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“If fanaticism was the sickness in

Catholicism, if Nazism was the sickness in
Germany, then surely fundamentalism is
the sickness in Islam.”

Contemporary Islam is infected with a sickness

that is cutting it off from the richness of its own
tradition and history. In this impassioned, erudite
and deeply moving book, Abdelwahab Meddeb
traces the genealogy of this malady and at the same
time powerfully demonstrates the pluralist tradi¬
tion at the heart of Islam. In so doing, he disman¬
tles the common misconceptions of both western
scholars of Islam and Islamic fundamentalists, and
offers new paths for engagement between Islam
and the West.
Written in response to September 11, 2001,
with an afterword addressing the war in Iraq, The
Malady of Islam seeks to unravel today’s Islamic
fundamentalism which finds in the Qur’an only a
summons to war. Meddeb looks back across
Islamic history from the Medina of the Prophet in
the seventh century, to ninth-century Baghdad in
the time of Abbassids, to Damascus in the four¬
teenth century, after the Crusades and the collapse
of the Mongolian invasion, and most importantly
to Arabia of the eighteenth century and the
founding of the Wahhabism. His account details
the turning away from the creativity and pluralism
that marked the golden age of Islamic civilization
that has left the Islamic world “inconsolable in its
destitution.” But to understand contemporary fun¬
damentalism it is equally necessary to see how the
West—particularly the United States—has exacer¬
bated the “perversion” of the culture, by failing to
integrate Islam into the rest of the world, by
renouncing its own principles as soon as self-inter-
The Malady of Islam
The Malady
of Islam

Abd elwahab Meddeb

Translated from the French by

PIERRE JORIS AND ANN REID

BASIC

B
BOOKS
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
Originally published as La Maladie de I’Islam
Copyright © Editions de Seuil, 2002
Translation © 2003 by Pierre Joris and Ann Reid

Published by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No

part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address
Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016

Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in

the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organiza¬
tions. For more information, please contact the Special Markets
Department at the Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center,
Cambridge MA 02142, or call (617) 252-5298, (800) 255-1514 or
email [email protected].

Designed by Fisa Kreinbrink

Fibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meddeb, Abdelwahab.
[Maladie de Pislam. English]
The malady of Islam / Abdelwahab Meddeb ; translated from
the French by Pierre Joris and Ann Reid,
p. cm.
ISBN 0-465-04435-2 (alk. paper)
1. Islamic fundamentalism. 2. Islam—Controversial litera¬
ture. I. Title

BP166.14.F85M4413 2003
320.5'5'0917671—dc21
2003007424

03 04 05 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

I Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 1

II A Genealogy of Fundamentalism 41

III Fundamentalism Against the West 93

IV The Western Exclusion of Islam 145

Afterword: War Chronicles 195

Notes 223
V.
The Malady of Islam
Part I

Islam: Inconsolable
in Its Destitution
 1

The spectacular attack of September 11, which struck the heart of

the United States, is a crime. A crime committed by Islamists. It con¬
stitutes the extreme point of a series of terrorist acts that have fol¬
lowed an exponential curve whose beginning I trace back to 1979, the
year that saw the triumph of Khomeini in Iran and the invasion of
Afghanistan by Soviet troops. These two events had considerable ef¬
fects that reinforced the fundamentalist movements and helped the
dissemination of their ideology. In order to understand the form this
ideology takes, we have to go far back in time. We have to recognize
exactly where the letter—the Qur’an and tradition—is predisposed to
a fundamentalist reading. We have to rediscover the exegetical and
theological tradition in order to unravel the way this letter enables
and encourages those who retain from its meaning only what sum¬
mons them to war. We have to discover where the tradition resists,
where we must allow a new interpretation that did not express itself
where such a tradition grew.

3
4 The Malady of Islam

It is important to know if we can read this literal text according to

the conditions offered by the mental landscape of our times. We must
also denounce the legerdemain that has perverted the heroic aspect of
Islam, by generalizing the concept of the enemy in peacetime. The sec¬
tarians at the origin of this operation have universalized and general¬
ized the concepts of anathema, excommunication and jihad, holy war,
whereas the tradition has often been careful when touching upon
these questions. It is imperative that we follow the course of such a
genesis, which has ended up producing monsters who have forgotten
the reasons of existence and which has transformed a tradition based
on the principle of life and the cult of pleasure into a lugubrious race
toward death.
On the very day that the two New York towers collapsed in a gi¬
gantic cloud of unbreathable dust, at the very moment when thou¬
sands of innocent people (whose ethnic, religious, and national
diversity is a sign of the city’s cosmopolitanism) died with the world
looking on, at that very instant television showed scenes of rejoicing
coming from Palestine and Lebanon. In light of what followed, these
images—pornographic at a human level, and politically disastrous—
revealed their marginal truth, and the local authorities managed to
control the street and to restore it to some decency. But from such im¬
ages, there arises a feeling and an emotion shared by many subjects
belonging to the Islamic masses, and I try to understand through what
trials or education an individual must have passed to be capable of re¬
joicing in such a crime.
There are internal and external reasons for this misery. In this
book it is my responsibility to insist principally on the internal rea¬
sons, without, however, excluding or neglecting the external ones. It is
part of the writer’s role to point out the drift of his or her own people
and to help open their eyes to what blinds them. I insist, as the saying
goes, on starting by sweeping in front of my own door. This book, a
translation from the original French version, will be read by numer¬
ous English-speaking readers concerned in one way or another by the
drama of their own Islamic origins. I address myself to all readers, but
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 5

I have a special concern for those readers who, like me, have constel¬
lated themselves symbolically within the faith of Islam.
To each entity its sickness. This affliction can become so conta¬
gious that it turns into a plague ravaging minds and souls. Voltaire
thus analyzed the sickness of intolerance that had kept up its ravages
until the Calas affair. In response to the death sentence imposed on
Jean Calas on March 9, 1762, by the tribunal of Toulouse, the philoso¬
pher of the Enlightenment wrote his Traite sur la tolerance (Treatise on
toleration). Begun in October 1762, in the middle of the campaign to
rehabilitate Calas, the book was published in Geneva in April 1763. In
this book, Voltaire recapitulates the horrors engendered by Catholic
fanaticism against the Protestants after August 24, 1572, Saint Bar¬
tholomew’s day, when the reformed Christians were massacred in Paris
and in the provinces. One of the reasons for the spread of fanaticism is
the survival of superstition among the people, and the best way to heal
this mortal illness is to subject the greatest possible number to the use
of reason. The word “sickness” appears in Voltaire’s book when the
author accuses the “convulsionary” Jansenists of cultivating supersti¬
tion among the people, which predisposes them to fanaticism. I hasten
to quote this passage even if the reader recognizes in it the biting irony
of the master from Ferney, the effect of which may seem inappropriate
to the gravity of my subject:

If there still are a few convulsive fanatics in remote corners of the

outlying districts, it’s only the basest part of the population which is
attacked by this parasitic disease. Each day reason penetrates further
into France, into the shops of merchants as well as the mansions of
lords. We must cultivate the fruits of this reason, especially since it is
impossible to check its advance.1

Thomas Mann had to deal with the German sickness, which led
him to write Doctor Faustus (published in 1947), an amplification
and radicalization of Death in Venice (1919). In it the author de¬
nounces the excess of the Promethean spirit, which brought so much
6 The Malady of Islam

harm to German thought and art and, as a consequence, to the Ger¬

man people themselves. Mann intended to show “the flight from the
difficulties of the cultural crisis into the pact with the devil, the crav¬
ing of a proud mind, threatened by sterility, for an unblocking of in¬
hibitions at any cost, and the parallel between pernicious euphoria
ending in collapse with the nationalist frenzy of Fascism.”2
Thomas Mann was thinking about Nietzsche. In the same work,
two pages later, he confirms the suggestion: It is indeed the author of
The Birth of Tragedy who is the unnamed model of the personage of
the musician he invented. Even if the German sickness did not spare
Nietzsche, one of his concepts of moral psychology nonetheless sheds
some light on an internal state that favors the eruption of the sickness
in Islam. It is this internal state that I propose to analyze. If fanaticism
was the sickness in Catholicism, if Nazism was the sickness in Ger¬
many, then surely fundamentalism is the sickness in Islam.
This is my thesis. That said, I do not, however, intend to claim
that there is a good and an evil Islam, that one has to honor the one
and denounce the other. Nor do I insinuate that fundamentalism is a
deformation of Islam. In Islam, there is no institution that legitimates
absolute doctrinal magisterium, but traditionally access to the letter
was protected: One needed to obey specific conditions to make it
speak or to speak in its name. However, unrestrained access to the let¬
ter was not prohibited and is not a peculiarity of our times. History
has often had to record the disasters such access provokes. Only to¬
day, thanks to the effects of demography and democratization, the
semiliterate have proliferated and the candidates who claim the au¬
thority to touch the letter have become much more numerous. Their
sheer number reinforces their ferocity.
The Qur anic letter, if submitted to a literal reading, can resonate
in the space delimited by the fundamentalist project: It can respond to
one who wants to make it talk within the narrowness of those con¬
fines; for it to escape, it needs to be invested with the desire of the in¬
terpreter. Rather than distinguishing a good Islam from a bad Islam, it
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 7

would be better for Islam to open itself to debate and discussion, to

rediscover the plurality of opinions, to set up a space for disagreement
and difference, to accept that a neighbor has the freedom to think dif¬
ferently. Better for Islam if intellectual debate rediscovers its rights
and adapts itself to the conditions polyphony offers. May the devia¬
tions multiply and unanimism cease; may the stable substance of the
One disseminate itself in a shower of ungraspable atoms.
As far as external factors are concerned, we may concede that
they are not the cause of the disease that gnaws at the body of Islam.
But they are certainly the catalyst. Because of them, the disease inten¬
sifies. If, by a miracle, they were to disappear, I do not know if the
sickness in Islam would disappear too, but it would not find a climate
favorable for the flourishing and propagation of its germs. What are
these external causes? They are, to list them, the nonrecognition of Is¬
lam by the West as representing an internal alterity; the way in which
Islam is kept in its status of the excluded; the manner in which the
West denies its own principles as soon as its interests demand it; and,
finally, the Western habit (and in our days, particularly the American
habit) of exercising its hegemony in total impunity, following the pol¬
itics of the double standard.
Without wanting to justify crime, many here in the Old World still
thought that the attacks on New York and Washington were an an¬
swer to an American policy based on partisan power. This opinion
seems to shock the Americans themselves, as Robert Malley, former
member of President Clinton’s National Security Council, reminds us:

In the Arab countries, in Europe and by a handful of American intel¬

lectuals, it was insinuated that American policy was the prime cul¬
prit: sanctions and strikes against Iraq, a pro-Israeli stance, the
backing of repressive regimes, that is what is understood as explain¬
ing the terrorists’ choice of target. The United States as victim of its
own policies? This was, understandably—and beyond the logical
flaw of the argument—difficult to accept.3
 8 The Malady of Islam

