Islam had at times hoped to expand further northward, and mounted military campaigns to capture Vienna in 1529, 1683, and other times. Islam also invaded and briefly occupied parts of Poland and Ukraine.
The reign of Ahmed III from 1703 to 1730 saw another stirring of Islamic expansionism. He oversaw the Muslim armies which invaded what is now Romania, Ukraine, and Russia in 1711; this invasion was ultimately unsuccessful. Likewise, he ordered his armies to attack Venice; Austria came to the aid of Venice, and in 1716, Prince Eugene of Savoy led an Austrian army to defeat the Islamic army in the Battle of Petrovaradin (also known as Peterwardein).
Describing Islam in the mid-1700s, historian Will Durant explains the expanse of its influence:
It still dominated Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Persia, Asia Minor, the Crimea, South Russia, Bessarabia, Moldavia, Wallachia (Romania), Bulgaria, Serbia (Yugoslavia), Montenegro, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Greece, Crete, the Aegean Isles, and Turkey. All these except Persia were part of the immense empire of the OttomanTurks. On the Dalmatian coast they touched the Adriatic and faced the Papal States; on the Bosporus they controlled the sole naval outlet from the Black Sea, and could at will block the Russians from the Mediterranean.
He surveys Islamic culture from Turkey to North Africa to Persia, and then presents his generalizations.
Although he admired Islam and often praised it, Will Durant was not blind to the fact that Muslim “women stayed at home, or walked” subservient “under their burdens and behind their veils.” He gives the date of 1754 for significant Ottoman legislation which made even stricter the requirement for veils and burqas, but he does not cite the source of this date.
Infatuated with a romanticized concept of Islam — an image promulgated by some European poets — Durant describes the Muslim women, wrapped in burqas, carrying baskets or large clay jars on their head, as moving with a “certain ease and grace” and “in stately dignity.” He is either oblivious to, or deliberately disguising, the oppression under which these women lived and worked — or perhaps he sees the situation clearly, and is honoring the character of these women as they carry on despite the most brutal subjugation.
While Christianity appeared as, and developed ever more into, a personal spirituality or belief, Islam constituted a political, social, and military program, as Will Durant explains:
Religion was more powerful and pervasive in Islam than in Christendom; the Koran was the law as well as the gospel, and the theologians were the official interpreters of the law.
Islamic morals were entrenched. The social patterns of Islam persevered. While Christianity promoted an ethic, Islam promoted a morality, as Will Durant writes:
Morals hardly changed from century to century. Puberty came earlier than in the north; many girls married at twelve or thirteen, some at ten; to be unmarried at sixteen was a disgrace.
In the passage quoted above, Durrant’s partiality towards Islam can be detected. If there were any difference between the north and the south in the onset of puberty, then it was indeed slight. No biologist will claim otherwise. Instead, it was merely Islam’s authorization to allow unrestrained male lust. The same was true of “the polygamy that Koranic law allowed.”
The Qur’an dictated such inequality. The same asymmetry in the legal treatment of women was applied to cases of adultery:
A cuckolded husband was not only permitted by law, but was encouraged by public opinion, to put the offending wife to death.
Forgiveness, not only in the case of an adultress, was rare or unknown. “Islamic theology,” writes Durrant, “considered woman a main source of evil, which could be controlled only by her strict subordination. Children grew up in the discipline of the harem.” Women moved “with a certain” motion, which they derived “from carrying burdens.”
The physical role of women in Islam was clear, as Durrant explains:
Polygamy did not prevent prostitution, for prostitutes could provide the excitation that familiarity had allayed. The courtesans of Egypt specialized in lascivious dances; some ancient monuments reveal the antiquity of this lure. Every large town allotted to prostitutes a special quarter where they might practice their arts without fear of the law.
Christianity’s earliest sources were not in Europe, but rather in the same ancient near east which also birthed Islam. Yet while Christianity imperfectly but increasingly gave status to women, Islam did the opposite. While Hildegard of Bingen was issuing written rebukes to popes and kings, Muslim women were bound by their gender to subservient roles.
Yet strict legalism sires energetic defiance.
So it was that Islamic civilizations, based upon the most stringent of written legal codes, rebelled correspondingly in the most excessive exploitation of women. The laws of the Muslims repressed sexuality in an extreme way, so the lives of the Muslims violated those laws in the most extreme way. Islamic rigidity fueled Islamic hypocrisy.
Women skilled in erotic dances were engaged to vibrate before male assemblies, and in some cases, women also took pleasure in witnessing such performances.
Again, Durrant’s fondness for Islam persuades him to understate, or to phrase in the most gentle way, his description of what was standard practice in Islamic society in the mid-1700s. The reader will understand what a less euphemistic account of these realities might be.
