathes of territory, including the Holy Land, and were now eyeing up Byzantine lands. They invited the Western Christians to lend their military might to hold off the Muslims, but this was an uneasy alliance. With the added political differences between Constantinople and Venice (supplier of ships for the 4th Crusade) the unease spilt over into outright violence and Constantinople was sacked by the Crusaders. Montefiore had a bit of an air here of an outsider handing out the popcorn while he was discussing the lead up to this disaster, but he sobered up for the discussion of the atrocities afterwards. The programme ended with the final fall of a weakened Constantinople to the Ottomans, after they’d taken over all the surrounding territory.

The third episode covered the whole of the Ottoman Empire’s time in the sun. This was a second golden age for the city, now known as Istanbul – once again the centre of a large secular Empire it also became the centre of another religion. The Ottoman Sultans moved the seat of the Caliphate to Istanbul, and discovered (or moved in some cases) relics of the Prophet Muhammed and those close to him in the city. Montefiore dwelt on different aspects of the Ottomans to the series we watched earlier in the year (post). He didn’t gloss over the institutionalised fratricide of the Sultans as much, and he told us about some of the less successful holders of the title whose incompetance or brutality also shaped the city. He also spent a bit of time telling us about how the Jews were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion from Western Europe. This episode ended with a discussion of Attaturk and the new secular Turkey after the end of the Ottoman Empire.

As always with Montefiore’s serieses I I liked the cinematography as well as being interested in the subject matter. There’s a visual style to the programmes that I like, though I’d be hard pushed to describe it or distinguish it from other things – but that’s me lacking the vocab and knowledge, I think 😉

The other series we finished off over the last few weeks was Sam Willis’s series about Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History. This was a three part series that looked at shipwrecks around the British coast or involving British ships since Tudor times, with the main focus being on the 18th and 19th Centuries. The format was part telling the stories of individual disasters, and part drawing out what effects these disasters have had on British culture and British history. Willis did a good job of making the shipwrecks sound every bit as hideously dreadful as they must’ve been, whilst not overdoing it. And there were lots of interesting tidbits of history – like in the last episode he told us about the first weather forecasting system, the first life jackets, the fight Plimsoll had to undertake to get overloading of merchant ships regulated and several more. An interesting series, worth watching.

Other TV watched over the last couple of weeks:

Calf’s Head and Coffee: The Golden Age of English Food. Disappointing programme about Restoration era English food that couldn’t work out if it was about the history or about the food, and ended up falling short with both aspects.

Planet Ant: Life Inside the Colony – a bit like the series The Burrowers that we watched a while ago (post) but about leafcutter ants not cute fluffy bunnies etc. An ants nest was reconstructed in a lab and science is being done on it (and we got told how the nest worked and about the ants biology etc).

BBC 4 Sessions: The Christmas Session – recorded for Christmas 2011 I think, this featured various folk artists including the Unthanks and was a lot of fun. We watched it on Christmas Day.

Egypt’s Golden Empire – a three part series on one of the Sky documentary channels that we watched at J’s parents’ house. I confess I wasn’t always paying that much attention, but what I did watch seemed like a rather good and thorough overview of the New Kingdom period of Ancient Egypt.

Charlie Brooker’s 2013 Wipe – round up of the big events of 2013 presented by Charlie Brooker (and segments from others, which I felt worked less well).

Jool’s Annual Hootenanny – music and chat from Jools Holland and his guests (and audience). It’s our tradition for welcoming in the New Year when we’re at home – Jools on the telly and whisky to drink. Not the best one there’s ever been, but we still had fun heckling.

2013: Moments in Time – another roundup of 2013, this time of the main news stories of the year shown through the photos that illustrated them. And some discussion of the changing nature of these photos (and the rise of social media’s importance in news).

Episode 1 of Rise of the Continents – series about the geology of the continents and how that’s shaped them and their wildlife (and us) presented by Iain Stewart. This episode was about Africa.

Episode 4 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

The Making of the Modern Arab World: Episode 1

The Making of the Modern Arab World is a new Radio 4 series about the causes and recent history of the current political situation in the Middle East. It’s presented by Tarek Osman, an Egyptian author, along with several interviews with historians or the descendents of notable figures – his focus is on Egypt and Syria in particular. The first episode looks at the development and decline of Arab liberalism. Osman started by talking about the parallels between the 2011 uprising in Egypt and the 1919 Egyptian uprising against the British colonial government, and about how during the early 20th Century there was a period that could be seen as a golden age of liberalism in the Arab world. He then began to trace the rise of this liberal ideology, and the flowering of the Nahda – the Arabic renaissance.

