Book Reviews

Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other. Edited by Michael Frassetto and David R. Blanks. (New York: St. Martin's Press. 1999. Pp. ix, 235. $45.00.)

European perceptions of non-Christians continue to attract much scholarly attention. One reason is the end of the Cold War and what Samuel P. Huntington sees as The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) with the West facing off against, among other threats, "The Islamic Resurgence." Some readers will see the implications of this volume for his thesis. Daniel J. Vitkus's, "Early Modern Orientalism: Representations of Islam in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe" ends on an anti-Huntington note: "With the end of the Cold War, America needed a new ideological bogey man to serve as an alleged external threat; and perhaps this explains the recent resurgence of anti-Islamic imagery . . ." (p. 226).

The author whose work hovers most over this volume is Edward Said. As Vitkus points out, 'orientalism' "was not 'born' with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798" but began with the medieval experience of Islam (p. 209). The theme of this volume is that European Christian understanding of the Islamic world was more complex than is often recognized, developed over a long period, and, contrary to what one might think, gradually became less sophisticated. Furthermore, medieval and Renaissance perceptions of the Islamic world were not "carried whole cloth into the modern world" (p. 3.). There were continuities, but there were discontinuities as well.

With eleven articles to choose from, the reader will pick favorites. The initial article, David R. Blanks's "Western Views of Islam in the Premodern Period: A Brief History of Past Approaches" is a fascinating survey of scholarship stressing the importance of Norman Daniel and R. W. Southern. Daniel's scholarly interest in Islam was linked to a personal ecumenical mission to inform Muslims and Christians about one another, a reminder that scholarship, especially important scholarship, is often linked to profound personal interests.

A strength of this volume is its co-operative nature, joining historians and literary scholars in a common task. One result is an awareness that literary and historical materials seem to have perceived the Muslims in different lights. Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran Cruz, Nina Dulin-Mallory, Gloria Allaire, and Nancy Bisaha demonstrate that literary sources could paint some Muslims in positive terms, while crusade chroniclers, even with firsthand knowledge of Muslims, generally portrayed them negatively. One obvious reason for this difference is that the crusade chronicles aimed at eliciting support for further crusades, so the enemy had to be shown in the most terrifying light. Furthermore, the writers of fiction may have made the Muslims more complex and more interesting in order to hold their readers' attention.

As Donald J. Kagay and Alauddin Samarrai demonstrate, there was access to accurate information about the Muslims either through Muslim communities in Europe or from the experience of merchants trading with them. They argue that the Muslims affected European intellectual life, Provençal poetry for example. Ernest N. Kaulbach even finds "Islamic doctrine in medieval Christian commentary on the Bible" (p. 147). There was, however, a question of religious identification. Some Christians considered the Muslims heretics, as Michael Frassetto points out, but others, as John V. Tolan indicates, saw them as pagans.

Emphasizing as it does the complexity of Christian-Muslim relations, this short volume could well serve as a basis for reconsideration of the nature of Muslim-Christian interaction in the Middle Ages. It also raises questions, such as why the image of the Muslim appears to have worsened over time. Should not increased contact have led to greater understanding, or is the liberal cliche about knowing people is to understand them false?

James Muldoon
The John Carter Brown Library

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