Like so much other great stuff on G+ these days, I’m simply having to share this so I can come back to it and add it to a Collection once I’m on a desktop, since the G+ iOS app still doesn’t work properly.
Anyway, some really fascinating and thought-provoking history from Yonatan Zunger (how he does this so regularly boggles my mind, kind of like David Amerland and Mark Bruce).
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
Eight hundred years after its signing, the Magna Carta is seen as part of the foundation of the idea of democratic rule, of the notion that there should be a law to which even the King is subject. Today, if anything, its relevance is greater than it ever was: the US Supreme Court was citing it in decisions only a few weeks ago. But an increasing group of scholars has been pointing out that the idea of its importance in defining the relationship between the law and the ruler is based on myth, not history: in 1215, the Magna Carta had nearly no effect on anything, and King John promptly ignored it. (And then promptly died of dysentery) The importance of the Magna Carta comes not from its importance at the time, but from the story which we have crafted around it in the centuries since.
This is not the most extreme such case: there’s another historical document with an even stranger history. The Pact of Umar was a formal agreement by the 7th-century Muslim Caliph Umar ibn Khattab and the Christians of the Syrian town of Bakt (from which the word “pact” itself comes) about their rights and responsibilities in the society.
To understand the significance of the Pact of Umar, you need to understand that during the life of the various Islamic empires, the “people of the Book” — the Jews, the Christians, and the Zoroastrians — had a specific legal status (“dhimmi”), under which they were required to pay additional taxes, wear specific clothing, and live under various legal restrictions, but were otherwise full citizens, and could live in their communities, practice their professions, and even become key members of government. This was at the heart of the great efflorescence of culture in the 9th through 12th centuries in particular, with places like Baghdad, Cairo, and Toledo becoming the world’s great centers of learning and commerce. At the same time, Europe was only dragging itself out of the wreckage of the Dark Ages, and “citizenship” was defined purely by membership in the local church: there was no law against robbing and murdering anyone who wasn’t part of the church or otherwise legally protected.
This contrast was really at the heart of one of the most significant differences between the worlds: in the Islamic world, everyone was subject to the rule of law, from the lowliest to the highest. (I did research, many years ago, into the legal status of prostitution in the Islamic world during this period, and it was an extremely eye-opening contrast with its analogue in the Christian world; both in legal manuals and in the much more practical police manuals, you can see that everyone, no matter their profession, is seen as part of the society and subject to the law, while across the Mediterranean you get rulings such as that a prostitute cannot be raped, as her body is a public commodity to which she has no claim of ownership.)
The Pact of Umar plays the same role in the law of dhimmi (in the law of the relationship of people of different faiths) that the Magna Carta plays in many modern documents of the rule of law, like the US Constitution. It was cited left and right, used as a template, used to define the natural scope of such relationships.
The most interesting thing about the Pact of Umar is that it didn’t exist. The pact itself was utterly mythical; from what historians can tell, the legend of it came from cobbled-together memories of several treaties, legal documents, and ideas that had been floating around that region of the world during the seventh and eighth centuries.
So despite the fact that the archetypal document which defined relationships between Jews, Christians, and Muslims for centuries never actually existed, it was nonetheless the template for hundreds of real documents, and its legend formed the basis for some of the most important legal structures of the Middle Ages.
As you may guess, this is not historically unique. There has been a long tradition of people “finding” ancient documents which substantiate a good idea — from Moses de Leon’s Zohar, the foundational work of the Kabbalah published in the 13th century (in Spain, the same world created by that great peace above) which he claimed to have been the work of great sages from a thousand years earlier (which just happened to be written in ungrammatical, 13th-century Aramaic; it’s a miracle!) to the Bible itself. (See 2 Kings 22; going to excavate and repair a temple, the ancient scrolls of the Law just happened to be discovered, and people realized that they had not been doing Judaism according to the way that God had commanded it thousands of years earlier. It’s a miracle! NB that 2 Kings was being written right around the time that the entire Bible was being edited together from the two major local sources; the history of the writing of the Bible is quite fascinating)
But it would be wrong to say that later invention of ancient texts is a bad thing. For one thing, across a wide range of human societies, age gives wisdom its acceptability: a brand-new idea would be rejected outright, but a rediscovered ancient one will be considered seriously. This “ancientization” is often the only way for a new and important idea — such as the rule of law or democracy — to be taken seriously. For another, some of these discoveries are purely accidental, simply putting a name on a tradition which has been growing. Nobody forged the Pact of Umar: it was simply that everyone acknowledged that this tradition had been growing up for some time, it was vaguely associated with Umar and with Bakt, and so the legend grew into a more specific form in retelling which helped it propagate.
In each of these cases, the value of the legend has been not in its direct veracity, but in the effects which it had on people. The Magna Carta and the Pact of Umar share this: quite independently of what they actually said or did, they both drove people to create great things in their own societies.