Osman traced this story back to the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon in 1798. This shook Arabic culture out of a sense of complacency about its place in the world. In this pre-European-colonial-empires time there weren’t the same tensions between “the West” and “the Middle East” that there are now. Scholars and intellectuals from Egypt and other parts of the Arab world visited European countries and investigated European philosophy & science, with an eye to taking what ideas they could and integrating them into their own Arab way of life & their Islamic religion. This lead to a period called the Nahda, often translated as the Arab renaissance. This wasn’t seen as Europeanising, but more as modernising and regaining the place in the world that they used to have (back when Europe was in the “Dark Ages” and the Islamic world was the centre of intellectual development).

However the drive to modernise came at a cost. The economies of the Egypt and other Arab countries weren’t set up to generate enough money to buy the new modern industrial infrastructure that they were putting in. So they got in debt to the European nations, in particular Britain and France. When economies collapsed, or there were popular uprisings against the governments, the British or French would step in and directly rule the country concerned. But the Nahda continued, and there was a growing elite with more liberal values than the traditional conservative society of these countries. This elite was encouraged by the colonial authorities via diplomacy during and after the First World War to consider themselves a potential stepping stone to self-rule for their countries.

As always comes up in the modern history of the Middle East the First World War is where Britain and France really sow the seeds of the current political conflicts both internally to the countries concerned and between the Arab world and Europe. To get the various past and current constituent countries of the Ottoman Empire on the side of Britain and France in the war they were all promised self-rule and lands of their own. And in addition the Jews were promised territory in Palestine. Several of these promises were contradictory, but that isn’t even the worst bit about the situation – after the war most of the promises weren’t kept at all. Britain and France divided up the former Ottoman Empire between themselves, and the Arab states didn’t get self-rule.

The sense of betrayal in Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries was profound. Osman discussed the uprisings in Egypt (in 1919) and Syria against the colonial governments. Some initial amount of success – limited self-rule in Egypt after 1919, and a backing off of the French authorities in Syria (after the initial brutal crackdown) – lead the liberal elite to believe they had begun to achieve their goals. But the lack of results with Britain and France still holding onto the powers they wanted damaged the creditability of this elite with the rest of the population. Osman finished the programme by talking briefly about the movements that grew out this disillusionment with the liberal Westernised elite. One of these is the Arab nationalist movement, in particular the Ba’ath party in Syria, and the other is Islamism, in particular the Muslim Brotherhood which was founded in Egypt. These movements are the subject of the next couple of episodes.

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In Our Time: The Mamluks

The Mamluks were a slave army that went on to rule Egypt (and Egypt’s empire) for around 300 years between the mid 13th Century & the early 16th Century AD. Although we call it a dynasty the position of sultan was generally not hereditary during this period, and before one could be a sultan one needed to have been a slave. The three experts who discussed it on In Our Time were Amira Bennison (University of Cambridge), Robert Irwin (SOAS, University of London) and Doris Behrens-Abouseif (SOAS, University of London).

The Mamluk army was founded under the Ayyubid Dynasty, and soldiers were “recruited” i.e. bought as boys from Kipchak Turks who lived on the steppes, or from Circassians from the Caucasus. These peoples fought as a horse archers, and this was the skill they were purchased for. Once enslaved they were brought to Egypt where they were given a good education, and they were instructed in & converted to Islam. Bennison was keen to stress that this slavery was different to the US model that we are more familiar with – the Mamluks had high status, even as slaves, and in later times in particular were often freed once their education was finished.

When the last of the Ayyubid Sultans died, and his heir shortly after, his widow ruled in her own name for a while. She allied herself with the Mamluks, and subsequently married one of the Mamluk generals who became Sultan in her place. The experts were saying that the Mamluks used this to legitimise their rule – a sense of continuity with the old dynasty. They also did this by reinstating the Caliphate – the last Caliph had died in Baghdad when the Mongols sacked the city & when a relative of his turned up the Mamluk Sultans installed him as Caliph in Egypt. He was a figurehead, but one that meant they were seen as the legitimate Islamic rulers of Egypt & the surrounding area.

