Window on Eurasia

Orthodox Better Off under Islamic Rule Rather than Catholic, Muslim Says

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 17, 2006 – However counterintuitive it may seem, Orthodox
Christians have often been treated better and had their faith protected
when they have lived under Muslim rule than when their community has
been part of a state dominated by Catholicism, according to a Muslim
commentator from Tatarstan.

In an essay clearly directed at both Orthodox Christians and Muslims in
the Russian Federation, Akhmad Davletshin writes that what may seem
“unthinkable and improbable now” was “the real situation” at
many points in the history of the two cultures
[http://www.islamnews.ru/index.php?name+Articles&file=article7sod=509].

Despite the images of the other that many in each faith now have,
Muslims and Christians, two of the three Koran-based montheistic
“peoples of the book” -- the Jews are the third -- have often been
able to cooperate and Muslims have protected Christians and especially
Orthodox groups.

Only 15 years after Mohammed’s flight from Mecca to Medina, the
moment from which the Muslim calendar begins, Khalif Umar reached an accord
with Patriarch Sofronii of Jerusalim committing himself to protecting
Christians, their churches and their holy places.

Later, when Muslim armies occupied what is now Egypt and Syria, Umar
extended that commitment to Christians there, and while relations
between the two were not always perfect, the Christians were
sufficiently content with their status under the rule of the Muslims
that many of them worked for the khalif, Davletshin notes.

This same pattern was true in Slavic regions under the Golden Horde,
the Tatar scholar argues. In the Slavic portions of Eurasia under the rule
of the horde, “Orthodoxy remained integral and fully preserved,”
even benefiting from special tax benefits. But in those under Catholic
rule, the Orthodox were subjected to “all sorts of persecutions.”

The Grand Principality of Lithuania, whose leadership initially
included “a significant Muslim element” among the pagan rulers, did not
oppress the Orthodox either. But once Lithuania united with Catholic
Poland, the government of that state not only viewed the Orthodox as
“schismatics” but forcibly converted many of them.

After Muslim forces took Constantinople in 1453, Davletshin continues,
“the absolute majority of Orthodox Christians found themselves living
in Muslim countries – Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor, the Balkans, and the
eastern portion of the Russian principalities.”

Throughout this area, the Orthodox were not subjected to persecution,
unlike in those Orthodox lands “which fell under European control –
Poland, Hungary, the German principalities, and the Venetian and Genoan
republics.” There, Orthodox Christians were either “destroyed or
cruelly persecuted.”

Indeed, Davletshin says, in the eastern portions of Europe, it was
“precisely the Muslim forces [that] preserved Orthodoxy as a separate
confession,” something Catholic rulers to the west were in almost
every case not prepared to do.

On the one hand, Davletshin almost certainly overstates his case. In
many places even during the periods he discusses, individual Muslim
rulers behaved badly toward Orthodox subjects, even though the Koran
and the earliest traditions of Islam required them to treat Christian and
Jewish communities with respect.

But on the other, Davletshin’s argument is important both for
Russia’s Muslim community and for Russian Orthodox believers there as
well. For the former, it is a reminder that Muslims not only have the
responsibility to treat Orthodoxy with respect but have done so
frequently in the past.

And for the latter, it is an extension, from a Muslim source, of an
argument that has been ongoing in the Russian media for the last two
years concerning the medieval Russian Prince Aleksandr Nevskiy.

Nevskiy whose fame rests on his defeat of the Teutonic knights in an
ice battle on Lake Peipus, a fight immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s
film, in effect fought for Russia on the side of the Mongol horde
rather than uniting with Christians in Europe to fight off the Muslim horde as
his brother and many other Russian princes chose to do.

The current debate has focused on whether he made the right choice,
with most Russian participants arguing that he did. Had the Teutonic knights
been simply the representatives of the German emperor, most
participants say, then Nevskiy should have joined them.

But the Teutonic knights were also fighting for the Catholic pope, many
Russian writers have argued. And if Nevskiy had joined with them
against the Mongols, they insist, Russia would have become a second Poland, a
development totally unacceptable to the increasingly nationalist and
anti-Western mood of Russia today.

Davletshin is clearly and cleverly playing to those feelings. But he is
also clearly asking Russians to consider whether in fact the shifting
demographics in their country, one in which ethnic Russians are on the
decline and historically Muslim groups on the rise, may once again save
not only Orthodoxy but Russia itself.

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