Britain and Islam: A History from 622 to the Present Day by Martin Pugh (review)

Pugh has written a wide-ranging survey of Anglo–Muslim relations dating back to the earliest interactions during the Crusades (though not to the rise of Islam as implied by the book's subtitle). His primary thesis is that, in contrast to the "Clash of Civilizations" paradigm, this relationship was based on extensive common ground and collaboration that exceeded the spells of discord and confrontation (for example, Britain's supposed disruption of Muslim world unity after World War I), thus laying the groundwork for the gradual integration of Muslim communities into the sociocultural fabric of today's Britain.

Muslim–Christian millenarian interaction should by no means be reduced to the simplistic paradigm of a ceaseless civilizational struggle. For one thing, conflicts and wars within each of these two "great civilizations" have been far more common and far deadlier than those between them (suffice it to note the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European wars and the Middle Eastern internecine strife of the past decades). For another thing, Christians and Muslims have pragmatically cooperated across the "civilizational divide"—economically, politically, and even militarily—often against their co-religionists, from the Ottoman reliance on European support for imperial survival to the 1991 liberation of Kuwait by an assorted international coalition.

Yet even though this pattern of pragmatic cooperation casts serious doubt on the validity of the "clash of civilizations" paradigm, it hardly makes "the idea that Islam and Christianity were great religious enemies from the start . . . one of the great fallacies generated by the Crusades," as Pugh claims (19)—quite the reverse, in fact. The Crusades may not have been the great civilizational confrontation that they are commonly taken to have been (even the legendary Saladin was busier fighting Muslim rivals than the "infidel" crusaders, and he had no qualms about collaborating with the Byzantine Empire whenever it suited his needs). But they were certainly an integral part of a Manichean struggle for world mastery that began centuries before the Crusades and continued for a millennium after their end—a struggle that has essentially been a power-driven "clash of imperialisms" rather than a "clash of civilizations."

Ignoring this historical matter altogether, Pugh focuses on the full half of the glass, stressing the collaborative aspects of Christian–Muslim interaction while downplaying the depth of the discord underlying this relationship, and whenever he notes discord, he often ascribes Christian rather than Muslim culpability. This discord ranges from such small asides as King Richard the Lionheart's violation of a signed agreement (without noting similar behavior on the Muslim side) and charging Britain with deceiving Sharif Hussein of Mecca, perpetrator of the "Great Arab Revolt" in World War I (when Hussein actually did the deceiving), all the way to casting Islam as a peaceful religion seeking to spread its worldly message by primarily peaceful means. Pugh writes, "Jihad is casually, but erroneously, linked with the Christian idea of 'holy war' or crusade. ""In fact, it simply implies 'struggle' or taking pains to achieve something; thus, in the seventh and eighth centuries the greater jihad was an internal struggle to achieve personal purity" (15).

This interpretation cannot be further from the truth. Unlike Christianity, which came to dominate an existing empire slowly and painfully, with a universalism originally conceived in purely spiritual terms, the birth of Islam was inextricably linked with empire, with a universalism inherently imperialistic. It did not distinguish between temporal and religious powers, which were combined in the person of the prophet Muhammad and successive Muslim rulers, including the last Ottoman sultan/caliph. All of them used this unique combination of religious and temporal power to cloak their ambitions in religious colors, largely through the use of jihad—"exertion in the path of Allah."

Muhammad developed this concept shortly after fleeing his hometown of Mecca to Medina in 622 c.e. as a means of enticing his local followers to raid Meccan caravans, instantaneously transforming a common tribal...