Even after they took power the Mamluks were “recruited” in the same way, from the same places. They were mostly a meritocracy – at the end of their education the best & brightest became Emirs and other members of the elite (not just leading the army but leading the country). The position of Sultan was also filled from the Mamluk ranks, and the experts said it was generally not hereditary although sometimes sons did succeed fathers. There was also a lot of assassination as a means of succession – which apparently was also the way in their original cultures, if you killed the King you were fit to be the King. I thought it was fascinating that for so long the Egyptians & surrounding areas were ruled by outsiders.

The “Sons of Mamluks” were generally born to Egyptian mothers, and the experts said they didn’t often enter the army. Instead they were privileged & pampered, and well educated – they tended to serve the country as the civilian bureaucracy. And these men are why the Mamluk era is so well documented by contemporaries – they wrote biographies & histories of their nation.

During the Mamluk era the borders of their empire were fairly static, they had no expansionist goals. They worked to oust the Christians from Syria, and even fought off the Mongols. Perhaps a bit of luck involved in the timing of that latter, as the leader of the Mongol army threatening them was actually back in Mongolia at the time to elect the new Great Khan. But another important factor was that for the first time the Mongols were facing an enemy who fought using their own tactics. Their rule didn’t crumble or collapse towards then end, instead they were conquered in one fell swoop by the Ottoman Empire who took advantage of the distraction of part of the Mamluk army by the Portuguese presence in the Red Sea.

The Mamluk era was generally peaceful & stable, and the experts said that the primary legacies of the Mamluks are in literature (including new poetic forms) and architecture. A lot of the classic buildings of Old Cairo were built by the Mamluk Sultans or their Emirs, and they were responsible for a lot of the infrastructure as well.

In Our Time: Prophecy

Prophecy is an important facet of all three Abrahamic religions, but the interpretation of the role of prophecy (& who the prophets are) is different in each. The experts who talked about it on In Our Time were Mona Siddiqui (University of Edinburgh), Justin Meggitt (University of Cambridge) and Jonathan Stökl (Leiden University).

For the modern incarnations of the three religions the bulk of the prophets are those attested to in the Hebrew Bible. Stökl was the expert on Judaism on the panel and so he talked most about these prophets. Prophets are divinely inspired and are in communication with God without being divine themselves. Nowadays when we think of prophecy we think of predicting the future, but this was only one of the sorts of messages that prophets could pass on from God. They also provided more general advice for the rulers about matters that the divine had some bearing on. They pronounced on the validity of old texts, they advised the King when to or when not to undertake campaigns, they’d advise him if God wasn’t happy with how the country was being run. Stökl was also saying that some figures in the Bible were retroactively designated as prophets – that Moses, for instance, was a charismatic leader and then later in Judaic history when prophets are more important he’s designated a prophet.

In terms of predicting the future most if not all of the descriptions of this in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible were written after the events that were predicted – so “prophesying” after the fact. (And actually there are no written texts dating before 200 BC, which means we don’t know how it evolved before this.) It was a win-win situation for the prophets anyway – if they got it wrong, then either they had misunderstood what God told them or God had some reason for telling them the wrong thing. Not that they weren’t a prophet, or that God had got it wrong. Jeremiah was the example here – God told him to tell the people something that turned out to be false & this was because it set up the punishment that God was going to visit on the people for previous wrong doing. There are warnings in the texts about false prophets and discussions of punishments for this, but there are actually no records of this ever happening.

Meggitt was the expert on Christianity & he talked about the way that early Christianity used the Jewish prophets to legitimise their belief that Christ was the Son of God. Obviously the Christian tradition is that prophets weren’t really getting the message across, so God himself had to come to earth in the person of Christ. The way the Christian Bible has ended up being structured means that the Old Testament ends with prophecies that Elijah is going to return and proclaim the day of the Lord. Although this is in the Hebrew Bible the way it is structured means that this isn’t where the book ends. Meggitt was saying that there’s a strong sense that the authors of the New Testament were looking for the prophecies in the Old Testament and then making sure they could find a bit of the life of Christ to fit them. The narrative being created to reflect the prophecy rather than the prophecy predicting the narrative.

In the early church there were still people being referred to as prophets, but as the Church became more institutionalised the role of the prophet diminished & then vanished. Meggitt was saying this was because lone self-selected divinely inspired people don’t really fit in well with a hierarchical organised Church. Bragg brought up the Pentecostal Church which is a modern Christian tradition which has prophets – so it’s not something that’s completely absent from Christianity. Just that as with Judaism the bulk of the religion thinks that prophecy stopped some time ago.

