Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (review)

For the past forty years, there have been two standard reference works on this subject: Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (1960) by Norman Daniel, and Richard Southern's Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962). With the publication of John Tolan's well-researched, theoretically informed, and thoughtful account of Western attitudes toward Islam from the seventh through the thirteenth centuries, we now have a third.

Beginning with a chapter on the Church Fathers, and another on the polemics and apologetics of Eastern Christians in the seventh and eighth centuries, Tolan shows how Latin authors built upon tradition; how, for example, Christians living in Muslim-occupied Spain in the eighth and ninth centuries—like the protected minorities (dhimmi) of the Middle East before them—saw the conquest of Islam as a punishment from God; and how northern scholars, lacking any firsthand experience of Islam, tended to characterize Muslims either as pagans, akin to the Roman persecutors of old, or as arch-heretics, based, again, on the typology of early medieval authors such as Isidore of Seville.

By the time of the Crusades, Muslims had become idol-worshipers—and Muhammad their heresiarch leader. Never mind the inconsistencies. Actual experience of Islam rarely got in the way of ridicule and contempt; and negative images served to justify the use of force. Add to these attacks the more genuine attempts to understand this rival faith, and one finds that by the end of the thirteenth century, multiple and varied images of Islam were circulating—some positive, most negative—in a society where the boundaries between scholarly and popular views were not as clearly marked as is commonly assumed.

Tolan's intent in this book is to "complement" the work of Daniel and Said, and for those who study pre-modern Muslim-Christian relations, he does this admirably well: his nuanced and subtle analysis of Western images is based not only upon a thorough familiarity with the sources but also upon an equally close reading of the cultures that produced them. When examining the ninth-century Córdoban martyrs' movement, for instance, he contrasts the inflammatory writings of Alvarus and Eulogius—aimed at shoring up Christian resistance and at painting the world in apocalyptic terms—with the reserved reactions of the rest of the dhimmi community (the majority), who at least on some levels had come to terms with their Muslim overlords, and who wanted the fanatics to go away, so that they could continue to enjoy the protections and privileges the caliph had granted them.

For other readers, however, for historians working on the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, for example, or for social scientists studying the ideological role of dehumanization, Tolan does much more than merely "complement" the earlier studies: he corrects the impression left by Daniel and Said that the history of Islam in the European imagination is but an unbroken chain of stereotypes in the service of timeless colonial ambitions.

On the contrary: the negative "orientalist" portrayals of Islam that Said sees as the ideological underpinning of French and British colonialism, actually have their origins in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries—in the resistance of Christian "orientals" to their Muslim colonizers (p. 67). The martyrs of Córdoba are a case in point. By having themselves executed for publicly defaming Islam, and by demonizing those Christians who co-operated with the Muslim overlords, they wanted to incite hatred and to erect a "wall of violence" between Muslim ruler and Christian subject. And this, Tolan rightly points out, corresponds to the logic of what Said called anticolonial "resistance culture" (p. 88)—a stance that can be traced to early eastern polemics/apologetics such as the Risâlat al-Kindî and the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius.

Inevitably, in pondering the Middle Ages, we ponder modernity; and at one point, as he runs through the various conflicting representations of Muslims that existed in miniatures...