Prof. Dr. Şener Aktürk said, “In medieval Islamic and Orthodox Christian polities, we do not come across the mechanism of ethnic cleansing and genocide that we observe in medieval Catholic Western Europe.”
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Şener Aktürk, Professor of International Relations at Koç University, evaluated the ethno-religious cleansing of Muslim and Jewish minorities living in Western Europe in the Middle Ages for AA Strategic Analysis.
Aktürk said, “In the Middle Ages, Muslims and Jews lived in many parts of Western Europe, and in some areas they constituted the majority. Across Western Europe as a whole, there is not a single Muslim community, a single village, a single Muslim clan or a single functioning mosque at present whose origins can be traced back to the Middle Ages.”
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- Ethnic cleansing of all non-Catholic minorities in Western Europe
Q: Did modern Europe take its current shape via ethnic cleansing? Europe is said to be a Christian community, has this always been the case?
Aktürk: In the Middle Ages, Muslims and Jews lived in many parts of Western Europe, and in some regions they were the majority. For example, it is reported that there were 300 mosques in the city of Palermo on the island of Sicily alone. Today there is not a single Muslim community, a single village, a single Muslim clan, or a single functioning mosque in Palermo, or in Sicily, or in the whole of Italy, or even throughout Western Europe, whose origins can be traced back to the Middle Ages.
Q: Which groups were wiped out in Europe through this ethno-religious cleansing or genocide?
Aktürk: In the early 13th century, Muslims and Jews lived under Christian rulers in the regions corresponding to present-day Italy, England, France, Hungary, Spain and Portugal, but all Muslims and almost all Jews across Western Europe were eliminated through expulsions, forced conversions, and massacres.
- The main actor was the clergy led by the papacy
Q: What were the dynamics on which the mechanism of ethnic cleansing and genocide you describe in your article “Not Innocent at All: Clergy, Monarchs and the Ethno-Religious Cleansing of Western Europe” was built in medieval Western Europe?
Aktürk: The mechanism that led to the eradication of all Muslims and Jews across Western Europe as a whole consisted of the pressure exerted on the rulers by the clergy led by the Papacy, which rapidly gained power with the Gregorian Reforms. The clergy, led by the Papacy, punished and even deposed rulers who protected Muslims, Jews or any non-Catholic minority, and replaced them with rulers who would eradicate minorities. The papacy had a multitude of powers with tangible consequences, such as excommunicating and deposing the monarchs it punished, depriving their entire country of religious services, annulling their marriages and organizing crusades against them. The key actor here is the Papacy, a supranational power, and the clergy, which, under papal leadership, has been rapidly gaining power in all Catholic societies since the Gregorian Reforms.
Q: Not only Muslim communities but also the political authorities that supported them were affected by these discriminatory policies. What was the reason for this?
Aktürk: In the domestic political struggle of Catholic Christian polities, the main political opponent of the clergy led by the Pope were the monarchs. There were similar episodes earlier as well, but mainly from the beginning of the 13th century onwards, Muslims and Jews were eradicated because they were considered monarchical property and because they took the side of the monarchs in the struggles against the clergy. As a result of this political power struggle, Western European states and societies were largely shaped by the clergy led by the Papacy.
- Ethnic cleansings can be traced back to the clergy in the 13th century
Q: Today, there is a perception that genocides and ethnic cleansings are a morbidity or even a natural consequence of nation-states. To what extent do you think this perception reflects reality?
Aktürk: Today, demographic engineering policies, especially ethnic cleansing and genocide, are seen a natural consequences of nation state building, which is largely true. But I would argue that in Catholic Western Europe, demographic engineering and genocidal ethno-religious cleansing goes back at least to the early 13th century. In this respect, I think Western Europe is a unique example worldwide, because in the 14th, 15th, and even 16th centuries, let alone in the 13th century, no other region on a scale comparable to Western Europe experienced such religious and sectarian cleansing. Across Western Europe as a whole, this cleansing continued until all societies were exclusively Christian and even exclusively Catholic.
Q: We know that there are ongoing ethnic cleansings in the modern period. Do you think the characteristics of modern genocides differ from those of the Middle Ages? Which actors and motivations are at play here? Do you see similarities with the ethnic cleansings we witness in the modern world?
Aktürk: There are at least two important differences between the policies of ethnic cleansing and population engineering carried out in the modern period and in the Middle Ages on the European continent. First, in the modern era, groups that nation states perceived as security threats and “fifth columns” of foreign powers were targeted more, whereas in medieval Europe, the clergy led by the Papacy, itself an international and supra-state authority, ensured that Muslims and Jews, who were actually monarchical property and loyal to the government, were eradicated in every European country. This is a very important difference. Secondly, in the modern period, these policies were carried out with the support of relatively secular and non-religious ideologies, while in Western Europe, the Papacy and the clergy ensured the eradication of Muslims and Jews as a result of both political and religious reasons.