With all due deference to American common sense, I have to begin

by confirming that the three reasons specified as hypotheses are ex¬
actly those that feed the sickness in Islam and that help in its dissemi¬
nation. I would also like to know what Malley considers the “logical
flaw” of the argument. And who would find these hypotheses “diffi¬
cult to accept,” except the very conceivers and ministers of those poli¬
cies? Malley’s reservations are nothing more than unsupported
affirmations. I admit that the argument does not suffice to explain the
attacks that brought down the Twin Towers and a large wing of the
Pentagon, but it may constitute an a posteriori legitimation. The opin¬
ion was expressed not just by Muslims or Arabs, but also by the
French and other Europeans. It cannot be reckoned as a basic anti-
Americanism (even if such a feeling may be part of it).
If a country, a people, a state wants to remain the leader of the
world, it has to be impartial in its manner of governing. The choice
clearly lies between an imperialistic policy founded on war and an im¬
perial policy whose main concern is to keep the peace. Now, an impe¬
rial policy commends its promoter as the arbiter of conflicts flaring up
in the world, and by no means to be both judge and litigant. Take, for
example, the successful sequences that buttress one of the last histori¬
cal manifestations of such an imperial policy: the Ottoman empire un¬
der great sovereigns like Mehmet Fatih (1451-1481) and Suleiman
Kanuni (1520—1566). These leaders saw themselves as continuators of
the imperial structure developed along the rim of the Mediterranean
since its creation by Alexander, its strengthening by the Romans, its
continuation under the Byzantines and its attempted renovation dur¬
ing the Holy Roman empire. It’s with that mind-set that the Ottomans
successfully managed the mosaic of conflicts among minorities and
nationalities that have always existed in the Near East. Beyond the
emotions felt at the moment, there were many who realized that the
events of September 11 could constitute a response to a failure of
American policies, which have seemed imperialistic rather than impe¬
rial in matters concerning Islam in some of its areas or that touch
upon one or another of its sensitive symbols.
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 9

Who are those who died while spreading death in New York,
Washington and Pennsylvania? Beyond their contamination by the
sickness in Islam, they are the sons of their times, the pure products of
the Americanization of the world: the same ones who turned the digi¬
tal into child’s play and television into personal memory, without hav¬
ing troubled to transmute the essential archaism of their minds and
their souls.4 Thus we see the technical and “aesthetic” success of the
event. The terrorists used the technical means masterfully, and they
accurately thought through the relays of the event’s diffusion as im¬
age. In fact, one wonders if the twenty-minute delay between the tar¬
geting of the towers were not an invitation to the cameras to film
“live” the banking turn that the second plane made before hitting its
target at the point foreseen for impact. We witnessed the optimum use
of today’s means, inviting this quasi-instantaneity between the event
and its transmission across all continents. That is one of the effects of
the universalization of technique and of the cathodic unification of
humankind in the age of the Americanization of the world.
What I insist on, though, is that we witnessed technique rather
than science. Since the seventeenth century the Islamic world is no
longer a creator of science; since the middle of the nineteenth century
it has tried, without success, to reconnect with the scientific spirit that
once upon a time radiated from its cities. But during the postcolonial
era (begun in the 1960s and corresponding to the first manifestation
of the Americanization of the world arising in the aftermath of the
war), Islam, along some of its fringes, was able to master technique.
The implication is more a mastering of the machine’s functioning than
its invention, or even its production. With technique, one is down¬
stream from the scientific process, the initiation of which demands
great mastery upstream.
Who are these terrorists but the children of the Americanization
of the world (as I have said and as I will repeat)? Children who suffer
from the open wound the Muslim subject feels from having been
turned from a ruler into someone ruled. Children who refuse the state
of submission in which they believe themselves to be, and who dream
10 The Malady of Islam

of restoring the hegemony of the entity to which they belong; of mak¬

ing Friday the universally adopted weekly holiday (rather than Sun¬
day); of substituting the year of the hegira for the year of the
Common Era (whose Christian origin they keep stressing). This is not
a caricature. I draw my conclusions from what I have read of the
ineptitudes they publish. But let us first see what specific historical
process produced these people. If indeed they are the result of the con¬
siderations that follow, it is important to specify at the outset that no
rationale inherited from the past can justify their crime. Furthermore,
the process of explanation transcends the specific case of these mon¬
strous figures whose vector is nihilism. The process I am trying to
throw light on is meant to identify the anthropological conditions in
which these terrorists were born, though these conditions did not by
themselves condemn them to be the monsters they became.
The Islamic world has been unceasingly inconsolable in its destitu¬
tion. It knew one very high point of civilization, accompanied by the
boldness of hegemony. If we go back to the notion of world capital, as
proposed by Fernand Braudel, it is reasonable to suggest that before
its displacement toward Europe, this concept was concretized in the
Abbasid Baghdad of the ninth and tenth centuries, in the Fatimid
Cairo of the eleventh and the Mameluke Cairo of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. After that, the world capital crossed over to the
north shore of the Mediterranean with the Genoa-Venice duo, before
it exiled itself, departing ever further from the Islamic world, by set¬
ting up first in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, then in London
in the nineteenth and in New York City in the twentieth century.
Hereafter, we will probably see a migration toward the Pacific coast in
the dense interactions between Asia and North America. Since the fif¬
teenth century, the world capital has thus moved geographically ever
further away from the Islamic space.

11
12 The Malady of Islam

For Islam, entropy has been at work since the fourteenth century,
but it was only toward the end of the eighteenth (with Bonaparte’s ex¬
pedition to Egypt) that the Muslims themselves began to become con¬
scious that they were no longer at the same level as the West. It was this
lateness, this lag, that allowed a number of countries belonging to the
Islamic territories to be colonized because they found themselves in the
situation of the colonizable. The Muslim individual, who claimed supe¬
riority to or at least equality with the Western individual, cannot grasp
the process that has led the Muslim to such weakness when faced with
the centuries-old counterpart, enemy or adversary, or at times partner
and even ally, depending on the circumstances. In reaction to this state
of affairs, ressentiment against the Westerners arose among Arabs and
Muslims. (I am taking up the very useful concept of ressentiment as de¬
veloped in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals.1) Nietzsche himself
thought that the Muslim (or more precisely, the Arab) was someone
who belonged to a people who, throughout the ages, had acted more in
conformity with aristocratic morality, the morality of affirmation—
someone who illuminates, someone who gives without trying to re¬
ceive.2 The situation of the person of ressentiment, on the other hand, is
to be in the position of the one who receives but who does not have the
means to give; the person of ressentiment cannot affirm. Thus the Mus¬
lim is no longer the individual of the “yes” that illuminates the world
and creates a naturally hegemonic being. From sovereign being, the
Muslim has slowly become the person of the “no,” the one who re¬
fuses, who is no longer active but only reactive, the one who accumu¬
lates hatred and waits only for the hour of revenge. This sentiment,
initially unknown to the Islamic subject, will imperceptibly grow and
take over the person’s center. I believe that the fundamentalist actions
whose agent is the Muslim subject can be explained by the growth of
the subject’s ressentiment, a condition that had historically been un¬
known to the Muslim since his first appearance on the stage of history
as an individual.
This new feeling did not install itself mechanically after the defeat
of colonial confrontation: Much time passed before the germ of ressen-
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 13

timent started to grow. Consider Emir Abd el-Kader (1808-1883).

This Islamic ruler lost nothing of his aristocratic dignity despite the de¬
feat of 1847, his incarceration in France and his expatriation to the
Orient in 1852. He never knew ressentiment. This man of the sword
and the pen dedicated himself in his Damascene exile to the teaching of
the esoteric sciences, deepening the centuries-old furrow of his master
Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), whose works he interpreted and published.
During the troubles of 1860, he applied the Akhbarian doctrine that
preaches the equality of beliefs.3 Absent from Damascus when Mus¬
lims (carried away by the herd instinct that characterizes masses) at¬
tacked the Christians of the city, but hearing that vile events had
shaken the city, he hurried back and saved many lives. Gathering the
Christians in groups, he led them to safety in the citadel.
A Christian survivor, Mikhayil Mishaqa, bore witness to this ac¬
tion. Hundreds of fugitives (European consuls and Syrian Christians)
fled toward Abd el-Kader’s quarters on the banks of the river Barada,
and the excited crowd wanted to attack them. So the emir “had his
horse saddled.”4 In one of his mawaqif (spiritual stations), the same
emir recalled how during one of his Damascus sessions, he was ques¬
tioned by a member of the audience who was worried about the ef¬
fects of the defeat on the Muslims. The Muslims had started to imitate
the Christians (i.e., the Westerners) in the way they dressed, ate and
lived. In short, one is faced with an early questioning of the accultura¬
tion being experienced by the Islamic countries at the beginning of the
Westernization of the world.5
We cannot find the smallest trace of ressentiment in the emir’s re¬
sponse. After a traditional theological argument (if the Muslim faced
defeat, it must have been because he was tepid and negligent in the
service his God asked him to perform), he presented another argu¬
ment of psychological common sense (it is human nature that,
through fascination, the vanquished imitate the victor and will even
go as far as to learn the victor’s language). He then made an accurate
sociological observation (first adopted by the elite, the process of imi¬
tation then propagates like poison throughout the whole social body).
14 The Malady of Islam

Finally, the emir remembered the theory of divine names as con¬

structed by his medieval master, Ibn ‘Arabi, the names that govern all
human activities and preside over all events that occur. Thus he in¬
vented the divine name of Khadhil (the deserting god who abandons
you) to explain the defeat of the Muslim in the face of the European
(which was nothing else than the emir’s own defeat).
Even if such a name can be traced to a verbal form in Holy Writ
(the Qur’an says: “If Allah assists you, then there is none that can
overcome you, and if He forsakes you, yakddhulu-kum—who is there
then that can assist you after Him?”), it is clear that the emir’s inven¬
tion is of astonishing audacity.6 His boldness is the sign of a freedom
that can at least be assimilated to what traditional theology calls a
bid’a, a reprehensible innovation. All through his development, the
emir was inspired by the following verse: “God abandons the Muslims
without aiding the infidels. The defeat of the believer is due to God’s
abandonment; but the unbeliever’s victory does not result from His
help.” This vision of divine effect, negative for oneself without being
positive for the enemy, preserves the horizon of faith during the ordeal.
Thus aristocratic man believes himself to have enough sovereignty
to take the liberty to invent the actualization of tradition, and it is his
familiarity with the hermeneutical method of ta’wil that authorizes and
legitimizes his action. This familiarity predisposes him to emulate his
audacious predecessors. Such doctrinal boldness cannot be in the reach
of the half-educated, who today are legion in Islamic societies, which
during the period of decolonization have experienced democratization
without ever tasting democracy. It is in such a context that the mutation
took place: From being aristocratic, the Muslim subject gradually be¬
came the person of ressentiment, a frustrated, dissatisfied individual
who believes himself to be better than the conditions imposed on him.
Like every half-educated person, he turns out to be (in his accumulated
refusals and hatreds) a candidate for revenge, predisposed to insurrec¬
tion and all it demands in terms of dissimulation and sacrifice.
But the real origin of this development, which lies at the point
where psychology and ethics intersect, is the end of creativity, the end
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 15

of the contributions that made Islamic civilization. Aware of their

sterility, the Islamic people have grown inconsolable in their bereave¬
ment. Now, this state of affairs does not date from the colonial era; the
imperial role that the majority of Islamic countries experienced is not
the cause of their decline but the consequence of it: For the past several
centuries, Muslims have not been creative in the scientific domain, nor
have they been masters of technical development. It took them more
than a century to master technology, something that happened in the
postcolonial phase. As I have already said, the Americanization of the
world is what permitted this acquisition. It belongs to the domain of
consumption and functioning, and not to that of production and in¬
vention. It is useful primarily for the expansion of markets. However,
apart from some individuals of Islamic origin working in Western re¬
search institutions, Muslim individuals, inside the horizon of their own
symbolic and linguistic territoriality, remain excluded from the scien¬
tific spirit. They are not involved in the conception of the airplane, its
invention or even its production, but they can pilot the flying machine
very well, and go as far as to steer it to destruction.
 3

