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Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy Paperback – Illustrated, January 15, 2012
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During the 1920s Belgian historian Henri Pirenne came to an astonishing conclusion: the ancient classical civilization, which Rome had established throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world, was not destroyed by the Barbarians who invaded the western provinces in the fifth century, it was destroyed by the Arabs, whose conquest of the Middle East and North Africa terminated Roman civilization in those regions and cut off Europe from any further trading and cultural contact with the East. According to Pirenne, it was only in the mid-seventh century that the characteristic features of classical life disappeared from Europe, after which time the continent began to develop its own distinctive and somewhat primitive medieval culture.
Pirenne’s findings, published posthumously in his Mohammed et Charlemagne (1937), were even then highly controversial, for by the late nineteenth century many historians were moving towards a quite different conclusion: namely that the Arabs were actually a civilizing force who rekindled the light of classical learning in Europe after it had been extinguished by the Goths, Vandals and Huns in the fifth century. And because Pirenne went so diametrically against the grain of this thinking, the reception of his new thesis tended to be hostile. Paper after paper published during the 1940s and ‘50s strove to refute him. The most definitive rebuttal however appeared in the early 1980s. This was Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe, by English archaeologists Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse. These, in common with Pirenne’s earlier critics, argued that classical civilization was already dead in Europe by the time of the Arab conquests, and that the Arabs arrived on the scene as civilizers rather than destroyers. Hodges and Whitehouse claimed that the latest findings of archaeology fully supported this view, and their work was highly influential. So influential indeed that over the next three decades Pirenne and his thesis was progressively sidelined, so that recent years have seen the publication of dozens of titles in the English language alone which fail even to mention his name.
In Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited historian Emmet Scott reviews the evidence put forward by Hodges and Whitehouse, as well as the more recent findings of archaeology, and comes to a rather different conclusion. For him, the evidence shows that classical civilization was not dead in Europe at the start of the seventh century, but was actually experiencing something of a revival. Populations and towns were beginning to grow again for the first time since this second century – a development apparently attributable largely to the spread of Christianity. In addition, the real centres of classical civilization, in the Middle East, were experiencing an unprecedented Golden Age at the time, with cities larger and more prosperous than ever before. Excavation has shown that these were destroyed thoroughly and completely by the Arab conquests, with many never again reoccupied. And it was precisely then, says Scott, that Europe’s classical culture also disappeared, with the abandonment of the undefended lowland villas and farms of the Roman period and a retreat to fortified hilltop settlements; the first medieval castles.
For Scott, archaeology demonstrated that the Arabs did indeed blockade the Mediterranean through piracy and slave-raiding, precisely as Pirenne had claimed, and he argues that the disappearance of papyrus from Europe was an infallible proof of this. Whatever classical learning survived after this time, says Scott, was due almost entirely to the efforts of Christian monks.
The Pirenne thesis has taken on a new significance in the post 9/11 world. Scott’s take on the theory will certainly ignite further and perhaps heated debate.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNew English Review Press
- Publication dateJanuary 15, 2012
- Dimensions6 x 0.61 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100578094185
- ISBN-13978-0578094182
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Emmet Scott’s Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy is not only a fascinating study but an important book, which, I believe, will eventually lead to a paradigm shift - a change in the way we look at the history of Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval Period, and how we answer the question, “What ended Roman civilization and brought about the Dark Ages?”
It is a riveting tale - a history of ideas that does much to illuminate current concerns. Scott takes as his starting point the thesis of the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne [1862-1935] that the real destroyers of classical civilization were the Muslims. Scott refines, corrects and augments Pirenne’s insight, and he does so by taking into account two essential disciplines often neglected in studies of this period - archaeology and Islamology. As Scott points out, very few historians paid any attention to the nature of Islam or its beliefs - they simply assumed that Islam was and is a faith no different from others. As for the former element: Scott argues correctly that the written records cannot be taken at their face value, and must be supported by archaeology.
I shall not spoil the fun by revealing what his conclusions are, but they are arrived at after an exhilarating intellectual ride through the history and archaeology of Byzantium, the Roman presence in the West, Middle East, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and much, much more.
