Infidels : A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

Rating:
Summary: Original and confusing
Review: Andrew Wheatcroft's Infidels examines the bloody faultline between Islam and the West. The scope of his book is ambitious: he starts with a tremendous account of the battle of Lepanto in 1571, but then he forgoes the chronology. There are different sections on Andalucia, the Middle East, the Balkans and the Otto-man Empire.You get a bit about the romance of Moorish Spain and some exotic tales from the Crusades.

Andrew Wheatcroft is especially good on the key question of mutual perceptions. His knowledge of the Western representations of Islam in art and literature is impressive. Atrocities were mutual, and Wheatcroft wants to tell us why certain events were remembered better than others; he wishes to find out how we know what we know about the past. The tale is just that: one of difference and enmity and is clearly intended as the final word on the cultural history of the clash of civilizations. His attempt to short-circuit the 'maledicta', the words of pure hate at the heart of the relationship between Islam and the West, through a greater understanding of the history of mutual repulsion should be applauded.

All that said I had the impression that he wanted to cover too broad an issue in a new way. Certainly, he warns that his aim is not to explain why things happened that way, but how they happen, but in my opinion the very choice of some facts supposedly to be relevant implicitly asks for some kind of explanation that in this work is never openly developped.The final result is somehow confusing.

Rating:
Summary: Animosity based on Myths continues
Review: In the age of polemics this is a well written history and sensitive understanding of the conflicts between Christianity and Islam.

The images of each other, shared human weaknesses, violent conflicts, failure to empathize and understand are all here. How history has been abused time and again to encourage hate as a tool for politicians and 'true believers' is a repeated, sad, but interesting tale. The mirror images of polluting and demonic "other" are drawn with quotations and local 'color' as are battle scenes and key characters on both sides. Changing understandings and emotional impact of terms like 'Crusade' and 'Jihad' are noted. At least until very recent history the author provides a well balanced story with focus on 'hot spots' like Andalusia; the Levant; the Balkans, while including some of North Africa and other conflicts. This book is 100 times better than the likes of "Jihad" by Fergosi and may be well complemented by books like Fletcher's recent book, "Cross and Crescent".

One of the most common and often serious fallacies writing about Islam is to generalize from the less than 20% who are Arabs or the perhaps 40% who are in the greater Middle East. (The author has also written on the Ottomans.) This book holds up well because it provides a "why?" for the relationships that enlightens whether reading about centuries ago in Spain or recently in Serbia. One might disagree with some of the conclusions about current events, but the book remains valuable for readers.

Rating:
Summary: artificially "balanced" history
Review: The author starts off with a fine graphic and factual account of the battle of Lepanto in 1571. However, what follows is a series of the author's conclusions designed more to present a "balanced" picture of Islam than real history. I would rather have seen the facts for myself and drawn my own conclusions. I read history for the history, not to have my thoughts politically corrected. If you have any doubts as to the above criticism, just read the introduction where the author manages to criticize the West for it's treatment of women. This in a book on Islam!

Rating:
Summary: Decent Historical Narrative of Three Historical Moments
Review: The subtitle suggests that this work is a history of Christian-Islamic conflict. In the preface, Wheatcroft claims that he "tries to trace a few of the myriad ways in which the Christian West has responded to the Islamic East." At the beginning of the second chapter, he writes, "[t]his book is about enmity, how it was created and how it is sustained." There seems to be some confusion about the purposes of the work. It is not comprehensive enough to be the first or the second. It comes closest to trying to match the last goal.

Wheatcroft focuses on three historical moments -- Moorish Spain and its Reconquest, the Holy Land during the Crusades and the Balkans during and after Ottoman Rule. In this section of the narrative, he discusses the enmity of the particular cases, but rarely its genesis or creation. He does suggest that the cyclical violence and deprivation on both sides along with tendencies to villainize each other sustained it. The discussion of Moorish Spain is the most thorough and focused while the other two, particularly the section on the Balkans, seem too large, too unwieldy for the author in the space he gives them. The last third of the book seems thematically to deal with the means of sustaining enmity, i.e. in imagery, printed matter and evil words or insults. However, this is rarely the approach Wheatcroft takes. He focuses on the ways Muslims and Turks were marked out as the "Other" in imagery, but not the relationship between that imagery and conflict. He discusses Ottoman resistance to printed words and images with only tenuous links to the conflict. The section on evil words, or maledicta, tries to show how cultural/religious insults are magnified and often misunderstood or not fully understood. The book omits several elements that seem important in understanding Christian/Western-Islamic conflict today. It says little of initial Christian reactions to Islam. It includes only a cursory discussion of the links between modernization, a Western-oriented Arab intelligentsia, indirect colonial rule and "fundamentalist" developments like the Muslim Brotherhood and Wahhabi interpretations of Islam. It does not speak to the conflict between Muslims and other Europeans in Western Europe or to the role of Western securlarization in the conflict.

After reading Wheatcroft's work, I know more of the atrocities on both sides. However, it has added little to my knowledge of this conflict over the last century or so that I could not have gotten from television and newspaper accounts. This is a shame since his earlier chapters feature a lively prose within an historically-grounded narrative.

Rating:
Summary: History or propaganda?
Review: This disjointed account of the long history of antagonism between the West and Islam attempts to support the politically correct but counterintuitive thesis that the West is less tolerant than the Muslim world. At the end the book disintegrates into a bitter denunciation of President Bush and others who support the use of force to combat Islamic terrorism, even comparing "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror" by David Frum and Richard Perle to "Malleus Malleficarum," a book credited with inspiring Medieval witch hunts that "remains one of the most malign texts ever produced." While not coherent or objective enough to stand up as history, "Infidels" might have propaganda value to some on the left.

Rating:
Summary: A biased history
Review: This much needed history, misses the mark. The problem here is mostly that the book ignores all the islamic atrocities and anti-european sentiments among islamic scholarship while emphasising every inch of anti-muslim or intolerant writing done by Europeans. A heavily documented history of the anti-muslim manuscipts published in this book pretends to illustrate that it was Europe that was intolerant when in fact it was Islam that was on the offensive occupying Europe from 700AD through the 1800s. So how is it possible that it was all Europe that was intolerant when it was europe that was invaded, enslaved, persecuted and attacked for so long? THis book is simply biased, and loses the reader in hits intolerance.

Seth J. Frantzman