The major events in Islam happened very early on. But their muta¬
tion was interrupted too soon. The very beginning of the ninth cen¬
tury saw the birth of a rationalist movement animated by those whom
we call the Mu’tazilites. These thinkers tried to disrupt two then-
dominant ideas: They criticized the Islamic dogma that states that the
Qur’an (like God) is uncreated and has come down from heaven as it
is in itself and in eternity. Their answer to this dogma is that, indeed,
the Qur’an is of divine origin, but that the concretization of the Holy
Writ in an earthly language can only be created by God at the moment
of its revelation. These sectarians think that those who claim that the
Qur’an is uncreated are installing an Islamic equivalent of the Christ¬
ian sense of incarnation: The Qur’anic letter would thus be the in¬
carnation of God. The literalists could thus easily be mistaken as
Christians who identify Christ with God because he is His Word.
These Mu’tazilites removed God from the world; they gave him back
to his unknowability, they neutralized him in a transcendence that lib-

16
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 17

erated humankind from predestination and made humans alone re¬

sponsible for their actions.
This theological movement became the official state ideology. The
caliph himself, al-Ma’mun (786-833), the son of Harun al-Rashid,
w? -ted to impose it on all his subjects.1 The caliphate in fact set up a
sort of inquisition (the Mibna, inaugurated in 833) that attacked
with great violence the contemporary literalist school in the person of
its most eloquent representative, Ibn Hanbal (780-circa 855). It is
important to remember this moment in history. The genealogy of
fundamentalism must include this ninth-century personage, who was
subjected to the worst tortures because in the name of his literalism
he refused to accept the theses of the Mu’tazilites. His resistance
found resonance and support among people anxious for the return of
Qur’anic orthodoxy.
The great limitation of the Mu’tazilites’ rationalist movement was
that it failed to evolve into an enlightenment, above all because it
sought to impose its point of view through the most radical violence,
using the means at the disposal of an Eastern despot. (To extend his
power over the theological domain as a whole al-Ma’mun gave him¬
self the title of imam and imposed his interpretation on the consti¬
tuted bodies of the ulemas, scholars in theology.) Orthodoxy was
reestablished at the center of power as soon as Mutawakkil, the third
successor of al-Ma’mun, took over (847). Now the Mu’tazilites were
made to suffer in their turn—first by their complete marginalization
and then by their slow but certain extinction—the same hardships
they had made their adversaries suffer, who not only survived them
but prospered.
During this period (as precocious in its conflicts as in its complex¬
ity and promise), the caliph al-Ma’mun played an important role in ac¬
climatizing the Greek heritage in the Arab language. This caliph, so
tradition tells us, dreamed about Aristotle, who asked him to have his
books translated into Arabic. It is as if every process that leads to an
enlightenment were triggered by a love for the Greeks and the restora¬
tion of their ways of thinking and feeling. While on a campaign against
18 The Malady of Islam

the Byzantines, al-Ma’mun came across the Neoplatonic community of

the Sabsens in the Harran. A bold fatwa likened them formally to the
enigmatic Sabi’un, to whom the Qur’an had given the status of a peo¬
ple of the Book: “Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews,
and the Christians, and the Sabsens . . . ”2 So the Holy Book put the
Sabsens on equal footing with the Muslims, the Jews and the Chris¬
tians. The Sabsens provided Islam with a number of scholars and trans¬
lators from the Greek.
The caliph al-Ma’mun encouraged the confrontation of ideas in
the heart of the city by organizing debates between sectarians of di¬
verse faiths and Muslim theologians of various schools of thought. Al¬
ready at this early period, the literalists were stubbornly opposed to
any foreign borrowing as well as to the presence, in the city, of contra¬
dictory voices, which their ears perceived as blasphemous. Yet this
staging of a forum for disagreement was itself the work of a ruler.
This point keeps us from affirming that the exercise of reason, in its
triumph, was accompanied by freedom—which remained the great
unknown, especially in its political form.
It was in this Baghdad of the first part of the ninth century that the
great scientific adventure of Arabic literature began, an adventure that
lasted into the sixteenth century. It was at this time that the school of
astronomy of Baghdad was created, founded both on speculative cal¬
culations and on observation. It was also in this city that algebra was
invented by al-Khwarizmi, who dedicated his treatise to al-Ma’mun.
Besides this scientific movement, there was born a poetic revolu¬
tion reminiscent of the nineteenth-century poetic revolution in France.
If the reader can transcend context and history, he or she can hear
how the words of these Arab poets resonate with those of Baudelaire,
Verlaine, Rimbaud and even Mallarme. In the body of work created
by these Arab poets, one can distinguish poetic processes as varied as
those of the French poets just cited. As just one example, consider the
recognizably Mallarmean case of the Syrian Christian poet Abu Tam-
mam (806-845). His father ran a tavern in Damascus. By using odd
syntactical devices, rare words, antitheses and abstractions, and by a
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 19

cultivation of paronomasia, he inflected the occasional verse that was

his chosen genre (panegyrics, threnodies, satires, description of bat¬
tles) toward a hieratic and hermetic poetry that demands interpreta¬
tion and that comes to its full realization only in the fullness of
commentary. His is the following rather compassionate and limpid
(he was able to write like that too) distich that speaks of the eternity
of love in a dialectic of absence and presence:

What is it consoles me in your absence

if not the memory of you which doesn’t fade

Of all the guests you are the closest and

even if you are far sadness brings you close3

To show a likeness with Baudelaire, the emergence of a critical

and scandalous individual making use of transgression as the engine
of the poem, I will evoke Abu Nuwas (762-circa 813), one of the
most radical figures of this poetic revolution. An Arab-Persian poet
writing very provocatively in Arabic, he sang the praises of wine (for¬
bidden in Islam) and homosexual love; he was an existentialist who
brought his own experiences to bear on his poems. The critics of his
era saw him as the main figure of the school of the Moderns (the
Muhdathun). In a polemical way, he turned his back on the poetry of
Arab origins rooted in the desert and in nomadism. He considered
that way of living a throwback to the poverty that marked the region
and to the difficult life such penury engenders; to the original desert
he contrasted the conquest of the metropolis and the pleasures it pro¬
vides, even down to the tragedy of profligate spending and excess that
make for the enjoyment of the provocative and reckless dandy as well
as for the dissipation he undergoes, diverted from religious practice by
what presents itself to his senses. Moreover, he helped impose a quasi¬
arithmetic formal unity and rigor onto a rhapsodic, discontinuous,
unbridled poetic tradition. We still read this poetry from the high
Middle Ages as if it had been written yesterday, as if the ink had not
20 The Malady of Islam

yet had time to dry. Just imagine those spectacular moments of cre¬
ation happening in that ninth-century Baghdad workshop! As you
can see, the attempt to reform took place very early on, but it was
aborted.
The following two poetic extracts illustrate the mischievous joy of
this lively transgressor, whose verbal lushness could certainly be
likened to the ‘abath, that scandalous vanity that discredits any art
form in the eyes of our narrow-minded contemporary fundamentalists:

Serve me and serve Joseph

this tasty wine
that makes one thrill

Push trouble out of your life

keep only its peace

Fill my glass to the brim

I don’t want cups
that are only half full

Put down the gourd

and beside it the Book

Drink three glasses

and recite a verse

Good has mingled with bad

and if God forgives

He will win in whom the one

has wiped out the other, basta!

Or, from another one:

 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 21

To one who asks me if I want to go to Mecca

I answer yes—when the pleasures
of Baghdad will have been exhausted
For how could I make the pilgrimage
as long as I remain immersed
in a brothel or tavern?4
If we look simultaneously at science, the state of technology and
the state of the arts, we can say that Islamic civilization kept pace with
what was happening in Europe until the baroque and classical peri¬
ods. There can indeed be an equivalence between what happened in
Islam in the eleventh, twelfth or thirteenth centuries and what was
created in Europe up to the seventeenth century. Islam came very close
to the Cartesian, Keplerian, Copernican and Galilean threshold.1
From the seventeenth century onward, and through the revolutions in
thought symbolized by the names just mentioned, there evolved a
movement that would lead to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth
century. The Enlightenment would separate Europe from the other
great civilizations, from the Islamic as well as the Chinese and the
Indian civilizations. It is the eighteenth century that caused the separa¬
tion of the West, with the fascinating accumulation of ideas con¬
cretized by the events of 1789. According to Hegel, rarely had a
historical rupture been thought through as deeply before it actually

22
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 23

occurred. With the French Revolution, the idea preceded the fact: The
former made the latter ineluctable.2
And yet, at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the
eighteenth centuries, both in regard to the material life of the societies
an ' to the morality that framed them, the Islamic polis was consid¬
ered equal by those Europeans who were confronted by it. Two exam¬
ples illustrate this sense of equality. In his anthology of Eastern
maxims, Antoine Galland (1646-1714) tried to enrich the European
moral conscience by drawing on teachings of Arab, Turkish and Per¬
sian origin.3 And in her letters, Lady Mary Montagu, the wife of the
English ambassador to the Sublime Porte (1717-1718), at times
judged the Ottoman situation as more positive than the European
one, especially concerning religious tolerance. She expressed these
thoughts after her conversations with the religious scholar Effendi
Ahmad Bey, in whose house she had lived for three weeks in Belgrade.
She noted that the most widely shared opinion, if one sought out the
secret of the effendis, came down to a sort of deism corresponding
most probably to the spirit of Akbarism (the relativist theory of Ibn
‘Arabi) that pervaded the Ottoman elites.4
And this eighteenth century, founded essentially on the broaden¬
ing of the concept of freedom, the individual and the rights of men,
also experienced the explosion of the consubstantial link between the
political and the religious. The problematic that flowered, crystallized
and proposed the solutions that eighteenth-century Europe would ex¬
perience (and on which the future would be built) was located by the
historians as originating in an Arabo-Occidental text, the famous De¬
cisive Treatise by Averroes (1126-1198).5 In this book, the Cordovan
philosopher systematizes the thought inaugurated by the first hell-
enizing philosopher from Baghdad, al-Kindi (796-873). Averroes
takes up and deepens al-Kindi’s reflection on the relation between re¬
ligion and philosophy, theology and technique. He perceives philoso¬
phy as the logical technique that underlies his method. In Arabic,
Averroes calls this ela, the instrument, and the organon, the instru¬
ment of thought as inherited from Aristotle, the aim of which is to
24 The Malady of Islam

think the inexhaustible articulation of language on the world. The

first step in this long process carried this problematic to the European
Averroists—Christians primarily, but also Jews.6 In this philosophical
adventure, which canonized the separation of the fields, the ideas cir¬
culated from Greek to Arabic, then to Latin, to Hebrew, and to the
modern European languages. That’s where the beginning of the prob¬
lematic lies, and its evolution will pass through the Averroists, the
European ones, notably. In Islam we truly have the same perspective
as the Western one, but the process stopped in Arabic, whereas it con¬
tinued in the European languages.
It would be erroneous to believe that the energy of thought and of
creation died out in Islam with the lack of Averroist lineage. Henry
Corbin has reminded us in his books how fertile the Avicenian influ¬
ence was in Arabic as well as in Persian, especially via the Persian Pla-
tonists.7 The latter were marked by the Plotinian inheritance (long
extracts of the Enneads were known in Arabic from the beginning of
the tenth century on, via the Theology wrongfully attributed to Aris¬
totle). Add to this the meditation of Avicenna (980-1037), who spiri¬
tualizes the Aristotelian legacy; of Shurawardi (1155-1191), who
integrates the Zoroastrian heritage; and of Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240),
who adds to his interpretive audacities the ardor of interior experi¬
ence. This movement of thinking and being produced the great minds
of the seventeenth century—such as Molla Sadra Shirazi (d. 1640)—
and even beyond, with the Shaykhis school (around the city of Ker¬
man), which continued to produce great masters until the nineteenth
century. One changes horizons with this spiritualist and rather Shiite
movement, though it does, however, intersect with the speculative
thinkers of Sunnite Akhbarian Sufism (the latter produced great texts
until the seventeenth century, such as those of the Syrian Abd al-
Ghani an-Nabulusi (d. 1731), and even in the nineteenth century, such
as those of the already mentioned Algerian expatriate, the emir Abd
el-Kader). This perspective will end up privileging “the ontological in¬
finite over cosmological finitude.”8
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 25

