Urgent Task for Turkey and Europe: Reveal True European History to Europeans

The French president's irrelevant suggestions about an eventual need for Turkey to undergo a cultural revolution have been properly answered by the Turkish prime minister. However, they reflect a reality that goes to the opposite direction of what J. Chirac may have thought. Turkey will have to work a lot at the cultural level. That is true! But things do not and cannot happen unidimensionally.

If Turkey must undergo a Cultural Revolution, Europe must submit itself to a similar procedure and experience. A lot is missing on both sides. Whereas in an earlier article (Top Priority for Turkey and Europe: Clarify Identity and Limit Confusion! / http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/10-5-2005-78210.asp) we focused on the need for clarity, in the present article we will present the cultural issues that must become the epicenter of matured debate and ultimately lead Europe and Turkey together to a Cultural – Intellectual Revolution.

European History hinges on and encompasses Islam - to very large extent

We start from the most common argument against the Turkish candidacy for European Union membership, namely the fact that Turkey is the first Muslim country to become member.

Why should one be astonished with this reality? Only if based on erroneous and misconceived historical education, one would be surprised with the adhesion of a Muslim country in the European Union. Yet, quite unfortunately, the historical reality is constantly if not permanently disregarded and misrepresented in almost all the countries of Europe. Italians or Spaniards, French and English, Germans and Austrians still express an anti-Islamic animosity, as if we live at the times of Andrea Doria, who in 1532, when Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent threatened Hungary, landed on the western coast of Greece, then Ottoman province, took Corone and Patras, and even meditated an attack on Istanbul.

We do not live at the times of the Norman Reconquista of Sicily, 1061 – 1087, and in multicultural, secular Europe no one can think of having the hands of Muslims cut off, as the Normans did in Palermo. European Union cannot afford to have another Palermo Porta Nuova erected in the years 2005. This unforgettable monument (situated at the beginning of Corso Vittorio Emanuele) with its imposing mass, majolica-tiled pinnacle, and the enormous busts of the four Muslims, represented as prisoners with mutilated arms, cannot be an example in the 3rd millennium.

In the same way, Europeans learned not to have the hands of Muslims cut off, they must now realize that they cannot afford to have part of real European History cut off the European Primary and Secondary Education manuals. We must start with correct terms; if European intellectuals and statesmen, academia and Human Rights activists want real progress for the unified continent, terms like Moors, Saracens, and Arabs cannot be used anymore with regard to the population of Islamic Sicily, Crete or Spain. When introduced, at a period of vociferous and abysmal hatred, these terms were deprecatory. In addition, they do not depict the historical reality, since the outright majority of the Muslims in the three aforementioned parts of southern Europe were local Cretans, Sicilians and Iberians.

Europe is famous for its research centers and universities; at times excellent historical studies are published but they are then kept secret from the great public, and leave no trace on the historical manuals of the Primary and Secondary Education, where the falsehood and the misconception is preserved for long. To give an example, we may cite here the pertinent study of the Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily by Jeremy Johns of the University of Oxford.

In his book (http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521816920), the British Orientalist (http://faculty.orinst.ox.ac.uk/staff/index2.php?member=johns) focuses on Norman Sicily, and through use of Sicilian Arabic documents he demonstrates that the Norman kings restructured their administration on the model of the contemporary administration of Fatemid Egypt, which means contemporaneous Islamic political influence going beyond the simple level of Islamic rule over Sicily. Jeremy Johns argues that this choice was due to the fact that the Norman rulers of Sicily cared mostly about ways to project their royal image, not just administrative efficiency. For more than 150 years after the Norman Reconquista of Sicily, the local population was predominantly Muslim.

Such studies should make their way onto manuals and magazines, newspapers and TV programs, radio emissions and documentary movies. If the European political pledge against discrimination and racism is true, then there is reason to pass on an alarming warning because of the prevailing - among average Europeans - ignorance of the Islamic roots and dimensions of Modern Europe.

Islam in Europe was an overwhelming phenomenon: in 9 out of the present 25 member states of the European Union (more than one third), there was Islamic rule, culture, art, science and civilization over part of, or their entire, territory for at least some centuries: Portugal, Spain, France (Corsica), Italy, Malta, Hungary, Slovakia, Greece, and Cyprus. Shorter presence was noted in Austria.

If we view Europe in its totality, there was Islamic rule, culture, art, science and civilization in no less than 20 countries (so almost half of Europe's states). Of course, as it is known, the most important centers of Islamic cultural and political power in Europe were the Balkans and the Iberian Peninsula.

