While Continental Europe – the cradle of Western civilization – spares no one in preaching human rights and democracy, it has repeatedly demonstrated that this moral crusade has rarely gone beyond rhetoric when viewed against its role in the colonization of much of the world and the atrocities committed in the aftermath. In this respect, Continental Europe’s record is a heavy one. Yet, this is not a new phenomenon; a look at its past reveals that its record was far worse than it is today. It is precisely this past that renowned Turkish academic Şener Aktürk’s book "The Origins of the Modern World: The Destruction of Muslims and Jews in Western Europe" sheds light on. In the book, Aktürk offers a comprehensive analysis of how Muslims and Jews were systematically subjected to genocide in medieval Europe in the process of creating a homogeneous Continental Europe, as well as the underlying dynamics behind this process.
Aktürk examines a 470-year period between 1059 and 1529 in his study. Placing at the center of the systematic genocide directed against Muslims and Jews the clerical establishment led by the papacy, which rose during this period as a supranational power, Aktürk explains through concrete examples how the clergy’s step-by-step implementation of exclusionary – and ultimately annihilatory – policies toward non-Christians was facilitated by rivalry among Catholic monarchies. Strengthened by the Gregorian Reforms at the beginning of this period, clerical power reached its most magnificent phase during the pontificate of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216). With the Dictatus Papae decree issued in 1075, Gregory VII granted the pope the authority to depose kings, thereby positioning the papacy above monarchies as a supranational power.
During this period, the Papacy first set out by redefining non-Christian minorities in explicitly exclusionary terms: “The exclusionary redefinition of religious minorities reached a critical threshold when, at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Catholic Church stigmatized non-Christians by obliging them to wear distinctive clothing and physically segregated them by forcing them to live in separate areas...” This step, however, was not considered sufficient. As Muslims and Jews were increasingly physically segregated from society, pressure mounted on contemporary monarchies to compel their conversion. To this end, a wide array of instruments was gradually deployed, ranging from excommunication and the penalty of interdict – depriving an entire kingdom of religious services – to the establishment of Inquisition courts and the organization of Crusades.
Similarly, the mendicant orders (the Dominicans and Franciscans) were mobilized for the same purpose. In addition, Catholic military orders such as the Knights Templar and the Knights of St. John, or Hospitallers, were deployed in the field. By also using the approval of dynastic marriages as part of this process, the pope acquired the ability to depose rulers whom he had excommunicated. In this way, the noose was fully tightened around Muslim and Jewish communities, which constituted significant populations in many countries.
Moreover, the Papacy is seen to have taken two decisive steps to enforce religious homogenization in Continental Europe – that is, to eliminate Muslim and Jewish communities that constituted substantial populations in many countries. First, non-Christians were deemed to be the property of the ruler; second, they were judged not even to count as human beings. By positing a link between the capacity for reason and being Christian, it was argued that those who possessed rational capacity were Christians, and therefore that non-Christians lacked such capacity and could not be regarded as human. In effect, this judgment that non-Christians were not to be considered human laid the foundations of Orientalism, which would prove highly influential for a long period and continues to shape thought today. As prominent American academic Edward Said famously pointed out, Orientalism silences the “East,” which is no longer even regarded as human, depriving it of the ability to speak for itself. The West then begins to produce representations of the East on its own terms. Within this one-sided production of narratives, crimes committed by the West are no longer treated as crimes and can be comfortably presented as acts of civilization bestowed by the West upon the East.
At this point, words run out. What follows, in the author’s terms, is the advent of “papal imperialism.” Systematic genocide begins everywhere. The outcome is nothing short of a catastrophe: “From the capture of Barbastro in 1064 and the massacre of Muslims to the annihilation of the Muslims of Aragon in 1526, the Catholic clergy ensured the destruction of non-Christians – above all Muslims and Jews – through deportations, forced conversions and mass killings across Western European countries. This process rendered Western Europe the most religiously homogeneous region in the world...” Yet, prior to the genocide, Muslims constituted the largest non-Christian minorities in Spain, Italy, Hungary, and Portugal, while Jews held the same position in England and France (p. 64). Developments in Spain were particularly dramatic (p. 89): “Thus, while Muslims had once formed an overwhelming majority, reaching up to 80% of the population in Spain, by the end of the 15th century – when efforts to eliminate the Muslim presence were reaching completion – they had been reduced to a minority of only around 7%...” Therefore, as Aktürk emphasizes, the religiously homogeneous demography visible in modern-day Continental Europe is not a natural condition, but the result of a determined and deliberate effort sustained over 470 years.
In sum, as Aktürk himself notes, although genocide, ethnic cleansing and population engineering are often treated in the social sciences as crimes committed by nationalist actors in the post-nation-state era, in reality the largest instances of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and population engineering occurred in Continental Europe in the pre-nation-state period, directed against Muslims and Jews.
Therefore, such crimes in the modern era are not so much novel as they are part of a continuity in the case of Continental Europe. We witnessed traces of this continuity in the recent past, in the very heart of Europe, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bosnia is not a random geography. It was a land where multiculturalism, multireligious coexistence, and a lived experience of living together had been sustained. Before the war, Bosniak Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Jews lived side by side in Sarajevo. The Bosnian war, coupled with Western silence, led to one of the gravest human tragedies in the heart of Europe.
The arms embargo imposed at the outset of the war prevented the correction of the imbalance in military capabilities to the detriment of Bosnian Muslims, thereby paving the way for massacres. Bosnia's legendary leader, Alija Izetbegovic, forcefully stated that the immorality of the West’s initial intervention must never be forgotten, in his speech at the German Council on Foreign Relations on March 17, 1995: “The international community did intervene in this war, but in a manner that should never have occurred. This must never be forgotten! The intervention took place in practice only through an arms embargo that affected solely the victim of aggression. Instead of helping us through military intervention, instead of arming us, the world did the opposite. It prohibited the arming of the country under attack and deprived us of our most legitimate and most natural right: self-defense.”
In July 1995, one of the darkest chapters of the Bosnian War was written. In Srebrenica, a town designated a U.N. “safe area,” 8,372 Bosniak civilians were systematically massacred in a zone under the control of Dutch troops. The massacre marked not only the killing of the people of Bosnia but also the killing of the universal values that Western civilization claims to uphold – human rights, freedom and the right to life. After World War II, Europe had proclaimed that it had established a normative order centered on human dignity, declaring “never again.” Yet, Srebrenica once more demonstrated that, when Muslims are concerned, this claim has rarely gone beyond assertion. As thousands of Muslim civilians were slaughtered in an area for which the U.N. had guaranteed security, the silence of the Western world laid bare how selectively the discourse of human rights can be applied in the face of a tragedy suffered by a Muslim people.
On the other hand, all these crimes find their counterpart in a different imagery within the Western mind through Orientalist rhetoric about the East. Muslim geographies continue to be portrayed persistently as regions where order, prosperity, and peace are impossible, places identified with violence and chaos. Consequently, what happened in Srebrenica was also presented, through an Orientalist lens, as part of the “natural” course of history. A similar picture confronts us in Gaza today. While international law is openly violated, children are killed, and hospitals and schools are bombed, much of the West remains silent or continues to produce Orientalist discourses that legitimize the attacks. In this way, the tragedies endured by Muslims are not framed in the Western imagination as human catastrophes but are instead presented almost as the natural fate of the geography itself.