-- IBN WARRAQ author of Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate's Defense of Liberal Democracy
Conventional scholarly wisdom has held that German conquest ended Roman civilization and brought on the Dark Ages. Henri Pirenne strongly disagreed. Almost a hundred years ago, he argued that starting in the seventh century, Islam was a destructive, indeed a catastrophic, force that caused Europe’s Dark Ages. Most European historians have disagreed, claiming that Islam was a tolerant, enlightened force that began to raise Europe out of its darkness. The myth of a so-called Islamic “Golden Age” in Spain is an expression of that view. Scott defends and enlarges upon Pirenne’s thesis, arguing that these historians have paid scant “attention to the nature of Islam or its beliefs.” Like much of our media and government officials, they assume that Islam is a religion like any other. Scott argues that, with its doctrine of never-ending “holy war” against all non-believers, Islam was “an unprecedentedly destabilizing influence.”
As with all good history, by reading Scott’s well-written, richly-detailed account of the perils that almost destroyed Western civilization in an earlier age, we are informed of the danger that confronts our civilization in our time. This book is a must-read for any person concerned with the future of Western civilization in our times.
-- Richard L. Rubenstein, author of Jihad and Genocide
--New English ReviewA number of books published in recent years have demolished the myth of an allegedly tolerant Islamic culture that preserved the Greco-Roman heritage. Ibn Warraq s book Why the West Is Best is among the better and more accessible titles in this field. As I concluded in one of my earlier essays, the only part of the ancient Greek heritage that proved to be more compatible with Muslim than with Christian European culture was slavery, and possibly anal sex with young boys in certain parts of the Islamic world.
In early 2012 the historian Emmet Scott published Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy --Front Page Magazine
If you are on a limited budget or have limited time and can only read one book this year, Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited is the one to buy. And a purchase will most likely be necessary, since it will be unavailable in most libraries, what with the hot breath of CAIR and MCB and all the other surrogates of the Muslim Brotherhood breathing down librarians’ necks.
For more than a thousand years Europe and the European diaspora have struggled to cope with the enormity of the devastation inflicted on us by the Islamic invasions. Our collective memory has attempted — and failed — to retain an accurate idea of what actually happened to us.
In earlier centuries our ability to understand was limited by the inadequacy of communication over vast distances and times. Later, during the European ascendancy, it was difficult to comprehend how much damage could be inflicted by such a primitive and barbaric culture.
By the time the European colossus stood astride the globe in the nineteenth century, Islam was a trivial retrograde rabble that deserved no respect and even less attention. How could it have come within a hair’s breadth of smothering European civilization in its cradle?
The truth of what Islam did — and continues to do — to Western Civilization has finally been reconstructed. Like an accomplished forensic detective, Emmet Scott has assembled all the pieces of evidence and built an airtight case against Islam.
The only verdict possible is “Guilty!”
In the days and months to come the airwaves and the internet will be flooded with ads for books about Barack Hussein Obama, or Mitt Romney, or the meltdown of the euro. Resist their blandishments. Forego just one of those transient and evanescent books.
Instead, read Emmet Scott’s magnum opus. This one is for the ages.
After you finish >Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited, your understanding of and reverence for our precious civilization will be fundamentally reorganized. This book is truly artful because it changes the way you see.
---Baron Bodissey --Gates of Vienna
About the Author
Emmet Scott is a historian specializing in the ancient history of the Near East. Over the past ten years he has turned his attention to Late Antiquity and the declining phase of classical civilization, which he sees as one of the most crucial episodes in the history of western civilization.
Product details
- Publisher : New English Review Press; First Edition (January 15, 2012)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0578094185
- ISBN-13 : 978-0578094182
- Item Weight : 14.3 ounces
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.61 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,516,275 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,416 in History of Civilization & Culture
- #6,598 in History of Christianity (Books)
- #23,443 in European History (Books)
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This book has many good things:
1- This book really shows what Islam means.
2- This book is concise, easy to understand and short.
3- This book makes Inquisition as it really was. An inevitable result of Islamic conquests.
4- This book has many informations, about Islamic piracy making Europeans slaves, for more than a thousand years. See pages 160 to 168.
5- This book shows how only by Roman Catholic Church, ancient science could survive. See pages 59 and 60 as an example. Pages 140 and 140 follows the same idea.
6- Islamic destruction of culture is remembered in this book. See pages 212 and 213 as an example.