What interests these thinkers passionately is the continent of the

soul, and if politics enters this thought, it will be a politics that will
put the soul in command. Those who inhabit with their ardor the very
rich continent of the soul live, in fact and in thought, the separation
from the mundane area of politics. It is much more a poetic and meta¬
physical retreat than a desertion in the face of the responsibility awak¬
ened by the fate of the polis. Through this retreat it is a spiritual
tradition that gains in depth and unites with the spirit of aristocratic
morality, one that represents the essence of Islamic civilization.
Just the same, scientific activity did not cease. Scholars conducted
ongoing astronomical research and observations in Central Asia, in
continuation of the international school of Maragha (1259-1316).
There was also Samarkand (whose observatory was founded in 1420
and remained active until at least 1500) and Istanbul (which was
given its observatory by the scholar Taqiy ad-Din in 1575).9 More¬
over, the arts continued to flourish, in architecture as well as in paint¬
ing, in the various Islamic states: the Timurid state in Central Asia
(fifteenth century), the Safevid state in Persia (fifteenth to seventeenth
century), the Moghul state in north India (seventeenth and eighteenth
century) and the Ottoman state on the three continents over which the
empire spread (fourteenth to nineteenth century).
 5

It is essential to detach ourselves from the stereotypical notion

that Islamic civilization lost its fertility at the end of the twelfth cen¬
tury, in synchronicity with the end of Averroism and the theological
reaction this philosophic oeuvre gave rise to. At most we could say
that from the fifteenth century onward, a kind of entropy took hold of
minds and set them on a slow yet inexorable curve toward decline.
And yet, what was built and invented in the princely Timurid environ¬
ment (in the region of Samarkand, Bokhara, Tashkent and Herat) is in
no way inferior to the contemporary brilliance of the quattrocento in
the Florence of the Medicis and in the Burgundy of the Limbourgs.
These same Timurids were abundantly quoted by Antoine Galland in
his Remarkable Sayings, through which he sought to become the
Plutarch of the Muslims. On many occasions, Galland evoked the
Timurid sovereign Shah Rokh, a descendant of Tamerlane, as the fig¬
ure of the smart if not enlightened monarch to present as an edifying
example for the European kings.1

26
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 27

These days, in the face of the political woes of the Islamic polis
and the irresistible propagation of fundamentalism, it is fashionable
among certain intellectuals who claim modernity to neglect this in¬
tense creativity over so many years. They neutralize this contribution
to civilization by limiting it to the princely environment and to mys¬
tics, a conjunction they see as paralyzing necessary political reforms.
Armed thus with the proof of political failure, these intellectual critics
preach a return to Averroes to patch together a civil viability. They
relativize Western borrowings, because a self-identity without this rel-
ativization would be wounding and even ignominious, in their eyes.2
Such intellectuals trot out yet again the dialectic of the particular and
the universal to heal themselves of the sickness of identity in a world
objectively Westernized, and in which everyone ought to serenely ap¬
propriate the insights of the Western Enlightenment.
It is by such appropriations that the truth of the Enlightenment
will shine fully: If every non-Westerner uses its light, then this truth
will finally be rid of the smoke screen that veils things when the truth is
twisted by the descendants of those who first offered it to humankind.
The denial of the principle by the historical actions of the Westerners
does not suffice to disqualify the idea erected as a principle.
This failing was noticed very early on, as long ago as 1834, in the
first Algerian text written in French, The Mirror, by Hamdane Khodja.
This is a confused book whose value for us lies only in a remark in the
preface, which formulates what will be the irrefutable argument of
every anticolonial stance. At the very moment when, in the name of the
liberty of the people, the French aided in the struggles of Belgium,
Greece and Poland in Europe, France—creator of that concept of lib¬
erty—was enslaving another people in Africa:

I see Greece succored and established on a firm base after having

been liberated from the Ottoman Empire. I see the Belgian people
separated from Holland because of some difference in their political
and religious principles. I see all free peoples display concern for the
Poles and the reestablishment of their nationality, and I also see the
28 The Malady of Islam

British government immortalizing its glory by the emancipation of

the Negroes, and the British parliament sacrificing half a billion
pounds to realize this emancipation, and then as I return to cast my
gaze on the country of Algiers, I see its unhappy inhabitants placed
under the yoke of despotism, extermination and all the evils of war,
and all these horrors are committed in the name of free France.3

This says it all. In this statement, we find one of the very first de¬
nunciations of that Western perversity that causes the European to act
against the idea (that he himself set forth as a principle) when the
preservation of his hegemony demands it.
Will we find ourselves forced to agree with the critique that Carl
Schmitt formulated in 1926, concerning colonial empires? The Ger¬
man philosopher of law decries the illusion of democratic universality,
which leads to the opposition between the law of the state and the
rights of the people, and thinks that homogeneity and equality exist
only inside sameness, which annuls the universal. Democracy was
then limited to the West, which found itself incapable of creating uni¬
versal equality. In a colonial situation, democracy turns out to be
founded only on the concept of internal homogeneity and equality.

Colonies, protectorates, mandates, interventionist charters, and

other analogous forms create a relationship of dependency, which
means that today a democracy can dominate a foreign population
without making it into citizens and can make it dependent on demo¬
cratic states while simultaneously keeping it apart from that state.
This is the political and governmental meaning of the eloquent for¬
mula “The colonized populations are politically excluded and juridi¬
cally included.”4

According to Schmitt, the idea of universal—and thus absolute—

equality annuls itself; it is an empty concept that turns on itself: “Up
until now there has not existed any democracy that didn’t recognize
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 29

the concept of the foreigner and that would have tried to implement
the equality of all men.”5
And Schmitt ends up defining colonies with this lapidary formula:
Dependency in relation to the rights of the people, otherness in rela¬
tion to state law.”6
Close to a century later this definition extends Hamdane Khodja’s
remark. Every Algerian who read it when it was written could recog¬
nize himself in it.
Now that we live in the postcolonial era, are we able to say that
these perversions and illusions have ceased to exist? Or are they hid¬
ing behind other masks and disguises? If these failings continue to
manifest themselves, we can state without risk of error that their per¬
sistence feeds the resentment of the person who experiences its effects.
Such is the case with the Islamic subject.
The return to Averroes may, however, not be without pedagogical
value in guiding the Islamic subject through the confusion that disori¬
ents him and opens him up to harkening to the disastrous fundamen¬
talist illusion. Certainly it doesn’t seem meaningless to go back to a
twelfth-century thinker who, in your own language, has analyzed and
resolved problems encountered in his time and that continue to beset
your contemporaries. Such concerns, for example, are the relation to
the other and the inequality of women.
The relation to the other, to the stranger, is set forth admirably at
the beginning of Averroes’s Decisive Treatise.1 And the reasoning of
the medieval Cordovan philosopher can indeed provide today’s anx¬
ious identity seekers with an answer. In truth, it is common sense itself
that takes hold of the question through that technical aspect that deals
with the legitimacy of borrowing.
In order to use his reason to gain knowledge of God and of the
whole of the creation God has endowed with being, Averroes recom-

30
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 31

mended the use of inference as a method that extracts the unknown

from the known. This method can be assimilated to the syllogism with
its premises and species; it plays the role of the instrument for theoreti¬
cal thought, a role comparable to that of the tool in practical activities.
Concerning recourse to the logical instrument (the rational syllogism),
Averroes noted that the first generations of Muslims (who constitute
the basis of the tradition) did not know this instrument. He brushed
aside the suspicion of bid’a, the “reprehensible innovation” discussed
previously in relation to the Emir Abd el-Kader and which the conser¬
vatives invoke to obstruct new avenues opened by borrowing and
adaptation of foreign inventions. Averroes believed that it is foolish to
waste time reinventing for oneself what has already been invented by
others. The accumulation of knowledge is universal. Anybody can
draw on it, whatever his ethnic, language or religious background. By
calling for the utilization of the method of the Ancients (the ancient
Greeks, that is), Averroes overwhelmed the dogma of the Jahiliyya,
that era of ignorance abolished by the age of grace introduced by
Islam. Not only did he believe that new nations have to take advantage
of the memory stores of previous peoples, he further set up a welcom¬
ing formula for his borrowings: We should rejoice and thank the an¬
cient thinkers for everything they invented that conforms to the truth,
while warning the public of the excusable errors of the ancients. Until
this assertion, the word that designated the ancient Greeks was the
Arab word qudama, or Ancients, that is, the “Ancients from before the
apparition of the nation articulated by the Islamic law.”2
In a second move, Averroes ended up by creating a rather beauti¬
ful ambivalence when, invoking “those who came before us among
the ancient peoples,” he used the term umam as-salifa.3 This expres¬
sion makes use of an attributive adjective based on the consonantal
root sd.f., the very root of the word that designates “the pious an¬
cient ones” of Medina. Those salafs are constantly spoken of through
the history of Islam by all who call for a return to origins (without
forgetting to count among these the nineteenth-century fundamental¬
ists and their chief figure, Sheikh Mohammed ‘Abduh (1849-1905),
32 The Malady of Islam

as well as contemporary fundamentalists).4 It is as if the Arab Aris¬

totelian from Spain were subconsciously expressing a desire to con¬
fuse the Greeks, heathen foreigners, with the model figures that run
through the Islamic myth.
Concerning the question of women, this other form of alterity
based on sexual difference, Averroes analyzes it in his paraphrase of
Plato’s Republic. The original Arabic version of the book is lost and
has come down to us in a 1321 Hebrew translation by Samuel ben
Yehuda, a Jew from Marseilles, in the citadel of Beaucaire.5 We also
have a 1491 Latin translation based on the Hebrew version and pre¬
pared by one of Pico della Mirandola’s Jewish students. In this way
Florentine Neoplatonism of the late quattrocento was in its turn able
to enjoy the Arab philosopher’s commentary.
Without Aristotle’s Politics available to him, Averroes decided to
read Plato’s utopia in an active manner (summary, commentary, actu¬
alization). And he found himself in agreement with the Athenian phi¬
losopher concerning the natural equality between men and women.
This is why either sex can take part in great things: Women can be
philosophers, military and political leaders. But this equality does not
hide the difference that separates the sexes: If men can be more dili¬
gent at their tasks, women can be more skillful in the practice of cer¬
tain arts. This is the case for musical interpretation. Thus it is said
that melodies achieve perfection if men preside over their composition
and women over their execution. It is clear that since they share the
same nature, men and women can exercise the same professions in the
city. But since women are physically weaker, they should be responsi¬
ble for less arduous tasks. They are even capable of mastering the art
of war, as has been noted in the barbaric countries that stretch out be¬
yond the frontiers of the empire. To illustrate these assertions, Aver¬
roes took up once more the animal image used at the beginning of the
text concerning the class of the guardians: Although weaker, female
guard dogs are as ferocious as their male counterparts when it comes
to fighting the hyenas that attack the herds.6
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 33

