Isis: The Origins of Violence Page #4

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"and sit in wait for them in every

place of ambush."

The Mushrikun were the

pagans of Mecca

who supposedly worshiped

idols of stone.

The Yazidis are classed as the

pagans of Lalish.

Muhammad himself, when he captured

Mecca, destroyed its idols,

much as Muslim conquerors over the

centuries

have sought to smash this stone,

that's been repaired many times.

The thing about Isis is, it's not

just that they think

they're justified in doing what they

do to the Yazidis,

it's much more terrifying than that.

They believe that they are following

the example of the man who,

for Muslims, is the ultimate

model to follow.

The Prophet Muhammad himself.

And it's that conviction that has

led them to commit genocide.

The Koran says that the people of

the book,

by which it specifies Jews

and Christians,

should be allowed to pay the jizya.

So why is it that Yazidis

weren't allowed to pay it?

Were the Islamic State wrong to

slaughter Yazidi men

and enslave Yazidi women?

But if someone isn't a Muslim, not a

person of the book,

one of the Mushrikun, and the Koran

says they should be killed,

then why isn't it right

to kill them?

Abu Sayyaf is quoting the Koran.

The tragedy is that even today,

some Muslims use these words to

justify the killing of the Yazidis.

Muslims have had their dreams of

conquest.

But so, too, has the West.

Western soldiers crossed this

desert.

A Western general came here,

dreaming of a new Koran.

"40 centuries," he told his army,

"look down upon you".

In 1798, Napoleon's victory in the

Battle of the Pyramids

won him Egypt.

A decisive moment.

For the first time, a Muslim country

had succumbed to a

new and restless civilisation...

...the modern West.

When Napoleon came to Egypt,

he saw himself as someone who was

bringing light

into the darkness of the East.

Napoleon was a man of the

Enlightenment,

and he despised Islam pretty much as

he despised Christianity,

as a kind of backward form of

superstition.

He was completely open about what

he was doing.

He said, obviously not to the

Egyptians,

"You've got to lull this fanaticism

into a false sense of security,"

"so that we can destroy it."

What this building brilliantly

demonstrates is that

when Napoleon came to

Egypt, he didn't just bring

soldiers with him.

He also brought books, he brought

scholars of every kind.

He brought printing presses and he

brought

material for chemistry labs.

And he even brought a balloon.

And what this building,

Institut d'Egypte,

it's a kind of barrack room for the

Enlightenment.

Napoleon planted barracks for his

soldiers over there,

but here he planted an outpost of

the Enlightenment.

And this... was for the

good of the Egyptians.

And this is the result,

the Description de I'Egypte.

At 37 volumes, it was enormous,

encyclopaedic.

A 200-year-old precursor of

Wikipedia.

But the Institut's original version

no longer exists.

It was destroyed by fire during the

Arab Spring in 2011.

This book shop, founded

60 years ago,

is now run by a former tenor of the

local opera,

Hassan Kenny.

I am very honoured to meet you.

I'm very honoured to meet you.

Because there's not many traces of

Napoleon in Cairo.

But you seem to have most of them.

Not many places, only one place.

This is it.

He did come with a lot of

scientists, a lot of naturalists,

a lot of historians.

Because he was, he knew that Egypt

had a cultural treasure.

This is from the second edition.

This is from the 1835 edition.

Yes.

So this is the Description.

So this is from the...

This is Napoleon.

And the Devon. Look.

So it is.

Yes. So it is.

Your friend, Napoleon.

Yes!

Looking magnificently imperious.

'You turn the pages, and you can

almost feel Napoleon's

'all-conquering eye.'

So this sort of shows the way

in which

the people who are compiling this,

the people, the scientists

and the scholars who have come

with Napoleon,

are interested in every aspect.

Yes, everything.

'This was not merely scholarship,

'this was an act of annexation.'

God, amazing.

In an age before photography,

this is as close to looking at a

photograph as you'd get, and...

No, they, they didn't miss anything.

This is the harem.

Public dancers?

When the French come here,

they're not just interested in the

buildings,

they're not just interested in the

insects,

they're not just interested in the

mechanics. No.

They're interested in the

Egyptians themselves,

and what they look like. He said

copy everything you see.

I mean, these aren't individual

portraits,

these are portraits of types of

people.

Mr Napoleon wants to take everything

he has seen,

and his people have seen, to Europe.

'What's on show here in Mr Hassan's

book shop is knowledge,

'but also a display of power.'

The Western eye was restless,

searching.

There was no aspect of life it did

not devour and challenge,

and that included Islam itself.

Europeans were fixated by the idea

of the Orient

as something timeless and

unchanging.

They hadn't come to Egypt simply to

colonise Muslim lands,

they wanted to colonise Muslim

minds as well.

The West, like Islam, had universal

ambitions.

Under its domineering and seductive

influence,

the Muslim world begin to change.

It was under Western pressure that

slavery was abolished.

So, too, the jizya.

Napoleon's scholars, sitting on

the Sphinx,

were sizing up the ancient

civilisation of the Orient

for a future fashioned by the West.

Napoleon still casts a long shadow.

Dead and buried he may be,

but his ghost still haunts the

Muslim world.

'In the wake of his death,

'Napoleon became the absolute model

of a great man.'

'And when Western historians wrote

the Life of Muhammad...

'the shadow of Napoleon tended

always to be there

'in the background.'

'But in the 19th into the 20th

century,

'a period dominated by the West,

'the Western understanding of

Muhammad came to influence Muslims.'

'And so, you get something really

astonishing.

'Because gradually, over the course

of time,

'Muhammad came to be that little bit

more Napoleonic.'

Before Napoleon, um...

...the Muslim view of Muhammad was a

kind of mystical, cosmic one.

He was the beloved of God.

But in the two centuries since

Napoleon,

he's become a much more recognisably

Western figure,

a law-giver, a state-builder.

And the process by which Muhammad

continues to be shaped by

Western values

is evident, for instance,

in the growing Muslim embarrassment

about the story

that's told about his favourite

wife, Aisha,

who, according to tradition,

Muhammad married her when she was

six or seven,

consummated the relationship when

she was nine.

And up until about 30 or 40

years ago,

no one had any problem with that.

But as anxieties in the West about

child abuse have grown,

so there's been a gathering movement

in the Islamic world to

alter the terms of the history to

say that Aisha was older.

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