Islam, Christianity and the Making of Czech Identity, 1453–1683 by Laura Lisy-Wagner (review)

This is a courageous and ambitious undertaking. The author examines narratives about the Czech lands wherein Czechs played central roles and Czech identity was developed in relation to both East and West. The main focus of this book is on looking east and interacting with Islam and the Ottoman Empire. Laura Lisy-Wagner argues that the writings by Czechs that she has investigated are of considerably more significance than simply reflecting Czech attitudes toward Muslims. There is, in a real sense, a melding of East and West that results in the creation of liminal space and identity. Her study builds toward the conclusion that the narratives give voice to perspectives from the frontiers of Europe shedding light on historic binaries and accentuating what it means to be European, non-European, Christian, or Muslim. In these textual narratives, Lisy-Wagner believes such boundaries are ultimately rendered meaningless. Adopting the idea of beaches and islands from the work of Greg Dening on cultural and colonial encounters in Oceania, Lisy-Wagner suggests that her texts from early modern Europe provide a rhetorical space in which different cultures could meet and in these rhetorical spaces, identities could be challenged, disassembled, and reconstructed. In this way, national and cultural identities are subordinated to wider influences and factors. Notions of monolithic Czech or Islamic identity are dismissed while diversity and plurality within those historic taxonomies are exploited. What was the Turk? Who or what was Czech? One was as Czech as the next man (or woman). This book takes a specific focus and suggests that Czech relations with Islam and Christianity were fundamental for the development of what it meant to be Czech in the early modern world.

This is an interesting thesis and one that has not, to my knowledge, been attempted hitherto. The cultural history of Bohemia is rich and the religious fabric of the Czech world in the period just prior to Lisy-Wagner’s examination was both revolutionary and at the cutting edge of European development. The book mentions religious toleration in Bohemia where it appeared (hypothetically) possible to believe whatever one wished. Another current focused on the preference for peace over doctrinal purity with the assumption that when an irenic climate prevailed, religion was purer or provided greater opportunity for rectifying confessional difference. While German and Czech cultural identities are evident, this book introduces the possibility that the Turk represented a third component in the Czech world that served to ameliorate the historic tensions between Germans and Czechs.

The emphasis on the Turk is such that Lisy-Wagner appears to adopt the view that anything negative said about Muslims is antagonistic, and she is concerned with what she characterises as ‘anti-Ottoman propaganda’ or Islamic polemics ‘masquerading as ethnography’. One gets the sense of a pro-Islamic posture and in distinction to criticism of Muslims there is preference for the praises of Islam. This is perhaps neither here nor there except that it remains unclear if negative images of Islam have any value for the author. Limitations may be evident when a mild air of disapproval seems to settle around any negative characterisation of ‘Muslims’. While possible, it is not entirely persuasive to argue that expressions about the fear of people converting to Islam, or ‘turning Turk’, indicated an attraction to the ‘other’.

It is curious that folio numbers are never provided with references to manuscripts and sometimes journal page numbers are also omitted. One would also like to know who read the texts Lisy-Wagner utilises, especially the ars apodemica, and additional analyses of what impact this literature had on popular culture would be desirable. There is some unnecessary repetition, questionable value in outlining what the book intends to accomplish and finishing by summarising the same outline, and in places it reads like a PhD thesis.

The book is stimulating in many ways...