Siddiqui talked about Islam & the role of prophets in that religion. She told us that from an Islamic perspective all the prophets including Mohammed were given the same message or revelation from God. This message is about the oneness and truth of God, and has needed to be repeated because people fall away from it or fail to understand it. The differences in what was passed on or written down by each prophet & their followers are due to the interpretation of the prophet themself & their cultural blinders & ability to understand the message. Mohammed was able to properly understand and pass on God’s revelation, so there’s no need for any more prophets after him. Siddiqui also mentioned a distinction between prophets and messengers in Islam – I think she was saying that all messengers are prophets, but not all prophets are messengers. There’s some debate about whether the Virgin Mary is a prophet in the non-messenger sense because she is sinless, and this is one of the criteria for a prophet.

The way I’ve written this up it looks a little disjointed, but actually they followed the usual round table format & drew out the comparisons between the three strands as well as the differences. Although at times I felt like Siddiqui wasn’t quite having the same conversation as everyone else.

A History of Syria with Dan Snow; Howard Goodall’s Story of Music

Instead of starting TV night with our on-going series, we started with a documentary about Syria – watching it first because it was bound to be depressing viewing. A History of Syria with Dan Snow was a This World documentary that looked at the historical underpinnings of the current civil war, to put it into some sort of context. I’m sure I’m not going to manage to get everything right in my summary and being a current & politically charged subject I’m more conscious that errors may offend, I’ll still try & give some sort of feel for what Snow told us.

He started with a little bit of geography – showing us where Syria is on the map, and pointing out that it’s at the point of contact between Asia, Europe & Africa. So trade flows through the region, and empires butt heads across the region. In some ways the 5000 year history of the region could be summed up as “the Syrian people got screwed over by one big empire after another”. Snow only name checked the Egyptians & Assyrians, and got down to business properly with the Romans. Syria was a wealthy province under Roman rule, due to its location and the trade routes running through it. And the people converted to Christianity when the rest of the Empire did (if not before) – Syria was an important centre for Christianity until the Muslim conquest, and there is still a sizeable Christian minority in the region to this day. Snow visited a church service in Damascus, and talked briefly to a priest afterwards who was keen to stress his view that all Syrians were important regardless of religion, sect, ethnic background. Which was an optimistic way to start the programme.

Syria became part of the expanding Muslim empire very early on and then the capital of the (Sunni) Umayyad Caliphate was in Syria. The majority of the people living in Syria today are Sunni Muslims, and Snow said that the time of the Umayyads is looked back to as a kind of golden age for Syria by the Sunnis. He skipped lightly over the next few hundred years when Syria was first ruled over by an Egyptian centred Muslim empire, and then by the Ottoman Turks. The only key point from this era that he mentioned was the Crusades & the way they have shaped Arab feelings about Western intervention in the region. The next period he discussed in depth was the British Empire’s turn at screwing over the Syrians – this was during the First World War when the British allied with the native Syrians as a way of destabilising the Ottomans. This is the time of Lawrence of Arabia, and the war ends with the Arabs convinced that the British have promised them their own independent state – only the British had also promised most of the territory to the French & guess which promise gets kept? The French rule over Syria was imperialist & brutal, and there was a rebellion (which ultimately failed) in 1925. Snow talked to the daughter of the man who lead that rebellion & she talked about how she feels the current rebellion is the spiritual successor to her father’s rebellion.

Syria became independent in the 1930s, and the programme skipped lightly over the next period until we get to the seizing of power by Hafez al-Assad – but first it back-tracked to explain another bit of older history that is important to put this into context. Most of the Muslims (and indeed most of the people) in Syria are Sunnis, but the largest minority group is a Shia Muslim group of people called the Alawites who make up about 12% of the population of Syria. The division between Sunni & Shia Muslims goes back to immediately after the death of the Prophet, and has continued ever since. In Syria (and the region around Syria) the Alawites have been particularly persecuted – Snow was telling us that almost within living memory members of this group were unable to find work because of their religion. Assad was an Alawite, and rose to prominence via the military at a time when the Ba’athist political party were gaining in strength. Through two military coups (first that put the Ba’athists in power, then that put Assad himself in power) he took control of the country. Snow interviewed a Ba’athist political figure, a woman who is an advisor to the current government and was an advisor to Hafez al-Assad’s government. She emphasised the secular nature & policies of the Ba’athist party, dwelling on how Assad put schools into all the villages, and that women could get an education. What she didn’t mention was that the Assad regime was a tyrannical police state. Snow also interviewed a couple who had lived in Hama, a Syrian town, during the 1982 massacre that the government perpetrated there – theoretically to quell Muslim Brotherhood led insurrection, but actually tens of thousands of civilians were killed.