After the approving summary came the actualization, concretized in

the course of the commentary. Averroes attributed to certain women—
the intelligent and well disposed—the possibility of attaining political
leadership and authority. He must have been thinking about Islam
specifically when he noted that certain laws prohibit women from exer¬
cising supreme power (what he called the great imamat) because of the
conviction that such women could represent only rare cases.
Otherwise, the women of these cities (the demonstrative pronoun
pointed to the Andalusian cities Averroes knew) remained excluded
from participation in great things because they dedicated themselves
to the care of their husbands, to childbearing, to breast-feeding and to
the children’s education, tasks that occupied them completely. In this
way the women resemble plants. And as their upkeep is a heavy bur¬
den for the men, they also become one of the causes of the poverty
of these cities, because they do not participate in necessary activities—
they only augment production a little through rudimentary tasks like
spinning and weaving. This is Averroes’s calm witness, naturally fa¬
voring the equality of women and implicitly preaching their emanci¬
pation. By his recourse to the economic argument, he anticipated
contemporary feminist theories that link the liberation of women to
their participation in production, rescuing them from financial de¬
pendency, which leads to all the other kinds of dependency. This de¬
fense of women is written in Arabic by a Muslim man of the twelfth
century; it can still serve as a plea to put an end to the inequality and
the confinement that is so often women’s lot in many Islamic coun¬
tries, today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
We have to acknowledge the flourishing of Islamic fundamental¬
ism and the global dimension it assumed. The event we witnessed on
September 11, 2001, was made possible only by the mutation of the
Western model: It has gone from European to American.
It is clear now that the European model in which I grew up, the one
that arose from the French Enlightenment and formed me through a
Franco-Arabic education, no longer holds any attraction. I felt the shock
of that when the question of the veil, so highly symbolic in Europe, came
up. During my childhood in the 1950s, in that citadel of Islam that is the
Medina of Tunis, I witnessed the unveiling of wromen in the name of
Westernization and modernity. This involved the wives, daughters and
sisters of the scholars of the Law who taught at the thousand-year-old
theological University of the Zitouna (one of the three most important in
Islam, after the Kairaouine in Fez and al-Azhar in Cairo).
This unveiling of the women in the conservative milieu in which I
was brought up was not just the result of Habib Bourguiba’s emanci-

34
 Islam: Inconsolable in Its Destitution 35

patory action in Tunisia. Even in the more conservative Moroccan

context, King Mohammed V had unveiled his own daughters. It was
in the air at that time, and not only because of the Maghreb’s close
connection with France. Throughout the Arab world, the unveiling of
women was a process that had begun at the end of the nineteenth cen¬
tury, following Qasim Amin’s (1865-1908) pamphlet on the subjuga¬
tion of women, and the veil as sign of that servitude.1 Inspired by the
liberal interpretation of the Qur’an proposed by the Sheikh Mo¬
hammed ‘Abduh (1849-1905), Qasim Amin had written his Tahrir al-
Mar a ( The liberation of woman”).2 His ideas had mobilized the
women themselves to create the Egyptian Feminist Union, in 1925. Its
president, Hoda Sha’rawi, rejected the veil officially in 1926.3 Qasim
Amin s pamphlet does not propose a complete liberation of women.
In relation to the veil, for example, his proposal is for a practical veil
that complies with Qur’anic recommendations without hindering the
women’s movements or limiting their participation in civic activities.
Most importantly, he insists that the oppression of women does not
come from Islam itself but from usage and customs. This appreciation
is in accord with the anthropologist Germaine Tillion, who, after con¬
ducting fieldwork in the Islamic terrain of the Aures Mountains,
placed women’s condition of servitude inside a wider structure. Con¬
cerning women and the veil, she linked “the cloistering of women in
the whole Mediterranean basin to the evolution, the interminable
degradation of tribal societyShe also suggested “reasons why this
humiliating position was so often, and wrongly, attributed to Islam.”4
The movement that summoned women to end their cloistering has
to be inscribed in a cultural context of Westernization, which, during
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, even marked the thought and
action of the theologians. This is the case, for example, with Sheikh
Mohammed ‘Abduh, the master of Salafism, which invoked simultane¬
ously modernization and a return to the salaf, those ancient pious ones
of early Islam.5 It is a kind of fundamentalism, however, to be distin¬
guished from the integrism that is dominant today.6 The sheikh was si¬
multaneously against European hegemony and local despotism; he
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 Meantime Drake sunned himself in the Court favour, and books
and pictures and songs were made in his praise.
The Golden Hind was brought ashore at Deptford, and became a
resort for sightseers. But in spite of much patching she became so
old that she had to be broken up, and the last of her timbers were
made into a chair, which is still kept in a quiet Oxford library. So the
ship ends her days far away from the sound of the sea, and of the
gay throngs that used to make merry and dance on her decks.

SIR FRANCIS DRAKE

 On the 4th of April the Queen paid a State visit to the ship, and
ordered that it should be preserved for ever. A fine banquet was
served on board, and there, before the eyes of hundreds of
onlookers, Elizabeth knighted the “pirate captain.” She said jestingly
that the King of Spain had demanded Drake’s head, and now she
had a gold sword to cut it off. Thus Elizabeth openly defied the
Spaniards, who were still raging over their stolen treasure.
But there were some not in Spain who also thirsted for revenge
upon Drake. Thomas Doughty’s young brother was his unforgiving
foe. The case was never brought to Court or indeed to light; but
young Doughty wrote a letter in which he said “that when the Queen
did knight Drake she did then knight the greatest knave, the vilest
villain, the foulest thief, and the crudest murderer that ever was
born.” The Spaniards bribed him to try and murder Drake. We hear
that he was put in prison, and we never hear of his release.
In 1581 Drake was made Mayor of Plymouth. In 1583 his wife
died. He was then a member of Parliament. Two years later he
married Mary Sydenham. He never had any children.
The Queen now appointed Drake among others to inquire into
the state of the navy; he was to see to the repairing of ships, to the
building of new ones, and to the means of furnishing them with
stores in case of sudden war. From this time onwards the thought of
a Spanish invasion was a constant fear in the minds of the English
people. But Philip was unready, and Elizabeth unwilling to be the
first to begin a war. Elizabeth changed her mind and her plans in a
way that must have been maddening to the men who did her work.
One good result of her indecision was that England was better
prepared for the invasion. In those long years of private warfare
money had been gathering, and the navy made strong and ready for
work. But for men of action, who like to make a plan and stick to it,
and go through with it at all costs, Elizabeth’s delays and recalls
were bewildering and unreasonable.
In 1585 Philip seized a fleet of English corn-ships trading in his
own ports. Then, at last, Drake’s long-talked-of expedition against
the Spanish settlements was got ready and sent out. He had about
thirty ships, commanded by some of the most famous captains of
the time, men like Fenner, Frobisher, and Wynter, who afterwards
fought against the Armada. His general of the soldiers was
Christopher Carleill, “a man of long experience in wars both by sea
and land,” and who was afterwards said to direct the service “most
like a wise commander.” Drake’s ship was the Elizabeth Bonaventure.
After a week spent in capturing ships, the fleet anchored at the
Bayona Islands, off Vigo Bay. The Governor of Bayona was forced to
make terms. He sent “some refreshing, as bread, wine, oil, apples,
grapes, and marmalade, and such like.” The people, filled with terror,
were seen to remove their possessions into boats to go up the Vigo
River, inland, for safety. Many of these were seized; most of them
were loaded only with household stuff, but one contained the
“church stuff of the high church of Vigo ... a great cross of silver of
very fair embossed work and double-gilt all over, having cost them a
great mass of money.”
The fleet now went on its way by the Canary Islands. When
Santiago was reached, Carleill landed with a thousand troops and
took possession of the fortress and the town, for both had been
forsaken. Here they planted the great flag, “which had nothing on it
but the plain English cross; and it was placed towards the sea, that
our fleet might see St. George’s Cross flourish in the enemy’s
fortress.” Guns were found ready loaded in various places about the
town, and orders were given that these should be shot off “in
honour of the Queen’s Majesty’s Coronation day, being the 17th of
November, after the yearly custom in England. These were so
answered again by the guns out of all the ships in the fleet, as it was
strange to hear such a thundering noise last so long together.” No
treasure was taken at Santiago, but there was food and wine. The
town was given to the flames in revenge for wrongs done to old
William Hawkins of Plymouth some years before.
They had not been many days at sea before a mortal sickness
suddenly broke out among the men. They anchored off some
islands, where the Indians treated them very kindly, carried fresh
water to the ships, and gave them food and tobacco. The tobacco
was a welcome gift, to be used against the infection of the
mysterious sickness which was killing the men by hundreds. They
passed Christmas on an island to refresh the sick and cleanse and air
the ships.
Then Drake resolved, with the consent of his council, to attack
the city of St. Domingo, while his forces were “in their best
strength.” This was the oldest and most important city in the Indies,
and was famous for its beauty and strength. It had never been
attempted before, although it was so rich, because it was strongly
fortified.
Some boats were sent on in advance of the fleet. They learned
from a pilot, whose boat they captured, that the Castle of St.
Domingo was well armed, and that it was almost impossible to land
on the dangerous coast; but he showed them a possible point ten
miles from the harbour. In some way Drake had sent messages to
the Maroons, who lived on the hills behind the town. At midnight, on
New Year’s Day, the soldiers were landed, Drake himself steering a
boat through the surf. The Maroons met them, having killed the
Spanish watchman.
“Our General, having seen us all landed in safety to the west of
that brave city of St. Domingo, returned to his fleet, bequeathing us
to God and the good conduct of Master Carleill, our Lieutenant-
General.”
The troops divided and met in the market-place; and as those in
the castle were preparing to meet Drake’s attack from the sea, they
were surprised from behind by the soldiers marching upon them
with flags flying and music playing. The fleet ceased firing while the
fate of the town was decided in a battle. By night Drake was in
possession of the castle, the harbour, and shipping. One of the ships
captured they named the New Year’s Gift.
 But after all there was little of the fabled treasure to be found.
The labour in the gold and silver mines had killed the native Indians,
and the mines were no longer worked. There was plenty of food and
wine to be had, woollen and linen cloth and silk. But there was little
silver; the rich people used dishes of china and cups of glass, and
their beautiful furniture was useless as plunder. The town had to pay
a large sum of money for its ransom, and the English stayed a
month, and fed at its expense, and took away with them guns and
merchandise and food and numbers of galley-slaves, whom they set
free.
Cartagena, the capital of the Spanish Main, was the last town to
be taken, and it had been warned. It had natural defences, which
made it very difficult to attack. Drake, as we know, had been there
before, and often, since then, he must have dreamed of taking it. He
triumphantly steered his fleet by a very difficult channel into the
outer harbour. He then threatened the fort with his guns while the
soldiers were secretly landed by night. They made their way to the
town by the shore, “wading in the sea-wash,” and so avoiding the
poisoned stakes which had been placed in the ground in readiness
for them. They also routed a company of horse soldiers sent out
from the fort, as the place where they met was so “woody and
scrubby” as to be unfit for horses. So they pushed on till they made
a “furious entry” into the town, nor paused till the market-place was
won, and the people fled into the country, where they had already
sent their wives and children.
A large price or ransom was paid for this town, equal, it is said,
to a quarter of a million of our money; but it was far less than Drake
had at first demanded. But “the inconvenience of continual death”
forced them to go, for the sickness was still taking its prey from
among the men, and it also forced them to give up an attempt upon
Nombre de Dios and Panama. The voyage had been disappointing in
the matter of plunder. Most of the treasure had been taken away
from the towns before the English came, and many of the officers
had died.
 They considered the idea of remaining in Cartagena and sending
home for more troops. They would have had a fine position; but
they decided that their strength was not enough to hold the town
and also man the fleet against a possible attack by the Spaniards
from the sea. So the lesser ransom was accepted; the officers
offering to give up their shares to the “poor men, both soldiers and
sailors, who had adventured their lives against the great enemy.”
They then returned to England, only stopping to water the ships.
They landed again at St. Augustine, on the coast of Florida, where
they destroyed a fort and took away the guns and a pay-chest
containing two thousand pounds.
“And so, God be thanked, we in good safety arrived at
Portsmouth the 28th of July 1586, to the great glory of God, and to
no small honour to our Prince, our Country, and Ourselves.”
 CHAPTER X
CADIZ

