An Italian Cassandra: Leone Caetani and the Hamas massacre
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If Al Qaida’s 2001 mass murder urged the question whether Islam incubated terror, the Hamas’ 2023 mass murder showed that the post-2001 policies of pre-emption have failed. But a spiral of atrocity and reprisal has been foreseen long ago. Leone Caetani set it out in an essay on the role of Islam in East West relations, written in the wake of a massacre of Italian soldiers in Libya on 23rd October 1911.
The 1911 massacre had occurred in the course of Italy’s bid to carve Libya out of the Ottoman Empire. On 4th October 1911, Italian imperialists, at the time cheered on by the Italian media (including such famous newspapers as Corriere della Sera and La Stampa), despatched an expeditionary force to Libya. The 35,000 Italian troops were expected to make short work of Ottoman and local resistance. But already by 23rd October that optimism was dashed by a mass killing in Sciara-Sciatt of some 500 Italian soldiers.
This atrocity and subsequent Italian retaliation made shocking reading in the newspapers. Even now, accustomed as we have become to reported brutality, this witness account in The Times is horrifying: “I saw in an Arab House … five mutilated Bersaglieri. One of them had been crucified, with the eyeballs threaded with coarse palm fibre through the temple and nose. The eyelids had been stitched crosswise to keep them open … In the corner of the garden there were nine nude mutilated bodies. One had been impaled, another had been crucified with the crosspiece thrust through the muscles of the back, the neck, and the left hand. The right hand had been cut off, and the abdomen had been slashed open … In the Arab cemetery four soldiers had been buried up to the chest, and the hands had been cut off. Their agonized expressions justify the presumption that they had been buried alive.”
No less harrowing were newspaper reports of Italian retribution. On 3rd November a correspondent for The Times wrote that “there has been a systematic slaughter of Arabs, and that hundreds of them, including women and persons of very tender age of both sexes, have been shot mercilessly by the Italian troops, acting under the orders of their superiors, without the slightest pretence of a trial.”
Leone Caetani published his essay on the long arc of East-West relations at this critical juncture of turmoil in Italian public opinion. It was soon translated into French and published in book form as La fonction de l’Islam dans l’évolution de la civilisation. Leone Caetani’s qualifications for this task were unimpeachable, writing as a politician as well as a scholar and aristocrat. He was a deputy in the Italian parliament who had voted against the Italian foray into Libya. Of greater import was his position as a pioneer of the study of Islam. Caetani had for many years been publishing volumes of records of early Islam, Annali d’Islam, and he was a member of Italy’s most august scholarly academy, the Accademia dei Lincei. The present author has written before about Caetani in TheArticle here.
His essay argued that Europe was defined from the beginnings of its historical memory by the conflict between the West and the East – from the wars between Greeks and Persians, to the conquests of Alexander, to the eras of Hellenism and of Roman domination, to the birth of Christianity and of Islam, and to the crusades and the fall of Constantinople. Efforts by either side to vanquish the other had always failed. Islam’s vertiginous ascent in the seventh century and its tenacious hold over the lands it had conquered must be seen against the relief of East-West relations spanning millennia.
Oriental resistance to Western domination might for long periods lay concealed, but when it appeared in the open was no less overwhelming. Caetani offered up to his readers, reeling from the shock of October’s massacre, a pointed reminder that long before Islam emerged, in 88 BC King Mithridates of Pontus had orchestrated the murder of some 80,000 Latin speakers living in Asia Minor.
Caetani considered it a mistake to look for the roots of Islamist violence in Islam. Twentieth-century Europeans exercised by the question how the Occident could Europeanise the Orient should ask: why had Islam succeeded in routing Europeans out of the Near East 1,300 years ago, and why was opposition to the West after so much time still implacable?
The key to unlocking understanding of the Orient was to recognise that Islam was the outward manifestation of a social movement, a standard bearer of a révolution sociale mondiale. This was une grande réaction antieuropéenne that had been centuries in the making.
By the time Muhammad was born, East and West had been drifting apart for centuries. Muhammad marked a tipping point in this process, much as had Martin Luther in the Reformation and the French bourgeoisie in the French Revolution. Rome’s Empire was buttressed by its army and its laws. Its spiritual core, however, was a void, one that had been filled by Christianity. But fissures opened up between East and West after Christianity had grown into the position of state religion.
Hegemony in politics went hand in hand with hegemony in theology. Christians in the East — Syrians, Copts, Armenians, Nestorians — chafed at Rome’s enforced creedal uniformity, theological subtlety and priestly monopoly. Seventh-century Christianity, seen from the Orient, was a theological bureaucracy.
Muhammad conceived Islam as the restoration of an old faith, rather than the creation of a new one, and he preached to Arabs rather than to foreigners. But after he had died, Arab armies swept through Byzantium’s Asian and Egyptian provinces and they met with little resistance. Byzantine subjects were eager to shake off the yoke of Western domination. Islamic conquerors for their part were notably less combative towards pre-existing religions of their Asian cousins, such as Zoroastrianism, than towards the religion that stood for domination by the West, Christianity.
From examining past East West relations, Caetani turned to their future. In the West, culture has become secular. But in the East, anxious about being reduced to supplying riches to foreign nations, Islam is a barrier against the advance of European hegemony. Religion in the West is consigned to the private sphere, but religion in the East ensures social cohesion. An East without religion would be like a West without laws. Western disregard for the importance of religion creates a toxic reaction and one day it would inflame un désir insatiable de revanche.
Leone Caetani’s essay La fonction de l’Islam dans l’évolution de la civilisation has aged well. Since 1912, after the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution, the Near East has seen the emergence of multiple nation states, expulsions of minorities, and huge movements of populations. But for all the tumult of politics in the Middle East, the strength of Islam has remained a tie as strong as once was Ottoman rule. Caetani predicted that Islam would inspire résistance irréductible to Western domination. He counselled that the West would not break the cycle of aggression and retaliation until the Orient had room to flourish en pleine liberté, en pleine sécurité. That condition has yet to be met.
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