Assad’s Russian connections were also important – during the 60s he’d been an army leader at a time when Israel was flexing her muscles. And he gained a reputation as an Arab strongman, who’d helped the Arab world to recover it’s pride after defeat by Israel. I’m fairly unclear on the details of this bit to be honest – but the take home message was that Assad’s regime had both the backing of parts of the Arab world, and the backing of the Soviets as a counterpoint to the US backing of Israel.

So that’s almost all the pieces of the situation lined up – the last bit that’s needed is that once Hafez al-Assad died, his son Bashar inherited the presidency. He seemed at first to be likely to reform the police state nature of the Syrian state, and hopes were high that he’d move the regime towards a more open & democratic (and Western-friendly) state. But this was not the case, and he continued with his father’s policies – and methods.

The Arab Spring of 2011 was then the spark that lit the tinderbox. Snow’s interview with the couple from Hama also talked about this – they and their sons had been involved in the first protests, but are now living as refugees away from the fighting in Syria. One of the sons was saying that at first the protests were about wanting democracy, then once people started being killed it was about overthrowing the regime. The programme then cut back to the woman in the government who was saying that they had reacted to armed insurrection the way any government would – that the rebels were preventing the normal business of the country so the army had to be sent in to protect the state. With interviews with people on both sides of the conflict Snow showed that however it started it’s fragmented down the fault lines that history has provided – Sunni vs Alawite, secular vs religious, to name a couple. With the ordinary people being caught in the middle of it.

Sobering to watch – it seems like a situation where there’s so much history and ill-will on both sides both recent and dating from centuries ago that it’s hard to see how it can be resolved.

To follow that up, we watched the fifth episode of Howard Goodall’s Story of Music as something lighter weight to cheer us up before sleep! This was titled “The Age of Rebellions” and covered the period from the death of Wagner (in 1883) through to just before the First World War. Goodall opened by talking about how after the death of Wagner instead of several pseudo-Wagners continuing on with his style of music instead you have a movement away from a Wagnerian style – rebelling against it, if you like. Goodall seemed quite gleeful about this 🙂 So we heard some bits from Satie, Faure and other French composers of that era. Goodall also talked about Mahler in this segment & discussed how his symphonies & songs were a move to a more personally emotional music. Rather than writing some abstractly sad piece & calling it something general like “Nocturne” Mahler wrote songs about specific subjects like the death of a child.

Another of Goodall’s themes for the programme was the influence that folk music had on the classical music of the time – Mahler, for instance, incorporated the sounds & rhythms of the Jewish folk music of his upbringing. It was in Russia where this was a really striking trend. Previously Russian music had looked to the West rather to its own traditions of music, but in the late 19th Century this was to change. One of the major players in this change was Mussorgsky – and his music was different because he was not formally trained, and so didn’t know the “rules” that he was busy breaking. Not all of the composers influenced by Mussorgsky were Russian – Debussy heard Mussorgsky’s music at the World Fair in Paris. Debussy was also influenced by other music he heard there, like the Javanese musicians, and he incorporated these non-Western rhythms & tonalities into his music.

This breaking of the previous rules for composing music encouraged others to experiment even further. The ballets of Stravinsky (like Firebird & the Rite of Spring) with their overlayed rhythms & polyrhythms were a result of this experimentation, as was the dissonance & emotionality of Strauss’s opera Salome. We were shown a little of Salome & I don’t think I’ve any desire to see the whole opera 😉

The last segment of the programme was devoted to the new mainstream music that was beginning in this era – the blues and later ragtime and the beginnings of jazz. Goodall talked about how the blues and the spirituals grew out of the African-American’s musical traditions, both from the music that they remembered from their African origins & the Christianity they were converted to once in America. Goodall said it was controversial to suggest that there were any other influences on this music, but that he believed there were also traces of the music of European immigrants (in particular railroad workers) and also the Chinese railroad workers.