Q: You say that these mechanisms of ethno-religious cleansing and genocide, which you shed light on as a dark side in the formation of Western civilization, are directly related to the separation of church and state. Could you elaborate on this point?
Aktürk: Many social scientists, perhaps most famously Samuel Huntington, have emphasized the institutional separation of church and state in the Western Christian tradition as a superior feature of Western civilization over other civilizations. However, such a sharp separation of church and state is an important precondition for the mechanism of ethnic cleansing and genocide that I have described. If there were no professional clergy who virtually monopolized religious authority, there would be no actor who could force rulers to commit such strict policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide without an exception. The Catholic Church, led by the Papacy, rightly sees itself as the longest surviving institution in the history of the world and, for over a thousand years, the institution with the most detailed knowledge of Western Christian societies at the individual level. It is hardly surprising that such a centralized authority, able to collect and store the most intimate information on individuals belonging to the most populous sect of the most populous religion on earth for centuries, has shaped Western civilization.
- Jews’ and Muslims’ refusal to convert to Christianity was considered unacceptable
Q: Has this homogeneous structure of Western civilization, created through ethno-religious cleansing, affected the West's relationship with the “other” today? Is this the reason why Western civilization today still has major problems with different cultures, cannot reconcile with them or reacts in a way that is unfamiliar to the other?
Aktürk: Today, the very structure of Western civilization, created through such ethno-religious cleansing, profoundly affects the West's relationship with the “other” on many levels. Muslims and Jews living in Western Europe are accused of not being indigenous to Europe. Yet more than a thousand years ago, Muslim and Jewish communities lived in many parts of Western Europe and continued to do so for centuries. Contrary to popular belief, they did not suddenly disappear when Christian dynasties took over, and in many cases, they lived under Christian rule for centuries, insisting on not leaving the continent.
Again, especially from the 12th century onwards, the clergy developed the idea that Muslims and Jews are incapable of reasoning and therefore not human. The reason for this is that even though Muslims and Jews lived under Christian rule for centuries, they refused to convert and did not become Christians. This fundamentally undermines the clerical belief in the superiority of Christianity. On the contrary, the more ordinary Christians come into contact with Muslims and Jews, the more the clergy feared that Christians will convert to Judaism or Islam. This religious insecurity exists in Western societies even today and motivates Islamophobic policies. There is a fear that if Islamic practices are allowed, Islam will spread, and hence there are efforts to ban various Islamic practices, from the call to prayer to male circumcision, from Quranic schools to ritual animal sacrifice.
- We do not see in societies outside the West the complete eradication of religious minorities in the Middle Ages
Q: You say that the mechanisms of ethnic cleansing and genocide practiced in medieval Western Europe are not found in medieval Islamic and the Orthodox Christian polities. What are the reasons for this?
Aktürk: In medieval Islamic and Orthodox Christian polities, we do not see the mechanism of ethnic cleansing and genocide that we observe in medieval Catholic Western Europe, because all three elements of this mechanism are missing. First, there is no supranational religious authority strong enough to exert coercive pressure on monarchs to eradicate religious minorities. The most important difference is that in Western Europe, the Papacy and the clergy who obey it have enough power to replace monarchs and even dynasties. In Orthodox Russia or in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, for example, it is unprecedented for a religious authority to depose the Ottoman dynasty or the Romanov dynasty and to put in place another dynasty in power, which is the most important difference between Western Europe and non-Western examples. Secondly, there is no religious doctrine that legitimizes the extermination of minorities by not considering them as human beings. In fact, the concept of the Crusade, which we see in Western Christianity, did not develop in Orthodox Christianity.
So there is such a difference between the West and the East, for example between Russia, Byzantium and the Western European states. In an even greater contrast, Islamic religious tradition and legal structure justifies the existence of non-Muslims, especially Christians and Jews, in perpetuity.
Third, there are large imperial structures, such as the Orthodox Byzantine, Russian, Islamic Ottoman and Mughal empires, which are strong enough to withstand the pressures of a religious authority that would demand the destruction of religious minorities. As a result, countries ruled by Muslim and Orthodox dynasties have populations with a religious and sectarian diversity incomparable to the religious sectarian homogeneity achieved in Western Europe, at least until the emergence of modern nation states.
Q: Did nationalism and racism in Western Europe arise as a result of the process of uniformization and homogenization of society as a result of these genocides and ethnic cleansings? In other words, is there a connection between religious-ethnic homogeneity and the origins of nationalism or racism?
