Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities (review)

The book under review scrutinizes the triangular relationship that defined and continues to define political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faith communities, namely the Jews, Christians and Muslims. The story thus narrated reflects on modern scholarship based on medieval sources, which shapes our understanding of the medieval milieu. The core issue discussed in the book is how Jews, Christians, and Muslims perceived themselves and accommodated one another’s society and culture as Islamic civilization took shape, beginning in the seventh century CE, and how the intellectual encounter between the modern West and traditional Muslims has led to divergent and often highly contentious understanding of a shared monotheistic past. Hence, the subtitle of this volume: Modern Scholarship and Medieval Realities.

The essays in the book are divided into two parts. The first part, entitled “Encountering the ‘Other’: Western Scholarship and the Foundations of Islamic Civilization,” consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 begins by briefly traveling over familiar territory; namely, the interest of the Latin West in seeking knowledge of the Islamic East for both polemical and practical purposes. Following a brief survey of “The Modern Quest for Muhammad and the Origins of Islamic Civilization,” the chapter turns to less familiar concerns but in greater detail. Here, the focus is on the development of modern orientalist scholarship that jettisoned much of its polemical baggage in debating the origins of Islam and Islamic civilization. The second chapter, titled “Rethinking Islamic Origins,” deals with subsequent research and scholarship that has widened our understanding of Islamic origins and has presented scholars with new conceptual tools to reexamine old problems. The remaining two chapters, entitled “Occidentalists:” Engaging the Western ‘Other,’ and “The Occidentalist Response to Modern Western Scholarship,” deal with the contributions of orientalists to recovering an Islamic past that had for centuries been ignored by Muslims. These chapters also cover the critical response of Muslims and their sympathizers to what they consider to be distortions by Western scholarship and the manner in which they have been employed to further the political and cultural hegemony of the Western powers.

The second part of the book deals with the medieval encounter between Jews, Christians, and Muslims in seven chapters under the rubric “The Reality of Being the ‘Other’ in the Medieval Islamic World.” Among the various studies in this section is a reexamination of the confrontation between the Prophet Muhammad and the Jewish tribes of Arabia. The encounter was the formative moment in Jewish-Muslim relations, which still resonates today. The next chapter is a reflection on the manner in which Jews and Muslims perceived one another. The subsequent chapter concerns the much misunderstood concept of “tolerance” in discussing medieval Islam, as well as medieval Jewry in the orbit of Islam, with particular reference to their legal status and social and cultural interaction. In “Early Muslim-Christian Encounters” the author discusses the Islamization of Christian space, especially in sites considered to be holy by both Muslims and Christians. Next the author analyzes the polemics and apologetics that shaped how both Christians and Muslim communities perceived one another. The final chapter examines the role of all three monotheist communities in the lively intellectual life of the Middle Ages. This was a remarkable scholarly engagement that gave rise to crosspollination of the sciences and philosophies that would have a profound impact on the Latin West as well as on the Islamic world.

The study is written in clear language with immense erudition and will certainly stimulate a great deal of critical discussion. Utilizing a vast array of primary sources, Jacob Lassner, a foremost historian of Islamic civilization, balances the rhetoric of literary and legal works from the Middle Ages with other, newly published medieval sources, describing life as it was actually lived among the three faith communities. Finally, the author considers what a more informed picture of the relationship among the Abrahamic faiths in the medieval Islamic world might mean...