As this new music became more mainstream classical music began to decrease in popularity. Goodall told us that the reaction of classical composers was to write music that appealed to a sense of nostalgia. The music of Elgar is a part of this nostalgic music. And the programme ended with Goodall pointing out that this nostalgia was for the sort of elite lifestyle that was just about to end with the outbreak of World War I.

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Howard Goodall’s Story of Music; The Dark Ages: An Age of Light

The third episode of Howard Goodall’s Story of Music covered about a hundred years – from 1750 to 1850. This takes us from Haydn to Chopin via Mozart, Beethoven and more. Goodall’s two themes for the period were the changing social status of the composer, and the turn to simplicity in musical structure after the complexity of Bach etc.

At the start of the period composers were effectively servants – you found a rich patron and wrote him the music he wished. I’d guess it wasn’t that simple in reality, but that was the social status of the composer. Over this time period composers began to work freelance, and so their revenue stream also began to depend on the tastes of the paying audience. But it increased their social status, brought them above the salt so’s to speak.

The complexity of Bach’s fugues, and the moral uprightness of his & Handel’s work gave way in this era to the simpler forms of symphonies, and an emphasis on pleasant & entertaining music (having not much to do with the turbulent political times, that included the French & American Revolutions). Goodall talked about how the music became simpler both in overall structure and in harmonic structure. Simple is not being used as a value judgement here, incidentally. So in terms of overall structure he was saying that a lot of symphonies can be summed up as – take a short theme, repeat the same note pattern starting on a different note, finish with a phrase as long as the first two put together that brings us back to a satisfying conclusion. Then do it again. Which leaves a lot of room for different sorts of phrases and themes, and satisfying conclusions, but still gives an overall simple structure that the piece is constructed around.

In terms of harmonic structure he was saying that the numbers of different chords used in a single piece of music narrowed considerably – most of a piece of music now would be constructed on the first, third and fifth chords (for the key the music was in). He demonstrated with a couple of examples that this could be the sole chords used for about three quarters of a piece of music – all the other possibilities now only took up a relatively small proportion of the music. And then they had a short segment of a string quartet & singer all dressed up in 18th Century style playing what sounded like chamber music of the time, and then you realised the words the woman was singing were the words for Rockin’ All Over the World … which lead into a joke about how these three chords are “still the status quo in much music of today” *groan* 🙂

Goodall also talked about how Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony inspired other composers to use their music to paint pictures in sound (Mendelssohn was his example of one of these composers). And he talked about the single voice & piano songs of composers like Schubert – and compared them with the novels of Jane Austen with which they’re approximately contemporary, and pointed out that Schubert’s emotional maturity etc come off rather poorly compared to Austen. This was another point where the long-lasting nature of the music of this period was pointed out – we first had a man singing a Schubert love song, which was juxtaposed with a clip of Adele singing Someone Like You. Definitely felt like they were both a part of the same tradition.

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Waldemar Januszczak moved on to discuss the art of Islam in the third episode of his series about the art of the Dark Ages.

And somehow I haven’t ended up with much to say about this one. I’m not sure why – I think I ended up approaching it as more “look at the pretty things” than anything else.

Januszczak visited several places where you find Islamic art (mostly but not all mosques), and discussed not just the beauty of the mosaics, buildings etc but also the religious symbolism behind some of it. (And hopefully got it right – a lot was stuff I hadn’t heard before). Throughout the programme he also placed quite a strong emphasis on how modern more fundamentalist traditions of Islamic art aren’t the only ones – there was figurative art from early on, not just “decadent princes” decorating palaces with things they shouldn’t, but also in art that was intended to represent paradise and to have religious worth.

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Andrew Marr’s History of the World; Wartime Farm

The fourth episode of Andrew Marr’s History of the World was mostly about the European Renaissance – but not about what happened during it. Instead it was about what happened in the rest of the world that made it possible for Europe to go from being a cultural backwater to a vibrant civilisation with pretensions towards becoming one of the dominant cultures of the world. We did open with the Vikings, tho, who were a little shoehorned into the theme (but you can’t really miss them out). In 10 minutes it only had time to skim over the ground covered in Neil Oliver’s 3 part series – the emphasis here was firmly on the founding of Russia when the Vikings took over the area around Kiev (founding Kiev itself) and ruling the native Slavs. I think the relationship to the theme was supposed to be how Russia provided a large (Orthodox) Christian country to the east of Europe, expanding Christendom considerably & insulating northern & western Europe from the various empires to the East.

