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Reviewed by:
  • Europe and the Islamic World: A History by John Tolan et al.
  • Denise A. Spellberg
Europe and the Islamic World: A History. By john tolan, gilles veinstein, and henry laurens. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Foreword by John L. Esposito. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013. 478 pp. $39.50 (cloth).

This is an ambitious book, authored by a triad of French historians, each of whom writes roughly one hundred pages about Europe and the Islamic world, divided into the medieval (Tolan), early modern (Veinstein) and modern (Laurens) eras. It has much to offer, but neither does it read as a single text, with a consistent historical framework or point of view. Like the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the authors imply that their three works will mysteriously fuse into one, but that is not the overall effect.

Instead, we have three basically distinct histories by three very different historians. Additionally, there are issues with the geographical frame of the book. In the introduction, John L. Esposito speaks not of Europe exclusively but of the relationship of “Islam to the West” (p. ix), which is jarring. Nor is there authorial agreement about the geographical extent of either Europe or the more vexing phrase “the Islamic World.” Both entities expand over time. The Islamic world begins to stretch farther into Russia and the Balkans in Veinstein’s early modern era, and Iran is considered only briefly, which reflects his consistent narrative of Ottoman history, delivered in great detail. Little attention is given to the Islamic world as a place beyond the Middle East, even in the modern era, where the majority of Muslims now reside in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Europe had a role to play in all of these arenas. Laurens’s modern section asserts that Europe has been “replaced in part by North America” (p. 403), meaning the United States presumably, not Canada.

As a unifying structure, the general introduction refutes the “trap” of Samuel Huntington’s model of civilizational “opposition” (p. 1), opting instead for Richard W. Bulliet’s more complex paradigm of an “Islamo-Christian civilization” (p. 3).4 The model chosen invites specific integration throughout the work, but this remains unrealized, for Bulliet’s thesis about these “sibling” civilizations identifies stages of this relationship over time (“siblings in step” before 1500, versus sibling rivalry later), which are not identified in any of the book’s three sections. This remains a lost opportunity at an overarching synthesis and [End Page 647] raises the question of whether the book’s scope should be the European Christian—and Islamic—worlds.

It is also puzzling that there are no women named in either the European or Islamic spheres, except the English diplomatic spouse Lady Mary Montagu, whose actual contact with and descriptions of the lives of real Ottoman women in her travel account are aptly described by Veinstein (pp. 237–238) as exceptional compared to the fantasies of male European counterparts. In contrast, Muslim women are mentioned only when subsumed under the vague thematic category of “women’s emancipation” in the modern era by Laurens (pp. 346, 403). In fact, Europeans knew more about Muslim women, from the medieval era to the present, than this tome allows. For example, specific wives of the Prophet appear in medieval Christian polemics about Islam. Making no mention of real women in the Islamic world voids their considerable agency and perpetuates the myth of their passive, voiceless presence. Important Muslim and Christian women wrote in Arabic newspapers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as admirably documented by Marilyn Booth, Beth Baron, and Mervat Hatem.5 This is not the only key omission in relevant historical treatments.

John Tolan’s presentation covers the earliest contacts between Christians and Muslims, focusing most particularly on religious, military, and intellectual contacts. His work is thoughtful and engaging, particularly strong in depicting the comparative importance of relationships between concepts of jihad, crusade, and reconquista in Spain and the Mediterranean. Given this emphasis, it is unfortunate that there is no reference to Jocelyne Dakhlia and Bernard Vincent’s path-breaking edited collection, Les Musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe (2011).

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