W“Babington
Drake returned to England, it was to hear the news of the
hen
plot.” This was a plot to assassinate Elizabeth, and to
place Mary of Scotland on the throne. In 1587 Mary was beheaded.
In Philip’s eyes the time had at last become ripe for an invasion of
England. Now that Mary was dead, there was less danger of France
and Scotland joining forces. And Philip, as a descendant of John of
Gaunt, could put in a claim that the throne of England, at the death
of Elizabeth, should come to himself or his daughter.
The Armada was getting ready to sail in the summer. In April,
however, Drake was sent out again with a small fleet. His flag-ship
was again the Elizabeth Bonaventure. His second in command was
William Borough.
His orders were “to prevent the joining together of the King of
Spain’s fleet out of their different ports. To keep victuals from them.
To follow them in case they should come out towards England or
Ireland. To cut off as many of them as he could, and prevent their
landing. To set upon the West Indian ships as they came or went.”
But no sooner was he instructed than the Queen changed her
bold orders to milder ones. He was not to enter any port by force,
nor to offer violence to any towns, or ships in harbour. But Drake
had got away to sea without the second orders, and acted on the
first.
He had heard that the ships were gathering in Cadiz harbour, and
there he decided boldly to seek for them. The outer and inner
harbours of Cadiz were crowded with shipping, most of which was
getting ready for the invasion of England. Drake’s fleet sailed in,
routed the defending galleys, and made havoc among the ships,
about thirty-seven of which were captured, burnt, or sunk. One was
a large ship belonging to the Marquis of Santa Cruz. They carried
away four ships laden with wine, oil, biscuits, and dried fruit;
“departing thence,” as Drake says, “at our pleasure, with as much
honour as we could wish.” They were chased by Spanish galleys,
which did little harm, for the wind favoured the English as they
sailed away from Cadiz.
The Spaniards thought Drake had gone to stop the treasure fleet.
But Drake wished to stop the Armada, which was a much greater
affair. He knew now that Santa Cruz was making his headquarters at
Lisbon. Ships were gathering in the north of Spain. Recalde, one of
the best Spanish commanders, was waiting with a small fleet off
Cape St. Vincent to protect the treasure fleet when it arrived. Fifteen
big ships had escaped the attack in Cadiz harbour. The ships were to
meet in Lisbon, where Santa Cruz was collecting stores and food.
Recalde succeeded in escaping Drake, and took his ships safely
into Lisbon. Drake resolved to secure the station he had left. This
was the castle of Sagres, near Cape St. Vincent. His own officers
were staggered with the boldness of his plan, and Borough solemnly
protested. He had urged caution before Cadiz harbour; again he
pleaded for a council of war. He was of an older school of seamen
than Drake, and was horrified at the ways of the man who was born,
as it has been said, “to break rules.”
Drake was most indignant at his action, and put him under
arrest, while Borough expected daily that “the Admiral would have
executed upon me his bloodthirsty desire, as he did upon Doughty.”
 Drake at the taking of Sagres Castle
After reading the accounts of Drake in the stories of the different
voyages, we can understand how his men adored his spirit, and
flocked to his ship to serve under his flag. To them there was
something magical, and to the Spaniards something uncanny, in his
luck. The English called him “Fortune’s child,” and the Spanish called
him “the Devil.” But some of the officers who served with him must
have liked him less. He made his plans swiftly, and generally well;
but the doing of them had to be swift and sure. Like many great
men he knew he was right, but could not stop to reason or argue
about his course. He acted upon the instinct of his genius, with a
sure and shining faith in himself, which must have been hateful to
smaller men. In the days of his later voyages, when he had not the
undivided control of his expedition, he failed, as he never did when
he was alone, “with the ships not pestered with soldiers,” as he once
said.
The taking of the castle of Sagres seemed almost an
impossibility, so well did the rocks and steep cliffs defend the fort.
Drake himself commanded the attack on land, and in the end helped
to carry and pile the faggots against the castle gate. The
commander was slain, and then the fort surrendered. Thus Drake
took possession of one of the best places on the coast of Spain for
ships to anchor and get water.
Meanwhile, the rest of the fleet had taken and burnt fifty ships
laden with wood and hoops of seasoned wood, for which Santa Cruz
was waiting to make his water-casks. The loss of these did much
damage to the Armada, and helped to ruin it.
On the 10th of May, having disarmed the fort of Sagres by
throwing the big guns over the cliffs into the sea, Drake brought his
fleet to anchor in Cascaes Bay, south of Lisbon. He seems to have
judged Lisbon too strong to attack from the sea. He was prepared to
“distress the ships” had they come out; and he offered battle to
Santa Cruz, who, however, was short of powder and shot, and had
no ships ready as yet for action.
So Drake went back to Sagres to clean his ships and refresh his
men. He then sailed for the Azores. A storm parted the ships, and on
the few that were left the men were anxious to go home. The ship
on which Borough was still a prisoner deserted. Drake believed that
Borough was responsible for this; and, though he was beyond reach,
in his anger Drake sentenced him, with his chief officers, to death as
mutineers.
Drake went on with his nine remaining ships, and came upon a
splendid prize, the big San Felipe, the greatest ship in all Portugal,
richly laden with spice, china, silk, and chests of gold and jewels.
This prize was valued at nearly a million pounds; and, besides, she
carried secret papers of great value concerning the East India trade.
On the 26th of June, Drake returned home after his brilliant
campaign. Santa Cruz had indeed gone out to chase him, but it was
too late.
Borough was not found guilty by the court of law where Drake
accused him; but his grief of mind endured long. Some time after, he
wrote that “he was very fain to ease it as he might, hoping in good
time he should.”
 CHAPTER XI
THE GREAT ARMADA

