Peters’ analysis fails because he (like the ‘well meaning Western commentators’ he faults) has not bothered to look carefully at the causes of the alternation between cosmopolitan ‘Golden Ages’ and barbarism in the Islamic world.
Invariably the ‘Golden Ages’ (I can think of four: the late Arab Caliphate when St. John of Damascus, the first Christian critic of Islam was, for a while, Grand Vizier to the Caliph of Damascus; the middle part of the Muslim occupation of Spain (when Averroes and Avicenna fourished); the later part of the Moghul occupation of India; and the period just before the Ottoman Empire became the ‘sick man of Europe’) had a common feature: the Muslim rulers were pragmatists, not particularly devoted to jihad, nor even to rigorously enforcing the disabilities that Mohammed called for placing on subject non-Muslims. The status accorded St. John of Damascus is a shining example; the Ottomans found the willingness of Greeks, Armenians and Jews to engage in ‘usury’ useful; the Moghuls got pragmatic enough to accord Hindus (manifestly idolaters, and not ‘people of the Book’) the status of dhimmis; and so forth—all of which are pragmatic violations of a strict reading of Islamic jurisprudence.
When, on the contrary, Islam is taken seriously, wars of conquest, and barbarous treatment of non-Muslims ensues— the decline of the Ottoman Empire coincided with pogroms against its Christian inhabitants, most notably the Armenian genocide, but less famously, violent presecutions that sparked Arab Christians to immigrate to the United States beginning about the time of the War Between the States; the Almohad dynasty’s ‘fundamentalism’ destroyed both intellectual life and the relatively mild treatment of dhimmis in Al-Andalus. And all of the pragmatic ‘Golden Ages’ were preceded by ages of blood when Islam, and its injunction, now famously characterized by Emperor Manuel II, to ‘spread the faith he [Mohammed] preached by the sword’ was taken seriously.
The Muslim apologetic attributing the ‘Golden Ages’ to Islam also overlooks the degree to which the intellectual life of those periods was shaped by non-Muslims. Many of the notable Arab intellectuals of the first ‘Golden Age’ were, in fact Arab Christians. More importantly, it was not Islam, but the fact that Islamic conquests had created access simultaneous access to the intellectual heritages of Greece and India that caused the flowering of intellectual life.
That flowering, however, was cut off by the reassertion of Islam over pragmatism in the intellectual sphere—the triumph of Al-Ghazali’s occasionalism over the proto-scientific views of Avicenna and Averroes was the death of Islamic science—even as the reassertion of strict Islam under the Almohads was the death of ‘cosmopolitan’ Al-Andalus.
Peters’ also overlooks the degree to which the barbarisms of Al Qaeda et al. are explicitly justified by examples of like barbarisms committed by Mohammed himself.
If Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest wanted to turn the world into a copy of Al-Andalus under the Almoravids, by force of arms, that would be obnoxious enough, but they would be far less vile, violent and dangerous in their goals, and most likely methods than they, in fact, are. Unfortunately, they instead want to turn the world into a copy of seventh century Arabia, the time and land of Mohammed, complete with mass beheadings, abrogations of peace-treaties for the convenience of Islamic conquest, and all the rest.
Excellent response - I am including you in the list of FReepers whose posts I read with pleasure.
The first group that conquered the initial wave of Muslims that had conquered Spain - were other Muslims, who regarded the first Muslim groups (the much more sophisticated and much less Islamicized Persians and Baghdadis) as heretical.