In a way we can divide Europe in two parts, namely the part that became familiar with the Islamic Culture and the part that has been left out of the Islamic circumference. When making this division, if we take into account the purely geographical dimension of the historical facts, we easily note that more than half of the European territory (European part of Russia included) has belonged to Islamic culture and power. All this remains unknown to or unfelt and voluntarily forgotten by the average Europeans in the year 2005!

Measures to take for the pertinent familiarization of the European peoples with Islam

Basic aim of the European Colonial Historiography has always been to demonize Islam, to depict it as something barbaric, 'other', odd and alien, to present it as a sort of 'Arabo-Muslim Civilization', and to hide from the European public the foremost contributions of the Islamic Civilization to the History of the Mankind. To do so, European bogus intellectuals and disastrous politicians passed under silence the presence of Islam on European soil, the vicinity and the interactions between the Islamic world and Europe, and mostly the common background of the two entities that were falsely considered as 'two worlds' supposedly opposed to each other. All this led average European and American masses to ignorance, confusion, and darkness.

Turkey and Europe must work on a vast common cultural – educational project of pertinent presentation of Islam to the European public, correcting, amending and even criticizing the errors of the earlier misleading presentation. The correct presentation of the Islamic Civilization to the European public opinion must turn around the following axes:

1. As it happens within the context of every civilization, there has been a great variety of approaches, interpretations, theories and philosophical - ideological systems within Islam. What matters for Europeans is the European Islam.

2. Instead of confusing European readership with Islamic practices in Sahara and in Central Asia, the main focus must be on
a. Islamic commentary on, and interpretation, use, adaptation of, erudite scholars and philosophers who belong to European cultural background. An example is given by Jelaleddin Rumi Mevlana, the central figure of Turkish Sufism, founder of the Order of the Whirling Derviches, and author of the vast poetical – philosophical composition 'Mathnawi' (http://muslim-canada.org/sufi/book1rumi.htm). In this colossal work, Jelaleddin Rumi (1207 – 1273, died in Konya/Iconium) composed a Neo-Platonic adaptation of Islam that could be easily diffused and accepted by the Greek speaking populations of Anatolia.

b. Islamic representation of figures of the Antiquity, Babylonian, Hebrew, Egyptian, Greek and Roman. To offer an example, the foremost position accorded to Alexander the Great in works such as Shahnameh of Ferdowsi (Persian / 10th century) and Sekander Nameh of Nezami (Azeri Turk / 12th century) that seem to have assessed material already found in Pseudo-Callisthenes' Alexander Romance bears witness to the common background, concepts, values, and approaches of both, Islam and Europe.

c. Academic, theoretical, ideological, philosophical and theological exchanges, interactions and juxtapositions. It is essential for the average Europeans to know that the first Eastern Roman references to the explosion of Muhammad's prophecy, the Medieval Greek Historian Theophanes, and the Chronicle Paschale, do not depict Islam but as a latest Nestorian heresy and Christological dispute. The exchange of scholars and manuscripts between Constantinople and Abbasid Baghdad, the Islamic influence on the Quarrel over Icons within the Eastern Roman Empire, the free Islamic – Islamophile choice of medieval European erudite scholars like Hermann of Karantania (Carinthia), who lived in the 12th century and was among the top bridges between the two academia, the study of the Ancient World by European Muslim scholars either in Andalusia or in the Ottoman Empire, the artistic – architectural exchanges on European soil, all this must replace the repetitive eulogies of the 'Greco-Roman' heritage of Europe that – alone – gives a false impression about the continent's pluralistic cultural past.

3. A moment of repentance and regret is necessary for Europe. The various reconquistas pursued here and there from Iberia through Sicily to the Balkans signified the demolition of many mosques and medresas, the destruction of valuable manuscripts and artistic masterpieces, the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Jews, the expulsion of many. If we want to build a healthy and righteous Europe, we cannot limit the regret and the penitence in the 20th century. Europe has been the continent of many cases of genocide before the last one, and this must be acknowledged, denounced and regretted.

4. A vast project should be undertaken and bring in cooperation numerous Turkish and European Universities that will encompass exchange of scholars and students, a long list of lectures and courses, research programs and Ph.D. topics, and it must be genuinely popularized in the press throughout Europe. To this, various exhibitions, publication projects, newsletters and magazines should be added. Furthermore, a special committee should be formed to study, conclude and suggest the proper changes, amendments and additions for the Primary and Secondary Education manuals for all the countries of Europe.

With all this ends a first part of the Euro-Turkish Cultural Rapprochement and Revolution that will reveal to modern Europeans some of the most authentic moments of European Culture that went under oblivion for too long.