Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages: A Reader ed. by Jarbel Rodriguez (review)

Just about any anthology will leave something out, though this volume attempts to include documents that reflect on more than merely a history of military, political, economic, social, religious, and philosophical conflict. Yet when considering David Thomas and Barbara Roggema's eleven volume Christian-Muslim Relations Bibliographical History, the question inevitably arises as to whether any single volume such as this one could possibly do justice to the extensive array of primary sources. Given that this collection is presumably intended for the classroom rather than for reference purposes, Rodriguez may have succeeded in doing just that.

Rodriguez's introduction gives a solid, albeit brief historical setting and begins its consideration of texts with the Pact of Umar, which purported to govern the Muslim approach to the defeated Christians of Jerusalem in 636 C.E. But what of the letters of Muhammad to the Byzantine Emperor, the ruler of Persia, the Negus of Ethiopia, and others, ostensibly from less than a generation earlier? Some may argue that Muhammad's letters are later compositions projected back into history for ideological purposes. However, even the Pact of Umar is open to critical investigation, and many historians consider the Pact as we now know it to be, at best, elaborations of some problematic Ur-text which in a manner reminiscent of Gerhard von Rad's "wandering Aramean" thesis, serves as a literary nucleus to which later accretions are added.

How much of such early documents is authentic in content or even "true" is not always the most important question facing the researcher. Texts edited subsequent to the events they depict often ascribe significance only seen in retrospect. This does not necessarily make them any less "true" even if the manner in which the editing has taken place has made the documents less "real." There is, indeed, much to be learned on the question of Christian-Muslim relations from the letters of Muhammad to the Emperor of Byzantium as well as from the Pact of Umar.

By contrast, some of the topics included here have become the stuff of legend. Figures such as Saladin and Richard the Lionheart have come to border on the mythic in the popular imagination. From the primary sources presented here, they are barely recognizable. The historical record therefore takes on all the more importance for both students and researchers.

Of course, while chronology has an inevitable impact on the order in which texts are presented, the present collection initially focuses readers on hostilities and power relationships between Muslims, who were by and large in the ascendant, and the declining fortunes of Christians, whether Byzantines of western Asia or Visigoths of Iberia. This focus has a tendency to validate implicitly Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis as proposed in the late twentieth century. Whether applying this thesis in such a manner is anachronistic or actually sound tends to beg the question, of course, as to whether Huntington's thesis itself holds water; the order of presentation of primary texts in this collection, however, clearly, if unintentionally, reinforces the notion that Huntington is "settled theory."

To his credit, Rodriguez has chosen diverse materials deliberately to reflect differing points of view, from either side of the religious divide, with each document editorially introduced with accompanying notation of the translator and monograph in which it appeared. While the table of contents lists 89 entries or topics, the actual number of documents reproduced is much higher: for example, four separate records address the First Crusade (topic number fourteen).

Left unspoken are the reasons for variances among these multiple reports. Christian accounts of the first Crusade as reproduced here do not spare the reader's sensibilities, describing blood flowing so freely in Jerusalem that the ankles of mounted knights were awash in it. By contrast, the relatively terse Muslim description presented does not go into such detail. Is the comparatively restrained Muslim...