DArmada
’ raid upon the Spanish coast made it impossible for the
rake s
to sail in 1587. But after waiting so long Philip made his
preparations with an almost feverish haste. The death of his great
general, Santa Cruz, hindered his plans very much. Santa Cruz was a
commander of experience and renown, and the man most fitted,
both by his rank and his qualities, to undertake “the enterprise of
England.”
The man chosen to succeed him was the Duke of Medina
Sidonia, whose exalted rank seems to have been his chief claim to
the difficult place into which he was thrust by Philip. He had no
desire to take the place; he wrote to Philip and told him quite simply
that he was no seaman, and knew little about naval fighting and less
about England. But he was ordered to take the fleet into the English
Channel and take possession of Margate. He was then to send ships
to bring the Duke of Parma and his army in safety to England, when
Parma was to assume the command of the expedition.
But, after all, the Armada was not ready to sail till July 1588, and
the months between then and January were filled by the English
with preparations for defence. They had to face the difficulties, much
greater then than now, of keeping both men and ships on the seas,
and yet fit for action. Life on board ship tried the men very severely.
We have seen how often sickness broke out among the sailors if
they were kept long to their crowded, unhealthy quarters. The
feeding of both navies seems to have been a task of great difficulty.
This was due to the hurried demand for vast quantities of stores,
such as biscuit and salt meat The Spaniards, too, owing to Drake’s
foresight, had lost their water-casks, and had to depend on new
ones of unseasoned wood, which leaked.
 Lord Howard, a cousin of the Queen, was made Lord High
Admiral of England, and Drake was his Vice-Admiral and John
Hawkins his Rear-Admiral. With them served many other famous
men, such as Fenner, Frobisher, Wynter, and Seymour, and many
younger men from noble families. All were working hard, with spirits
stretched to an unusual pitch of endurance. In the letters they wrote
about the business in hand to the Queen and her Ministers of State
there is a note of high courage and defiance; and a distant echo
comes down to us from the dim old letters of all the stir and bustle
as the men gathered to the ships, and of the hum of excitement
about the clamouring dockyards. The shipwrights were working day
and night Lord Howard says he has been on board every ship
“where any man may creep,” and thanks God for their good state,
and that “never a one of them knows what a leak means.” Sir
William Wynter tells how badly the ships had suffered in the winter
storms, but adds: “Our ships doth show themselves like gallants
here. I assure you it will do a man’s heart good to behold them; and
would to God the Prince of Parma were upon the seas with all his
forces, and we in the view of them; then I doubt not but that you
should hear we would make his enterprises very unpleasant to him.”
The ships are always spoken of like live creatures, and their
personal histories are well known and remembered. Lord Howard
says of his Ark (which was bought of Sir Walter Raleigh by the
Queen): “And I pray you tell her Majesty from me that her money
was well given for the Ark Ralegh, for I think her the odd (only) ship
in the world for all conditions; and truly I think there can no great
ship make me change and go out of her.” And again: “I mean not to
change out of her I am in for any ship that ever was made.”
Drake had “her Majesty’s very good ship the Revenge” which was
so famous then and afterwards. Lord Henry Seymour writes from on
board “the Elizabeth Bonaventure, the fortunate ship where Sir
Francis Drake received all his good haps.” Howard and Drake, with
other commanders of experience, were of one mind; they wanted to
go out and meet the enemy upon the coasts of Spain, and so
prevent the Spanish fleet from ever reaching England.
 Howard pressed this opinion as that of men whom the world
judged to be the wisest in the kingdom. But the Queen was unwilling
to send the fleet away, and she still talked of making peace.
Both the Spaniards and the English were persuaded that God was
fighting with them. Philip told the Duke of Medina Sidonia, that as
the cause was the cause of God, he could not fail. In England Drake
was saying that “the Lord is on our side”; and Fenner wrote to the
Queen: “God mightily defend my gracious Mistress from the raging
enemy; not doubting that all the world shall know and see that her
Majesty’s little army, guided by the finger of God, shall beat down
the pride of His enemies and hers, to His great glory.” Nowadays we
do not look upon our enemies as necessarily the enemies of God.
Howard’s letters show a very noble mind. He grudged no time or
labour in the ordering of his fleet, down to the smallest matters. He
is full of care for the mariners, and is anxious that they should be
well paid and fed. He takes the advice of Drake and the other
seamen of greater experience than himself.
The fleet did at last go out, but was driven back by the winds;
and suddenly, after the fret and worry and strain of all those
months, there is a pause, and Howard writes: “Sir, I will not trouble
you with any long letter; we are at this present otherwise occupied
than with writing. Upon Friday, at Plymouth, I received intelligence
that there was a great number of ships descried off the Lizard:
whereupon, although the wind was very scant, we first warped out
of harbour that night, and upon Saturday turned out very hardly, the
wind being at south-west; and about three of the clock in the
afternoon, descried the Spanish fleet, and did what we could to work
for the wind, which by this morning we had recovered.... At nine of
the clock we gave them fight, which continued until one.... Sir, the
captains in her Majesty’s ships have behaved themselves most
bravely and like men hitherto, and I doubt not will continue, to their
great commendation.... Sir, the southerly wind that brought us back
from the coast of Spain brought them out.”
 William Hawkins, then Mayor of Plymouth, writes that the
“Spanish fleet was in view of this town yesternight, and the Lord
Admiral passed to the sea and out of sight.” They could see the
fleets fighting, the English being to windward of the enemy. He was
sending out men as fast as he could find ships to carry them.
There is a legend that Drake and his officers were playing bowls
on Plymouth Hoe when the news that the Armada was in the
Channel was brought to him by the captain of a pinnace. Drake
calmly finished his game, the story says, saying there was time to do
that and to beat the Spaniards too.
As the Spanish ships lay in the English Channel, blinded with the
mist and rain, the Duke sent a boat to get news. Four fishermen of
Falmouth were brought away who had that evening seen the English
fleet go out of Plymouth, “under the charge of the English Admiral
and of Drake.”
The Spaniards had come out ready to fight in the old way, in
which they had won so many brilliant victories. They had always
fought their naval battles with great armies on great ships, much as
they would fight on land. The soldiers despised big guns, and liked
better the bravery of a close fight, “with hand-thrusts and push of
pike.” The sailors were not prepared to fight at all, but with the help
of slaves they sailed the big galleys and fighting ships, and the
swarm of smaller troop-ships and store-ships that swelled the
numbers of the fleet which carried an army.
 Drake at bowls on Plymouth Hoe
The numbers of the ships on both sides are now said to have
been not so very unequal. If the Spaniards could have fought in their
own way, they must have been easily victorious. But the English had
got the wind at their back and the enemy in front of them, and
being better masters of their ships, they had the choice, and they
chose to fight at a distance, and never to board the big ships till they
were already helpless.
Their ships were newer, and built on different lines, and could sail
faster. They were smaller than our modern men-of-war, but carried
more guns for their size. They were, as the Spaniards said, “very
nimble and of good steerage, so that the English did with them as
they desired. And our ships being very heavy compared with the
lightness of those of the enemy, it was impossible to come to hand-
stroke with them.”
The English ships were manned with sailors and gunners who
could both sail the ships and fight the enemy. The guns were fired at
the hulls of the Spanish ships and not wasted on the enemy’s
rigging, which was harder to aim at.
The fleets met on the 21st of July, and there followed a week of
fighting and of disasters to the Spaniards. Yet as the news of their
coming up the Channel came to those on shore, who watched
beside the beacon fires with anxious hearts, the danger must have
seemed little less fearful than before. Those who viewed the
“greatness and hugeness of the Spanish army” from the sea,
considered that the only way to move them was by fire-ships.
Sidonia had steered his great fleet magnificently through the
dangers of the Channel; he anchored outside Calais to await the
answer to the urgent messages he had sent to the Duke of Parma.
But, as we know, the “Narrow Seas” were well watched by the
English, and they were so helped by the Dutch that Parma never
reached the shores of England.
Eight fire-ships were hastily prepared and sent down upon the
Spanish fleet, “all burning fiercely. These worked great mischief
among the Spanish ships (though none of them took fire), for in the
panic their cables and anchors were slipped.”
The great fight took place off Gravelines, on the Flemish coast,
where most of the scattered ships of the Armada had drifted in the
general confusion. The English hastened to take advantage of this
confusion, while Sidonia was forming his fleet again into battle order.
They “set upon the fleet of Spain (led by Sir Francis Drake in the
Revenge) and gave them a sharp fight,” while Lord Howard stopped
to capture a helpless ship, the finest, they said, upon the sea. “And
that day, Sir Francis’ ship was riddled with every kind of shot.”
The fight went on from nine in the morning till six at night, when
the Spanish fleet bore away, beaten, towards the north. Howard
says that “after the fight, notwithstanding that our powder and shot
was well near all spent, we set on a brag-countenance and gave
them chase as though we had wanted nothing (or lacked nothing)
until we had cleared our own coast and some part of Scotland of
them.”
Drake was appointed to follow the fleet, and he writes, “We have
the army of Spain before us, and mind, with the grace of God, to
wrestle a pull with him. There was never anything pleased me better
than the seeing the enemy flying with a southerly wind to the
northwards. God grant you have a good eye to the Duke of Parma:
for with the grace of God, if we live, I doubt it not but ere it be long
so to handle the matter with the Duke of Sidonia as he shall wish
himself at St. Mary Port among his orange trees.”
At the end of this letter he says, “I crave pardon of your honour
for my haste, for that I had to watch this last night upon the enemy.”
And in another letter to Walsingham he signs himself, “Your honour’s
most ready to be commanded but now half-sleeping Francis Drake.”
Many of the Spanish ships, being so crippled, were wrecked in
stormy weather off the coasts of Scotland and Ireland, which were
unknown to them, and thus the more dangerous. Not half of those
who put out to sea ever reached Spain again. Many men were killed
in battle or died of their wounds, and they were the most fortunate,
for others were drowned, or perished miserably by the hands of the
natives of the coasts. Some who escaped were put to death by the
Queen’s orders, and some lingered in the foul prisons of that time.
The instinct of savage cruelty revives, even in highly civilised races,
in time of war, and spreads, like an infection.
 Fighting the Great Armada
We get a glimpse, in an old list of plunder taken from the Spanish
prisoners, of the brave looks of the vanished host, that included the
flower of Spanish youth and chivalry. There were “breeches and
jerkins of silk, and hose of velvet, all laid over with gold lace, a pair
of breeches of yellow satin, drawn out with cloth of silver, a leather
jerkin, perfumed with amber and laid over with a gold and silver
lace, a jerkin embroidered with flowers, and a blue stitched taffety
hat, with a silver band and a plume of feathers.”
 For some time England was haunted by fears that the Armada
would return to her coasts, or that Parma would avenge himself. But
the reports of the many wrecks and of the massacre of Spanish
soldiers eased this present anxiety. And it was well, for fever and
sickness broke out in the English ships, and the men were dying in
hundreds, “sickening one day and dying the next,” as the letters say.
The ships had to be disinfected and many of the men dispersed.
 CHAPTER XII
EXPEDITION TO LISBON

