Andrew Wheatcroft – Infidels, The Conflict between Christendom and Islam 638 – 2002, pub. Viking, London 2003

There are a number of recent books on the history of the Middle East and debate, which seems to go back to at least the time of the Crusades, on the relationship between Europe and what the Victorians called “the Orient”.

There has been a historic problem for Europeans in their dealings with the “East” and that is the way in which the history of Europe is so closely intertwined with that of the East.  Muslims have historically been treated as the dangerous “other” by Europeans, but this attitude ignores the fact that some Europeans have been and still are Muslims.  Spain and Portugal were under Islamic rule for hundreds of years, and a Muslim state existed in Southern France.  The Balkans, including Greece, have a long history of Islamic rule and Albania and Bosnia remain predominantly Muslim to this day.  Sicily and parts of the south of Italy were also under Muslim control in the middle ages.  Many hundreds of thousands of Europeans were also captured by the Barbary Pirates, or Corsairs, and many converted to Islam and remained in North Africa.  One of the Sultans of Morocco is buried with his English wife.  The Barbary Pirates took villagers from the coast of Cornwall and Southern Ireland as late as the 17^th Century, and the first overseas deployment of the US Navy was to attack the Barbary Pirates, who had preyed on American merchant ships. 

Iris Shah in his book, The Sufis, pointed out the importance of Islamic Spain in the dissemination of new ideas in medieval Europe, inspiring the creation of Western Europe’s first universities at Padua, Paris and Oxford.  The ideas of classical Greece were also reintroduced into Europe via Arab scholars, and new navigational and mathematical knowledge came from the same sources.  Henry the Navigator in Portugal well understood the need to learn from Arab knowledge about navigation and geography.

Andrew Wheatcroft has provided a readable and comprehensive overview of the history of the interrelationship between Christendom and Islam.  He does concentrate on three main areas, Al-Andalus  (Spain and Portugal), The Holy Land of Palestine, and the Balkans.  He does not deal with the issue of the Barbary Pirates, nor with the contemporary Muslim populations of Britain, France and Germany, nor with Italy, but he provides a series of valuable insights and important facts, particularly on the history of Al-Andalus where the Muslim population fought long and hard to retain their Islamic faith.

This book is an important introduction to the interchange between Europe and Islam and I strongly recommend it.  It does not address the question of the impact of Europe on the Orient, except in passing references to the reaction of Muslims to the behaviour of Frankish (European) knights and their followers during the time of the Crusades.  For this subject you need to turn to writers like Bernard Lewis (The Middle East) and Edward W Said (Orientalism) and also to contemporary Arab writers like Albert Hourani (A History of the Arab Peoples) and Nazik Saba Yared (Secularism and the Arab World).

If you want books on terrorism, look elsewhere.  Wheatcroft stresses the interconnection between Europe and the Orient, the historical ties and common inheritance.  The common inheritance included great injustices like the Spanish oppression of the Moriscos after the fall of Granada, in contravention of the documents of surrender, the sack of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099, and the brutal history of the Balkans where both sides had massacred without remorse.  In the Balkans Wheatcroft believes that the bloody history had created a deep belief that history was mother and father to the present; the past was reinacted in the massacres of late 20^th century Bosnia and Kosovo.  The Balkans had been an area where myths have been created that ignore any reality, but have themselves created a new and horrific reality.

Wheatcroft’s concerns are that the false myths which have bedevilled the Balkans may gain a wider audience.

The most interesting part of his book is the final chapter, called “Maledicta”.  Wheatcroft refers to the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, that the mutual use of words of hate (Maledicta) effect both parties, that Christians and Muslims have been “enemies in the mirror”.  The demonised enemy is dehumanised.  He says that, “these ultimate words of hate have now become enormously effective with modern mass communication.”

Wheatcroft then addresses the fact that President George W Bush is a born again Christian with strong evangelical beliefs.  Bush used the word “crusade” to describe America’s response to September 11^th; he said, “This is a new kind of – a new kind of evil.  And we understand.  And the American people are beginning to understand.  This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while” - press conference on the 16^th September 2001.

G W Bush later gave instructions to the Director of Counter-Terrrorism at the CIA; “Get Bin Laden, find him.  I want his head in a box.”  Wheatcroft says that this instruction suggests is that, “once you have entered the world of maledicta with its accursed enemies, it is near impossible not to fall from a modern world that respects progress into the dark domain of raw faith.”  He adds, “It is enormously difficult to keep the language of maledicta under control, to hold it within bounds.  It touches too many deep and visceral feelings, dramatizing the conflict between a good and an imperfect world.”

Wheatcroft finishes his book by saying that; “A reversion to maledicta will ultimately prove self-destructive. An ideology based on these atavistic conditioned response to the “infidel” will fail, and in failing may even slowly unravel he last two centuries of the West’s social, cultural and spiritual development.”

Events in Iraq do nothing to silence the doubts that Wheatcroft raises.  This is a civilized and balanced book and I learnt a lot from it, I strongly recommend it, even if you only read the final chapter.

If we are not careful we will hear yet again the language of the Spanish Inquisition, the language of people who know that they are right, whatever the facts, and Bin Laden will have done far more damage to the West and to its relationship with the Islamic world, than could be caused by the destruction of any number of buildings, or the death of vast numbers of people.