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Of Sudden Reversals
In 792 AD, at Tours, the advance of Islamic arms halted. Charles Martel
stopped it. Since the death of Mohammed Islam had spread by the sword.
It swept through the Levant and North Africa, scything down most of the
former Roman Empire. Jihad was the motivation. Tours changed that. Islam
never moved farther into Western Europe.
History is littered with crushing defeats enforcing paradigm shifts on
sundry peoples. The Battle of the Teutenberg Forest (7AD) set the limits
of Rome in relation to modern Germany. The Empire never spread east of
the Rhine. Likewise the Hungarians, after the Battle of Lechfeld in 955
AD, gave up their marauding ways. The German king Otto I battered ìBloody
Bulcsuî in Bavaria. Legend has it that only seven of Bloody Bulcsuís
40,000 men returned to Hungary. John Derbyshire notes that, consequently,
the Hungarians settled down on the Pannonian plain, began farming and
converted to Christianity. Since those ghastly events at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, Japanese armies have stayed put and now trade and affluence
fuel Japanese travel.
It is tragic that change is often wrought not gradually, but with shocking
force. Terrible defeats reconcile peoples to a different sense of destiny.
Necessity defines limits. One shudders to conceive of such history applied
to the current situation in the Middle East.
James Clark
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(c) 2002 Millennium Relief & Development Services, vol. 2 no. 23
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