Tsecure
hegreat Armada was scattered, and yet the English did not feel
from their enemy. The sight of that fleet so near their
shores in “its terror and majesty,” and the memory of its vast army
of well-drilled soldiers, left a feeling of deep uneasiness in the minds
of wise men. “Sir,” writes Howard to Walsingham, “safe bind, safe
find. A kingdom is a great wager. Sir, you know security is
dangerous: and had God not been our best friend, we should have
found it so. Some made little account of the Spanish force by sea:
but I do warrant you, all the world never saw such a force as theirs
was....”
Fortune had favoured England this time, but what if Philip built
newer and lighter ships, and really succeeded in landing his army?
They did not as yet know that Philip had no money to build his ships
with, and rumours of a second invasion were plentiful.
The Spaniards, it is true, had suffered great loss and a crushing
defeat to their pride, but they had not, after all, lost anything that
they already had, but only failed to get something they wanted very
badly to have, and the second kind of loss matters far less than the
first.
But, on the other hand, if the English had been defeated, it is
difficult to think how darkly their history might have been changed.
It was this thought that made the wise men sober in the midst of
the national joy and exultation. They saw how much England, as an
island, must depend for strength and defence upon her navy, and
they saw this much more clearly than before. But Drake had seen it
for a long time. And he had seen something more. He had seen that
the English navy must be ready and able to protect her merchant
ships by distressing and attacking her enemies abroad, and that this
was a means of keeping the enemy so busy abroad that he could
not invade the peace of England at home.
Elizabeth was eager to complete the destruction of Philip’s navy,
now so much crippled. In the spring of 1589 she consented to a new
expedition being fitted out, and appointed Sir John Norreys and Sir
Francis Drake as commanders-in-chief. The two men had fought
together in Ireland. “Black John Norreys,” as he was called, came of
a famous fighting family, and had served in the Lowlands and in
France with high courage and skill. During the Spanish invasion he
had been made chief of the land forces. It is said that in one battle
he went on fighting after three horses had been killed under him.
With him went his brother Edward, and a famous Welsh captain, Sir
Roger Williams, was his second in command.
The objects of the expedition were: first, to distress the King of
Spain’s ships; second, to get possession of some of the islands of
the Azores in order to waylay the treasure ships; and, lastly, to try to
recover for Don Antonio his lost kingdom of Portugal.
Money for this expedition was raised from every possible source.
The Queen gave six royal ships and two pinnaces, money, food, and
arms. The forces were made up of soldiers, gentlemen who wished
to make their fortunes in war, and English and Dutch sailors and
recruits, most of whom were pressed. With this large but mixed
army the generals prepared to face the best-trained soldiers in
Europe.
As usual, there were many delays. The ships were not ready to
go out, and much of the food was consumed before they started.
More was not to be had, though Drake and Norreys wrote letter
after letter begging for supplies. The Queen had already begun to
regard the expedition with disfavour. Some days before the fleet
sailed, the young Earl of Essex, her latest Court favourite, had
slipped away to sea with Sir Roger Williams on the Swiftsure. He was
tired of a courtier’s life, and wanted to breathe freer air, and to help
to fight the Spaniards. The Queen was very angry, and sent orders
for his arrest, accusing Drake and Norreys of aiding his escape. But
they declared they knew nothing of his plans.
About this time some Flemish ships appeared in Plymouth
harbour laden with barley and wine, and Drake seized their cargoes
in the Queen’s name to victual his fleet, and sailed early in April. The
weather was so rough that several of the ships containing troops
were unable to get beyond the Channel, but even with lesser
numbers the crews were short of food before they reached Spain.
Philip was very ill at this time, and in grave anxiety. He knew that
Drake and the English ships might land on his coasts, that the
French might cross the mountains with an invading force, and that
the Portuguese might arise in rebellion to win back the crown for
Don Antonio. This last danger seemed to Philip the most urgent, and
Drake guessed this, and landed his men on the north-west coast at
Corunna.
In doing this he tried to obey the Queen’s orders to distress the
King’s ships, and also, no doubt, to satisfy the craving of his hungry
crews for food and plunder. The lower town of Corunna was taken,
and much wine and food consumed and much wasted. The
townsfolk were routed and put to the sword, and their houses
burned. An attempt to take the upper town failed, but the English
were the victors in a sharp battle which took place some miles from
the town, and they thus secured their retreat to the ships and sailed
away.
The presence of Drake on the coasts caused great panic, for his
name and luck had become a terror to the people. Philip felt deeply
insulted that such an attack should be made “by a woman, mistress
of half an island, with the help of a pirate and a common soldier.” In
Spain, as we have seen, the command was always given to
gentlemen of high birth and breeding and title.
Four days after leaving Corunna, the fleet first sighted some of
the missing ships, and also the Swiftsure with the missing Earl, who
had “put himself into the journey against the opinion of the world,
and, as it seemed, to the hazard of his great fortune.” The Swiftsure
had taken six prizes off Cape St. Vincent.
The two generals had from the first wished to go straight to
Lisbon, and it is thought that if they had done so, and thus given the
Spaniards no warning of their coming, they might have had success.
But they were hindered by the Queen’s orders to destroy the
shipping now collected in the northern ports, and chiefly in
Santander. After leaving Corunna, however, they decided in council
not to attempt that port, both soldiers and sailors reasoning that the
conditions did not favour an attack.
They landed next at the Portuguese town of Peniche, which lies
about fifty miles north of Lisbon. It was difficult to land on the surf-
bound coast, and some of the boats were upset and battered. At
last, Essex sprang into the waves and waded ashore with his soldiers
and climbed the steep cliffs. The commandant, thus surprised,
willingly surrendered to Antonio as his lawful king, “The king” soon
had a following of peasants and friars, but neither nobles nor
soldiers came to help him. He was eager to march to Lisbon, where
he thought he was sure of a welcome. Norreys resolved to march
there overland. Drake, it is said, would have liked better to attack
the town from the sea in his usual daring but successful fashion. But
the soldiers’ plan carried the day; and leaving some ships at Peniche,
Drake promised, if he could, to bring the fleet to meet them at
Cascaes, at the mouth of the river Tagus, south of Lisbon.
There, when he arrived, he waited, not liking to venture up the
river without knowing where the soldiers were, and not liking to quit
the sea, where he could give them the means of retreat if necessary.
For this he was very much blamed by the soldiers at the time, and
afterwards when he got home. The point is still disputed.
Meanwhile the army was encamped outside the walls of Lisbon,
but they never got inside. The Portuguese refused to join Don
Antonio’s party, and the Spanish governor kept the gates shut in a
grim and heroic defence. The English sailors were sick and hungry;
they had had no exercise on board ship to keep them healthy, and
were exhausted with the heat. The stores and guns were on the
ships with Drake. So, reluctantly, they left the suburbs of Lisbon and
marched to Cascaes, where they embarked, not without some loss,
and sailed away.
While they were still disputing in the councils, a fleet of German
ships were sighted, and most of them secured. They were carrying
corn and stores to Spain, against the rules of war, which bind
countries not concerned in the quarrel to help neither foe. So the
English seized sixty ships and the stores, both of which had been
destined to furnish the new Armada of Spain.
Next came into view some English ships with supplies, but also
with angry letters from the Queen; in answer to which Essex was
sent home bearing the news that the expedition, though diminished
by sickness and death, still meant to sail to the Azores.
On June the 8th a wind had scattered the fleet, and suddenly left
it becalmed. The Lisbon galleys came out and cut off four English
ships.
The winds continued to prevent the fleet from going towards the
Azores, and all this time hundreds of sick and wounded men were
dying. After seventeen days at sea, they landed at the town of Vigo
and burned it, and laid waste the country round. At length storms
and sickness and ill-fortune drove them home, and the expedition,
woefully shrunken, straggled miserably back. Don Antonio died, poor
and forsaken, some years later. The English had done a considerable
amount of damage, but at great cost to themselves; for the loss of
life was terrible, and that of money very considerable. Both Norreys
and Drake were called upon to account for their failure, and at the
time Drake got the most of the blame. Perhaps he was more hardly
judged because failure had never come near him before, and his
successes had always been so brilliant. His best friends at Court
were dead, and for five years he was not asked to act in the Queen’s
service. So five years of his life which should have been the most
active were spent in retirement, if not actually in “disgrace with
fortune and men’s eyes.”
 The war was carried on upon the old lines of distressing the
King’s ships, but with very poor success. After Drake’s voyage round
the world, which encouraged other adventurers and treasure-
seekers, the Spanish treasure-fleet had been carefully guarded. This
was done by strongly fortifying the coast stations, by providing an
armed escort, and a service of light ships, which went frequently to
and fro with letters of advice and warning from the Indies to Spain.
Drake had ruined this defence in 1585, and in 1588 again many
of the guard-ships had to be used in the service of the Armada. A
really strong English fleet might at this time have stayed the
treasure, but Philip continued to gather in his gold, and also began,
with splendid patience, to rebuild his navy. In 1591 a royal squadron
was sent out under Lord Thomas Howard, and the great battle of Sir
Richard Grenville on the Revenge was fought, “the fight of the one
and the fifty-three,” with the loss of that ship and the victory of the
Spanish fleet. The Queen made a fighting alliance with Henry the
Fourth of France, who was the enemy of Philip, and this she felt
would help to keep him out of England. Philip was now trying to
establish a fortified station on the north coast of Brittany, from which
his new Armada might be despatched.
 CHAPTER XIII
THE LAST VOYAGE

DRichard
had settled in Buckland Abbey, which he had bought from Sir
rake
Grenville. He helped to prepare and furnish ships for
some of the different excursions against Spain, and he spent much
time on schemes to improve Plymouth. He paid to have pure water
brought to the town from many miles away; he had flour-mills built,
that the sailors might have good biscuits provided for them, and he
overlooked the work of fortifying Plymouth, and making it in all ways
a strong naval station.
As the danger of a fresh invasion by Philip grew more
threatening, Drake was called to Court again, and it was about this
time that he gave to the Queen his written story of the voyage to
Nombre de Dios.
In 1595 a fresh expedition was arranged for the Indies, and after
the usual bewildering indecision at Court, and difference of views
and plans (delays that proved fatal to an excursion whose proper
nature was to be swift and secret, and above all things powerful), on
August 28, 1598, Sir Francis Drake started on his last voyage.
The story of the expedition begins by saying that “the Spaniard
leaves no means untried to turn the peace of England into a cursed
thraldom, and this is shown by his attempts, and also by his greedy
desires to be our neighbour in Brittany, to gain so near us a quiet
and safe road for his fleet. So the forces were sent to invade him in
that kingdom from whence he has feathers to fly to the top of his
high desires.
“The invasion was glorious spoken of long before it was sent, and
Sir Francis Drake was named General. For his very name was a great
terror to all in those parts, and he had done many things in those
countries to his honourable fame and profit. But entering into them
as the Child of Fortune, it may be that his self-willed and peremptory
(despotic) command was doubted, and that caused her Majesty, as it
should seem, to join Sir John Hawkins as second in command. He
was an old, wary man, and so leaden-footed” (or slow in action)
“that Drake’s meat would be eaten before his was cooked. They
were men of such different natures that what one desired the other
commonly opposed. The journey had so glorious a name that
crowds of volunteers came to them, and they had to discharge such
few as they had pressed. Yet many times it was very doubtful if the
voyage would be made, till at last the news came of a ship of the
King of Spain, which was driven into Puerto Rico with two millions
and a half of treasure. So her Majesty commanded them to haste
their departure, which they did with twenty-seven ships.”
The generals began to disagree soon after. Drake wanted to
begin with an attack upon the Canaries, and Hawkins thought it
unnecessary and unwise; and, as the story says, “the fire which lay
hidden in their stomachs began to break forth.”
It was five years since Drake had fought with his old enemies. He
did not know how much stronger the Spanish defence at sea had
become, owing to the lessons he had given them, nor how complete
Philip had made the protection of the traffic and the treasure-ships.
He was to see this first at the Canary Islands, where he tried, and
failed, to make one of his old surprise visits.
The fleet sailed on, and anchored on the 29th of October, for
water, at Guadeloupe. The Delight was the last of the ships to arrive
the next day, and she brought news that the Francis, a small ship of
the company, was taken by five Spanish ships, which had been sent
out by Philip to bring home the wrecked ship at Puerto Rico. This
was a great misfortune, because Sir John Hawkins had made known
to all the company, “even to the basest mariners,” the places whither
they were bound, naming Puerto Rico, Nombre de Dios, and
Panama. Now the Spaniards would learn this from their prisoners,
and at once send warning to the coasts.
 Drake wanted to give chase at once, but Hawkins was old and
cautious, and desired to stay and mount his guns, take in water, set
up his pinnaces, and make all things ready to meet the Spaniards.
And Sir John prevailed, “for that he was sickly, Sir Francis being
loath to breed his further disquiet.” It took four days to make those
preparations, and always the sickness of Sir John increased. On the
12th of October Drake brought the fleet up by a secret way to
Puerto Rico, and about three o’clock that afternoon Sir John Hawkins
died.
In the evening, as Drake sat at supper, his chair was shot from
under him, and two of his officers received their death wounds from
the Spanish guns. The ships had to move away. The next night the
English made a desperate effort to fire the five ships that had come
for the treasure. Four of them were set alight, but only one was
burnt, and by the great light she gave the Spaniards “played upon
the English with their ordnance and small shot as if it had been fair
day,” and sunk some of the boats.
Next day Drake, undaunted by failure, determined to try and take
his whole fleet boldly into the harbour and storm the place. But the
Spaniards, guessing his desperate intention, and fearing his great
courage, sunk four ships laden with merchandise and armed, as they
were, and so, at a great sacrifice, blocked the way for the English.
Drake took counsel with the soldiers as to the strength of the
place, but most of them thought it too great a risk, though one or
two were for trying it. “The General presently said: ‘I will bring you
to twenty places far more wealthy and easier to be gotten;’ and
hence we went on the 15th. And here,” says the teller of the story, “I
left all hope of good success.”
On the way to Nombre de Dios they stopped at Rio de la Hacha,
where Drake had first been wronged by the Spaniards. This town
they took with little difficulty, and some treasure was won.
On December 27th they were at Nombre de Dios, which they
took with small resistance. But the people had been warned, and
had fled and hidden their treasure, and the town was left very bare.
So they resolved to “hasten with speed to Panama.” The soldiers
were under the command of Sir Thomas Baskerville, who had been a
brave fighter against the Spaniards before now in Holland and
France. They started to go to Panama by the old road well known to
Drake. He, meanwhile, stayed with the ships and burned the town.
He was about to sail nearer the river when news came that the
soldiers were returning. The road was only too strongly defended
now, and Baskerville’s men were driven back with severe loss. They
were a small force, and weak with the long march through heavy
rains; their powder was wet and their food scarce and sodden, and
Baskerville decided upon a retreat. “This march,” says the story, “had
made many swear that they would never buy gold at such a price
again.”
Drake, being disappointed of his highest hopes, now called a
council to decide what was to be done. All the towns had been
forewarned, and told “to be careful and look well to themselves, for
that Drake and Hawkins were making ready in England to come
upon them.” And now the company seem to have regarded their
leader with some bitterness, as his brave promises failed, and the
places that he used to know were found to be changed and
formidable. Now they had to rely “upon cards and maps, he being at
these parts at the farthest limit of his knowledge.” But still he
proposed fresh places that had the golden sound of riches in their
names, and gallant Baskerville said he would attempt both, one after
another.
But the winds drove them instead to a “waste island, which is
counted the sickliest place in the Indies, and there died many of the
men, and victuals began to grow scarce. Here,” says Maynarde, who
writes the story, “I was often private with our General, and I
demanded of him why he so often begged me, being in England, to
stay with him in these parts as long as himself.... He answered me
with grief, protesting that he was as ignorant of the Indies as myself,
and that he never thought any place could be so changed, as it
were, from a delicious and pleasant arbour into a waste and desert
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