Aktürk: In Western Europe, nationalism and racism emerged after the ethno-religious cleansings carried out under the leadership of the Papacy with the support of the clergy. After all Western European societies were reduced to being exclusively Christian and exclusively Catholic, secular nationalism emerged as an attempt to create a society that was linguistically and culturally homogenous in some cases, such as France, and ethnically and racially homogenous in others, such as Germany. Therefore, we can say that the eradication of all Muslims and Jews in Western Europe in the Middle Ages prepared the ground in Western Europe for the birth of nationalism and racism in the following period.
- Democracy may have emerged on the assumption that all citizens belong to a single religious sect
Q: So how can we explain the emergence of democracy and freedom of expression in Western European countries?
Aktürk: The religious and denominational homogenization of Western Europe since the 13th century has had many long-term consequences to the present day. First of all, Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal are the four greatest powers that shaped the rest of the world through their colonial empires. Therefore, the fact that these four countries eradicated all Jews and all Muslims in their lands during the Middle Ages must have directly affected the social structures they shaped when they discovered the New World, the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and sent settlers there; it certainly did.
Therefore, the American continent today is the most Christian and Catholic continent in the world because the societies there were established and shaped by Portuguese and Spanish settlers.
Similarly, the fact that the world's first nation-states and the first democracies emerged in England, France, and perhaps Spain and Portugal, shows that the Western concepts of nation-state and Western democracy are the products of societies consisting only of Christians and only of Christians of the Catholic sect. This is also very important. In other words, when democracy first emerged, it may have emerged as a regime that assumed that all citizens and representatives belonged to one religion and one denomination.
England, which we now recognize as the oldest democracy in the world, was governed by Christian and Protestant prime ministers for 300-odd years since the revolution in 1688. Until Rishi Sunak, who recently resigned as Prime Minister, all prime ministers, even if they were not of Protestant origin, converted to Protestantism at an early age. Jewish-born Benjamin Disraeli and Catholic-born Boris Johnson converted to Anglican-Protestantism, the state religion and denomination, in their secondary school years. Or secret converts like Tony Blair continued to appear as Protestant Christians in public during his prime ministership. Only after Blair left the prime ministership did he announce that he had converted to Catholicism.
- Questions in which non-Western societies would look better than Western societies are not asked
Q: Despite Europe's homogeneous structure, why do we have such a liberal image of Europe? Do you think we know Europe well enough or correctly?
Aktürk: Yes, unfortunately, I think we do not know Europe and the rest of the world well enough and correctly. This is partly due to the fact that the production of knowledge in Türkiye, including academic knowledge production, treats Türkiye itself as a colony. What I mean by this is that there is an understanding that Turks can only study Türkiye and present the data they collect and produce about Türkiye to Westerners, and Westerners can make the authentic theoretical and conceptual contribution, and this problem needs to be overcome as soon as possible. The way to overcome this understanding which underestimates the intellectual capacity of Turks is for Turks to learn about different countries and their languages, cultures and histories, to do fieldwork abroad, and to make conceptual and theoretical contributions to universal science as experts of these different countries.
Q: We see that the examples of ethnic cleansing detailed in the article are not the subject of academic research. What do you think is the reason for this?
Aktürk: The fact that the eradication of all Muslims and Jews in Western Europe, which I seek to explain in the article, was not the main question of any other academic research before my study, is I think a reflection of the Western-centric approach in the social sciences. Unfortunately, in Western-centric social sciences, issues where non-Western countries seem to be superior to Western countries in variables related to identity and culture are often not considered main research questions.
For example, when I studied the political representation of minorities in my earlier publications, I have found that many countries in Eastern Europe are in a better position than Western European countries. I consider such a finding to be normal, because on some issues Eastern Europe may just be better than Western Europe. If you look at homicide rates, some Asian countries ns some Muslim countries may be better than Latin America and many other Christian countries.
But I think, unfortunately, in the social sciences at present, such an open minded approach to identifying truly interesting research questions is not pursued. Researchers mostly focus on a few indicators such as democracy indices and GDP per capita, which are exactly the indicators where Northwestern Europe and North America are at the top of the global hierarchy, and then researchers compare superior Western outcomes in these few indices with worse outcomes in some non-Western countries. When you ask the question in this way, the answer will certainly be one that puts the West under a favorable light in normative terms. But I think because the Western-centric way of asking questions is more dominant in the social sciences, questions are always asked more or less in the same direction.
The address where the article, “Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe,” can be freely accessed is the following:
https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/48/4/87/121307/Not-So-Innocent-Clerics-Monarchs-and-the