The Christian-Muslim Frontier by Apostolov Mario;

Author:Apostolov, Mario;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Table 5.1 The potential for conflict or cooperation in the zone of contact

Hundreds of years of life on the frontier and the absence of indigenous political administration have preserved the various groups in the mixture of conquered, converted and resettled communities that make up the population of the historical zone of the Christian–Muslim frontier from complete assimilation. This pattern of communal relations can still be felt in such countries as Lebanon, Bosnia, Egypt, Russia, and Bulgaria. The historical zone of contact is still fragmented among numerous, sometimes irrationally small, separate communities and states. Social and political fragmentation remains one of the defining characteristics of the Christian–Muslim frontier. The historical overview of Christian–Muslim relations (see previous chapters) has shown the origins of this division of society into segments, a division that penetrated the institutions and the psychology of societies in the zone of contact. It also influenced the security structures and economic behaviour of people and states in this zone.

Frontiers bring dynamism to human society. In the English language, especially in America, the term means a peripheral and dangerous region, a ‘Wild West’ where poverty, wars and suffering reign. Yet many peripheral or frontier zones have in the past undergone spectacular evolution to become new centres of civilization. The early Ottoman state or Austria, and its capital, Vienna; the New World; the new industrialized countries (NICs); these were all at a certain point of history merely places on the fringes of civilization, yet they eventually became centres of events with global significance or even the cutting edge of civilization. Innovation often takes place on the periphery, in defiance of the existing political, economic and social structures and patterns of behaviour. We have already mentioned the impulse of the Reconquista liberating the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim Moors that led Spain and Portugal to unforeseen discoveries and expansion into world empires, and the impressive expansion of the Ottoman principality, with its military frontier culture, into a vast empire. World history is full of such examples. Owen Lattimore claims that opposition on the frontier between agricultural China and its nomadic, ‘barbarian’ neighbours to the north produced such crucial innovations as grand-scale military construction (the Great Wall) and new techniques of warfare (the cavalry warfare of mounted archers, adopted from the ‘barbarians’), which made possible the emergence of centralized political organization in China (Gottmann 1980b: 205–8). Frontier powers in a way profit from their place in world society. The Ottomans, for example, acquired knowledge of certain Byzantine administrative and technological achievements before and after they crushed the Byzantine Empire.

The Christian–Muslim frontier should be understood from the perspective of the potential for innovation and revolutionary leaps ahead. Whether this potential has been realized under the various historical circumstances in the various cases of frontier opposition, is another issue. It seems that the dynamism and expansionary thrust in many cases gave way to more or less rigid structures, which gradually closed the way for social mobility. This was the case of the Arab Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, and the colonial empires of the nineteenth century.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.