Even with these and so many others good things, I have to give four stars for this book, because it really has a bias against Islam. Please, I'm not an Islamic and I don't like Islam, in any sense.
Another reviewer wrote these sentences from page 172:"Under the protective shield of Rome, the farmers, artisans, and intellectuals...had grown to despise the calling of the soldier, and to see the defense of the country as someone else's business. ... The civilian populations of Anatolia, of Syria, of Egypt, and of North Africa were vast, but they were completely unused to war. After the defeats of the Imperial forces (by the Muslims), there existed no tradition of military training or activity which could have facilitated independent local action against the invaders."
Well the real thing was an Asiatic and North-African Christianity ever against Roman Catholicism and full of later "Islamic problems" such as women's opression, link to politics and fanaticism.
Some thousands of Arabs conquested Damascus easily, in early VII Century, because a Syriac monk inside that city opened the gates for them. Some thousands of Arabs conquested Egypt, not because Egyptiians were civilized and cult, but because under Byzantine yoke, the Egyptians hadn't any religious or political freedom. The Coptic clergy supported the Arabs in exchange for not paying jizia and working with Islam, against Byzantines and Catholics, from the start. The same thing happened in Syria, Iraq, Palestine,etc. as Nestorian and Syriac clergy not paying jizia and working with Islam, against Byzantines and Catholics, also from the start. When Syriacs, Nestorians, Coptics,etc. realized that Islamic ruler means their religions becoming small or even over, it was too late. See the Ethiopian Coptics. They fought not against some thousands of Arabs in VII century, but against millions of them, for more than a thousand of years. Even so, today Ethiopia has a Christian (Coptic) majority and a third of its population is Muslim. Why Christian became doomed in Egypt, Syria, etc. in some deacdes of VII Century and not doomed in Ethyopia or Western Europe today? Because Syriacs, Nestorians, Egyptian Coptics, etc. didn't had the will, the clergy and the rulers to stand against Islam. In a sense, North African and Asiatic Christianity was Byzantine Empire and died with it. The same can be said, about Zoroastrianism in Iran.
On page 218 onwards, this book tries to debunkes the tradictional view of early Islamics conquests, in VII Century. I don't agree with this book on these pages. Why? Because in XX Century there were many tyrants' conquests even more easy than early Islamics conquests, in VII Century. See how rapid and easy fall of "might" and "Orthododx Christian" Russian Imperial Tzarist for an Atheistic regime, in 1917. How easy Hitler dominated "cultured" Germany and how easy he conquested France, in 1940 with less that 2% of his army being killed or wounded and more than 95% of the "might" French Army surrendering without any battle at all. See how easy was Cuba put under Fidel Castro's yoke, in 1959, an island next to United States and among the best level of life in Latin America, in 1950 decade. I still agree with tradictional view of early Islamics conquests, in VII Century. The Arabs defeated despotics, weakened and incompetents empires of Persia and Byzanthium easily and fast. Zoroastrians in Iran and "Christians" in Iraq, Syria, Egypt,etc. hadn't any will to really fight for their religions and even less will, to support Roman Catholicism or Byzantine church outside their nations. The Asiatic Christianism and Persian Zoroastrism fell because of its incompetence and this made Islam to grow, from nothing to a first class world power, in less than 100 years, in VII Century. From about the year 670 or even before, the mankind's choice was the contention of Islam or the Islamic domination of the world.
About this same subject, the book "Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization", by John J. O'Neill is better.
The book's nature as expanded-and-adapted dyspeptic review explains certain quirks: like its continual pauses to argue with this or that other scholar (following Hodges and Whitehouse, also Ward-Perkins, Dopsch, Briffault), and its overall tone. And knowing this, helps the rest of us understand how to use its content.
To explain this vexing topic - the effects and cause of the entire mediaeval Dark Age - to us Amazon review-readers demands a status quaestionis of just about every essay and book which has ever touched upon the topic. Among these are works claiming that the fall of Rome wasn't all that bad - that we should open our minds to a putative "Late Antiquity" bridging the early Byzantines and the Umayyads (by way of the Merovings I suppose). So one can see why a book of "Revisited"'s length, or longer, would be necessary even to summarise the topic. One can (well, I can) also sympathise with the difficulty of marshalling all the ideas to make an argument and at the same time keeping it interesting.
