Category Archives: Europe

Fraser Weir’s A Centennial History of Philippine Independence, 1898-1998 gives an account of Islam’s arrival in coastal Southeast Asia in the 14th and 15th century, closely followed by the arrival of the first Portuguese and Spanish Christians.

Regular coastal trade in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea linking Mesopotamia and the Indus valley dates from at least the time of the Assyrian Empire (729-612 BC). Arab and Persian merchants are reported in the southern Chinese port of Guangzhou (Canton) in the 8th century AD. However, after Mahmud of Ghazni’s invasions of the Indus valley (997-1030), the Sword of Islam added a vigorous religious and political dimension to the commerce.

On his return to Venice from the court of Kublai Khan, Marco Polo noted in 1292 that Pasai in northern Sumatra had converted to Islam. The Sultan of Pasai, the first Muslim ruler on Sumatra, died in 1297 and Pasai returned under Majapahit’s Hindu ambit in 1350. Despite this reverse, Islam was moving steadily through the archipelago.

Islamic inscriptions in Malaya date from 1326. A Muslim scholar, Mukdum, from Malaya is reported in the Philippine’s Sulu archipelago in 1380. In 1400, the northern Sumatran province of Aceh converted to Islam.

When Majapahit captured the Sri Vijayan capital Palembang in 1377, a prince of the royal house, Parameshwara, escaped to Malaya. In 1402 he chose the choke point where the Straits of Malacca narrow to 53 km in width to found his new capital, Melaka. Parameshwara moved quickly to protect his fledgling state. He sent a mission to the Emperor Zhu Di (Yong Li) seeking Ming protection from his Majapahit enemies. Admiral Zheng He (Cheng Ho) arrived at Melaka in 1409 with the Ming’s Dragon Fleet. Parameshwara paid a personal visit to Beijing in 1411 to cement his alliance with the Ming Empire.

In the same year as a Muslim mission was attracting converts far to the east on Ambon in the Moluccas, Parameshwara announced his conversion to Islam in 1414 and proclaimed himself Sultan of Malacca. The appeal of Islam was strong. The Sultanate’s arch rival, Majapahit converted in 1447. Hindus who wanted to retain their faith were under siege. From mid-century on, Javanese Hindus concentrated on the island of Bali where they have succeeded in preserving their religion to the present day. In 1475 the Moluccan islands of Ternate and Tidore converted to Islam.

Through the 15th century the upstart Sultanate of Malacca grew from strength to strength. It successfully repelled overland and seaborne attacks from the Thai Empire in 1445 and 1456. The Sultan Mansur Shah put down the Thai’s peninsular allies Kedah and Pahang in 1459. Finally in 1498, by the efforts of its Admiral Hang Tuah, Malacca had secured the monopoly. All the trade in the Straits, and especially the spices from the Celebes and the Moluccas, moved under its protection and through its markets.

Considering that in over a thousand years, Buddhism and Hinduism had barely made an impression east of Borneo, for Islam to have travelled the length of the archipelago from Sumatra to the Moluccas in under two centuries is remarkable. As a religion, Islam had popular appeal. The Hindu and Buddhist religions had been used mainly to deify the rule of the Rajas. Islam offered its converts a personal salvation.

Islam was also carried with the mobility of the merchant community. The landed Hindu-Buddhist Rajas were content to let the trade come to them and tax it as it passed through their ports. Lacking a fixed land base, the Islamic merchants followed their commercial instincts knowing that the best profits on the trade were to be made at source. The trail of conversions led straight to the spices.

Perhaps most important of all, Islam brought with it gunpowder, firearms and cannon. Recalling how smartly the Sultan of Malacca accepted the new faith and how quickly others followed his lead, access to the new weapons may have been restricted to the faithful. The religion’s rapid progress through the islands may have been, at least in part, an arms race.

The year that the Sultanate of Malacca finally consolidated its hold on the Straits was fateful. That same year, Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope from Portugal with four ships, crossed the Indian Ocean and landed on 27 May 1498 at Calicut on the Malabar coast. Indian Hindus and Portuguese Christians shared in common a deep animosity for Islam. In 1510, Affonso de Albuquerque, the Viceroy of India, by treaty with Krishna Deva Raya, the Emperor of Vijayanagar, secured the port of Gao [sic] as a naval base for Portuguese operations in the Indian Ocean.

Albuquerque had already learned of Malacca’s strategic importance to the spice trade. The very next year, in 1511, he took with him eighteen Portuguese warships from Gao [sic] and ended the Sultanate of Malacca. The loss of Malacca shattered the Islamic trade network at a blow. From so far away, though, Portugal was operating at the very limit of its power and was never quite able to rebuild the trading network it had destroyed. Ten years later, the Portuguese were greatly alarmed to see Magellan’s flagship Victoria returning to Spain – westward from the Philippines.

One other symbol in Spain was Ernest Hemingway, by far the most famous of the English-language writers there during the war, an influential figurehead in the fight against Fascism–“How could this fight be lost now, with Hemingway on our side.” Hemingway had already worked on one propaganda film, Spain in Flames, and had agreed to help with another, The Spanish Earth, when he accepted an offer from the North American Newspaper Alliance [NANA] to report the war. He arrived in Spain for his first visit in March 1937, and altogether made four trips. He travelled widely, usually with Martha Gellhorn, Herbert Matthews, and Sefton Delmer, saw a lot of the fighting, and got to know many of the Republican leaders and supporters. Yet his performance as a war correspondent was abysmally bad. On a technical level, his descriptions of battle and bombardments are monotonous; his emphasis on his own close location to the action smacks of boastfulness; his accounts of blood, wounds, and severed legs are typical of his desire to shock; and his reporting of conversations is so totally Hemingway in style as to make the reader doubt their authenticity. NANA had to ask him to confine his work to human-interest features and, when that failed, to report only developments of vital importance. As his biographer, Carlos Baker, puts it, “His eye for telling details and individual traits was not nearly so sharp as that of Dos Passos, nor did he commonly rise to the meticulous exactitude and inclusiveness which characterised the best work of Matthews and Delmer.”

True, Hemingway grew up politically in Spain and believed it was the place to stop Fascism, before Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshirts could precipitate a second world war. But he was unjustifiably optimistic about the Republicans’ chances of doing this. One of his principal informants was Mikhail Koltzov–the Pravda and Izvestia correspondent who quarrelled with Louis Fischer over an accurate but pessimistic dispatch Fischer had written–and this might explain the views Hemingway expressed to reporters in New York in June 1938. Franco was short of troops, Hemingway said, and handicapped by friction among the foreign elements in his army; the Republicans were well organised and their chances of winning were good. Actually, at that moment the Republicans were only six months away from defeat. But these criticisms are the least serious of Hemingway’s shortcomings as a war correspondent. The most important concerns his total failure to report the Communist persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of “untrustworthy elements” on the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this….

In the end, Hemingway did write it all, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but from a war correspondent the reader has the right to expect all the news the correspondent knows at the time, not as interpolations in a work of romantic fiction published when the war is over. The truth was that Hemingway, for all his compassion for the Spaniards, for all his commitment to the Republican cause, used the war to gain a new lease on his life as a writer. As Baker says, “Refusing to waste the best of his materials in his newspaper dispatches … he had gathered and salted away a body of experience and information which he described to [his editor Maxwell] Perkins as ‘absolutely invaluable’.” For a novelist, this was understandable. For a war correspondent, it was unforgivable.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 230-232

Okay, the price for this second excerpt from the chapter on the Spanish Civil War is a total embargo on excerpts from several chapters on the two world wars.