(^394) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
his defeat was a setback for humanity. So when, beginning in the
eleventh century in Spain and the Levant, Christian knights came to
push the faithful back and to occupy lands once part of the House of
Islam, Muslims saw this as the triumph of evil. And when, in the east
ern Mediterranean, Muslim armies drove the crusaders into the sea,
this was not simply victory, but God's victory, the restoration of order
and a redress of history. The expulsion of the Christian crusader king
doms of the Levant became a kind of paradigm, a metaphor for all
time. When, almost a millennium later, Saddam Hussein of Iraq seized
Kuwait and took on the coalition of Western powers and their Muslim
toadies, he did so in the name and memory of Saladin, the Kurdish
chief who took Jerusalem back from the infidel.*
From that peak moment (1187), the course of Islam was mostiy
downhill. Not that the religion languished. It continued to make gains,
especially among populations of animistic belief. The message of Islam
is simple; the act of conversion also. Of the great monotheistic faiths,
it makes the least demands on the new adherent, at least in the begin
ning, t But insofar as Islam links faith to power and dominion, as it
does, the loss of might relative to infidel societies became a source of
profound despair or active anguish. For a long time, the problem of de
cline was concealed by the sustained autonomy of Muslim states, the
diversion of European power to other parts of the world, the instances
of local triumph (in particular the territorial gains of the Ottoman
Turks), the apparent imperviousness of Islam. But from the seven
teenth century on, no one who looked around could be blind to the
shifting balance of world power. Islam had become an economic and
intellectual backwater. History had gone awry.
In two places this clash of faiths and empires was critical for the
larger course of history: Moghul India, where the British began gob
bling territory, revenues, and sovereignty; and the Ottoman empire,
where the sultan's writ was flouted and his lands gnawed by the pre
tensions of Christian neighbors and the derived nationalism of Chris
tian subjects. Both these entities were aristocratic (despotic) empires in
the classical mold: societies divided between a small elite and a large
mass of fleeceable subjects. Above the prime divider that separated the
few and the many, nobles and officials held limitiess power. They had
- Cf. Charnay, Traumatismes musulmans, p. 314. The Christian campaign in the
Gulf was seen as a reprise of the crusader hatred for the Islamic spiritual heritage. - I exclude from this comparison the phenomenon of forced conversion, which ob
viously makes no demands on faith or preparation.