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Rating: 
Summary: Much-needed history
Review: In this book, (his 1924 Ph.D. thesis), Nobel laureate Ivo Andric observes, that Europe's Turkish conquerors brought their Christian subjects "no cultural content or sense of higher historic mission, even to those South Slavs who accepted Islam." Rather, they delivered a "hegemony" that "brutalized custom, and meant a step to the rear in every respect."From this non-fiction, Andric draws the history infused in his fictional Bridge over the Drina, which won him the Nobel prize for literature. Here, he provides considerable evidence of Islam's institutional enslavement of children under the Seljuks and Ottomans, over 500 years, in Greece and Serbia. Unfortunately, this history seems very much alive in the Islamic wars against non-Muslim dhimmis ongoing from Indonesia and Malaysia to the Philippines and southern Sudan. In any case, this book provides evidence that while the vast majority of Muslims may indeed be peaceful, their tolerance is less apparent in Islamic tradition and laws, as recorded by jurists from al-Mawardi to our own time, or by the historical record. Andric's history of classical Islam's European actions should give one pause, particularly since, as Robert Spencer explains in Onward Muslim Soldiers, classical Islam remains very much in vogue among radicals today. This book provides a much-needed snapshot of classical Islam's historical effects. --Alyssa A. Lappen
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