The programme then moved on to look at the rise of the Mongols – Marr told us some of Temujin’s early life story, before he became Ghengis Khan. Then looked at how after the conquest of China (impressive in its own right) the Mongol army took on Chinese war technology and this combination of the horse nomad warriors & the great siege machines led to them sacking several of the core cities of the eastern Islamic world. Which obviously weakened the Islamic empire – allowing those pesky European crusading knights to have more successes than they otherwise would have. (The Crusades weren’t really touched on much in the programme, the emphasis was on showing more of the stuff we probably didn’t already know about the era.) And also opened up the Silk Road more – ruled over now by a Mongol Empire. The next sequence was about Marco Polo who travelled from Venice to the heart of China during the time it was ruled by Kublai Khan, and acted as an ambassador for the Khan for a while. (If he is to be believed, or indeed even existed …) And this opening up of trade across the whole of Europe & Asia also had the unfortunate side-effect of bringing diseases across the whole land – the Black Death originally broke out in China, and was spread by traders across the whole landmass. Moving on in history he also covered the final fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks.

Other subjects covered were the mathematical & scientific golden age of the Islamic world during the period we call in Europe as “the Dark Ages” – concentrating on the work of Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (I totally copied that spelling from wikipedia, so I hope it’s right! He’s the chap whose work was developed into the modern concept of algorithms, so called from the Europeanisation of his last name.) And the meeting between the Mali Empire & the rest of the world (effectively) when Mansa Musa visited Cairo en route to Mecca when he was performing the Hajj. This both collapsed Cairo’s economy (he and his entourage gave away so much gold that the price of gold plummeted and took 10 years to recover), and introduced the Europeans & the Middle East to someone to buy gold from. I think he said that within a century 20% of the gold in Europe came from mines in Mali.

And we finished with Leonardo da Vinci & the painting of the Last Supper – which (along with lots of Leonardo’s other interests) in many ways draws upon & expands the artistic, mathematical and scientific knowledge gained by the Europeans trading with the Islamic world & beyond.

This is one of my favourite bits of history, so it wasn’t a surprise I already sort of knew most of it already (still fun to watch, though 🙂 ). But I was amused to note how many of the names of people I knew as leaders in the game Civilization IV 🙂

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For the second programme of the evening we watched the first episode of Wartime Farm. We’d been a little dubious about this from the description, so were prepared to bail if we decided we didn’t like it. But actually it was a really interesting programme with less dramatisation than I’d feared. The premise is a group of historians/archaeologists living on a farm for a year working the land the way that it would’ve been done during the Second World War. For this first episode they were mostly concentrating on the first year or so of the war, and on how farms throughout Britain were being reorganised in a massive agricultural revolution to double their food output. Most of Britain’s food was imported pre-war & the threat of a U-boat blockade meant that this couldn’t continue after war was declared. The presenters told us about things from a mix of a modern & an in character perspective, melding the two together during any single section. Which sounds like it should end up a mess & hard to follow, but actually worked really well. So Ruth Goodman told us about the kitchen conveniences she was getting both by showing us how they worked in a way that wouldn’t quite’ve been necessary for people of the time (pointing out how much quicker it is to mop a lino floor than scrub a stone one), but also exclaiming over how modern things were (like the paraffin heated stove rather than a range). The “modernisation” of the farm included using a tractor instead of horses – much quicker to plough once you got it going. Once you got it going … easier said than done, it seemed. And getting an oil driven electricity generator, that let you charge up big batteries and then have lights on after dark!

There were also interviews with people who either remembered the war (an old chap who’d been 7 and a farmer’s son when war broke out, and remembered the switch to using tractors etc) or were experts on parts of the history of it. The bit that was most startling to me was that I had no idea that there were trained guerilla groups made up mostly of farmers (it was a reserved occupation) and farmer’s wives (in the intelligence arm of the organisation). These were top secret at the time, and were effectively a resistance movement in waiting – and people kept it very very secret, they told us that there were couples who were both in the organisation but didn’t tell each other until decades after the end of the war. And the historian who was telling us about that bit said he had done interviews with surviving members who would only discuss people who had already died, not any still living ex-members. It really brought home how much they believed that Britain was going to be invaded, which it’s easy to gloss over from my perspective as someone born about 30 years after the war ended – it’s history to me & I know we won without being invaded, and you hear more about the Blitz and D-Day than you do the rest of the war.

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