Any argument involving the Dark Age must first deal with that whole "Late Antiquity" alternative. That the conditions of the 600s (in for instance Merovingian France) were much worse than the conditions in the 300s (here, Gaul), and that this decline must be attributed to the end of the Roman economy, have been conclusively demonstrated - in the mid-2000s - by Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins. Scott assumes this much; and against Late-Antiquity apologists, his exasperation is merited (I must say, even in the 1990s when I first heard of Late-Antiquity, I thought it was absurd and, yes, an apologetic for barbarism; a form of political-correctness).
Scott's thesis is more about the timing of the decline. If the rot set in during the 500s CE, then the wretched state of 600s France (as above) was just part of the Mad Max ambience of Rome's fall. But if the Merovings, Visigoths and (after Justinian) North African Greeks were more-or-less running things okay over the 500s, then the state of affairs in the 600s wasn't a collapse - it was a crime.
The murder weapon wasn't so much the wars themselves. Wars happen. It was *where* this war happened - the great trade highways of the classical world - and the attendant rise of piracy. To Scott, the loss of papyrus was as important as the hazards in trade and movement. Imagine today if Internet hacking got so bad that it was no longer possible to look something up on a search engine, use a credit card, or withdraw money from an ATM. This argument of the book was especially enlightening.
Scott finds the beginning of the decline best placed to Khusru II's war, which breached to the Mediterranean as far as the Nile Delta. The Arabs - opportunistic brigands - then picked up where Khusru left off. Once they had their own ports into the Mittelmeer, says Scott, the Arab amirs chose to *leverage* piracy; to weaken any possibility of a united Western front against them.
Reviewing this book is not easy. I share the author's bias against the foundational texts of Islam, and his nostalgia for the classical world. I dearly want to read a book *like* this, and there *is* the germ of such a book within it. But the book I actually bought has fundamental problems. Previous reviewers (like Alberto Vargas) have already noted its disorganisation and even self-contradiction, so I'll take that as given and move on to other standouts.
As status quaestionis the book has value. Researchers do need to know what has been said and who said it. But for that purpose the book requires a proper bibliography, and the one I found at the end (in my edition) was disastrous. For all that the book castigates (for instance) Ward-Perkins, his name does not even appear there.
Then there's the dualism. His earlier Amazon reviews show a mindset of 1/5 or 5/5. Going back to Ward-Perkins again, Scott cannot meet him halfway; he has to be rude to him as well. And where he sees scholarship as helpful to his overall worldview, as Illig's musings about the loss of whole centuries from the historical record (filtered through John O'Neill's "Holy Warriors") - he just figures, what the hey, and cites it. This book is controversial enough without adding any more weirdness than strictly necessary.
Some interest in the topic is welcome, as is the acknowledgement of bias. The topic itself is a good one, which needs to be reopened. But it needs to be reopened by someone more competent and dispassionate, which as of 2010 and 2011 this author was not.
Top reviews from other countries
This volume is essential reading for anyone seeking explanations beyond the politically approved for what happened to Europe, and the rest of the Roman lands, after the fall of the Western Empire.
In the 1930s, Belgian historian Henri Perrine published a book called Mohammed and Charlemagne in which he put forward the argument that the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire didn't cause the Dark Ages in Europe, as most historians claimed. Instead Perrine argued that Islam, with its doctrine of jihad, and the Muslim invasions, conquests, piracy in the Mediterranean and constant raiding of European territory, were responsible for bringing about the Dark Ages in Europe.
Perrine's thesis has been energetically and repeatedly attacked by historians, and others, ever since and is still considered an unorthodox historical viewpoint by most historians.
In this book, Emmett Scott examines the evidence for and against Perrine's thesis, using modern archaeological discoveries, early literary references and other surviving textual records from the period and many other sources to examine the arguments made by Henri Perrine and the counter-arguments made by Perrine's many detractors.
Scott's examination of the available evidence is fascinating and well worth reading for anyone interested in European and Middle Eastern history.
It's also very relevant to current events like Muslim migration into Europe and the worldwide conflicts between jihadists and virtually all non-jihadists.
Hint: Scott's analysis concludes that Perrine was right. His arguments in favour of Perrine's position are very persuasive and have serious implication for present day events as well as the historical record.
Bottom line: this book is well worth reading for both its historical analysis and its relevance to present day events.





