Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 496 pages
• Published by: Random House Trade Paperbacks May 3, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0812972392
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0812972399
• Book Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Weighs: 12.8 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
Historian Wheatcroft (The Ottomans) adds another volume to the steadily growing literature on the history of Christian-Muslim relations. Part philosophical treatise, part history and part diatribe, Wheatcroft's study adds little that has not been covered already by more thorough and elegant studies such as F.E. Peters's recent The Monotheists. He offers an overview of the tortured relations between Christianity and Islam in various contexts including the Crusades, Spain, the Middle East and Bosnia. Wheatcroft opens his book with an account of the 1571 battle of Lepanto, where Christians triumphed over the Muslims. Using the theoretical writings of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Stephen Greenblatt, Wheatcroft emphasizes that the conflict between the two religions most often devolved into a war of words in which one side used dehumanizing language to describe the other and to thereby sanction war. He helpfully brings his study into the 21st century by looking at briefly the religious rhetoric that President Bush and General William Boykin have used to defend the attack on Iraq and other Muslim nations. Unfortunately, Wheatcroft betrays his own ideological position by referring to Muslim terrorists as a "virus" and by defending the Bush administration's positions on the war, thereby diminishing the value the book might have as an objective description of the conflicts between Christianity and Islam.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In the roar of skyscrapers collapsing in New York and in the thunder of fusillades in Afghanistan and Iraq, a leading British historian hears echoes of battles fought centuries ago. This timely chronicle amplifies those echoes to show how much ancient animosities pervade the modern conflict between radical Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden and American president George W. Bush. Impelling the Muslim and Christian combatants who crossed swords at Jerusalem and Granada, at Lepanto, Constantinople, and Missolonghi, these ancient hatreds inspired daring innovations in military weaponry and tactics, as well as amazing enlargements in both faiths' religious demonology. Wheatcroft recounts the clashes of arms--jihad and crusade--in narrative taut and memorable. With rare sophistication, he also traces the perplexing ways religious orthodoxy now reinforced, now checked the political and economic impulses shaping Europe and the Levant. But readers will praise Wheatcroft most for his acute psychological analysis of how Muslim and Christian leaders alike imbued their followers with hostility toward those who adhered to alien creeds. It is this analysis that lends force to the concluding commentary on how President Bush has unwittingly tapped into a very old reservoir of religious enmity with his absolutist rhetoric calling for a "crusade" against the terrorist evil. As a work that interprets today's headlines within a very long chronology, this book will attract a large audience. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
_Infidels_ by Andrew Wheatcroft is an account of the history of conflict between European Christendom and Mediterranean Islam. Though the book can be read as a history of a number of interactions between Islam and Christianity - the initial Arab invasions, the Islamic conquest and Christian reconquest of Spain, the Crusades, and European conflicts with the Ottomans - it is really more about how and why these two cultures came to feel the way they did about each other both in the past and today and how these feelings were sustained over the centuries, with the emphasis being more on the Christian side of the equation. Wheatcroft argued in this book that the Western view of Mediterranean Islam was and is rooted in the distant past. Negative views of Muslims were often created or exaggerated and spread for political reasons. In areas where Christians were minorities, such as in Islamic-dominated Spain and in parts of the Balkans, historical memory came to be honored as a defiant form of resistance, memory that could serve to bind and unite a community but also serve to sustain (and later reinvigorate) hatred. In the mid 9th century for instance leaders in the Christian community in Spain sought to arrest the erosion of the number of Christians - many were converting to Islam or were otherwise becoming less distinctly Christian - by working hard to accentuate the differences between Christians and Muslims and even to create conflict where there wasn't by a series of martyrdoms. There were theologians who saw Muslims as a necessary evil, that they existed "to fulfill the word and will of God," a view often favored in the apocalyptic views of medieval Christians, seeing for instance the Muslim conquest of the Visigothic kingdom in Spain as an "elaborate metaphor" pointing to the evils of that kingdom, their consequences, and lessons for later Christians. The threat of the Muslims became a "heavy flail" used by God (or the priests) to bring His people back in line. Sometimes fear and hatred of Islam occurred without any conscious planning by Western religious and political leaders. Ideas and views of events could also develop a life of their own, fueling negative stereotypes and hatred. Wheatcroft recounted how the very concept of crusade produced effects that echoed centuries after the death of its author, Pope Urban II, and how prior to that, accounts of Christian pilgrims being attacked and robbed by Muslim brigands on their way to Jerusalem could be exaggerated, often at first to make the heroism of those involved more impressive but later for other reasons as negative views became dominant. Also during the Crusades each conquest "engendered a desire for reconquest," producing a conditioned response that became more and more imprinted on both Christianity and Islam. In the end each culture was left with a "well-honed ideology of war in a just cause." Both civilizations were left with a "malign heritage," each civilization writing and mythologizing opposing narratives of history. Wheatcroft wrote that historical memory could be viewed as form of group thinking and would more often than not have negative consequences. Group thinking, as defined by Irving L. Janis, is a situation in which members are under pressure to adhere to a certain point of view, tending to discredit and explain away ideas contrary to that of the group, constructing negative stereotypes of enemies and rivals outside the group, viewing those who question group stereotypes and ideas as disloyal, and falsely perceiving within the group silence of group members as consent. Group thinking could be seen to have occurred at many times and among many groups in European Christendom with regards to Islam. Western views of the Islamic world became largely imprinted in the two centuries following the Islamic conquest of Constantinople in 1453. This period marks the development and spread of the printed word and image in the West, resulting in by the late 17th century a near universal image in the West of how the Muslim "infidel" looked like and behaved. Though hostility towards the Muslim world dated to much earlier times, it was the printed word and image (as well as a lesser extent later painted works of art and sculpture and the like) that solidified the definition of the Muslim infidel and served to sustain negative views of Muslims. Additionally, these innovations have meant that the West's negative views of Islam have been much more "potent and widespread" than that found in the world of Islam, with Christian interest in the world of Islam far exceeding any Muslim interest in Christendom, a situation only now being corrected by Islam with the spread of the printing press and visual and electronic media to the East. I found the author's account of why the West got such a head start on the use of the printed word and image quite interesting. Discounting notions of universal Islamic disdain for images, he instead focused on other causes, such as the difficulty of typesetting in Arabic, as it is essentially a cursive written language, in sharp contrast to European languages which are made up of individual letters, a format that readily lends itself to typesetting; the fact that Arabic letter forms can change, depending upon where in a word they are, necessitating the creation of a minimum of 500 different pieces of type, prohibitively expensive to most early printing companies; the fact that the printing press was opposed by powerful vested interests in the Muslim world, namely the scribes and clerks who ran the Ottoman Empire and religious elite who controlled the mosques, where most of the copying was carried on and where the majority of publicly accessible books were located; the fact that Ottoman authorities limited early printed books to subjects such as mathematics and science, too small of a market to sustain publishers when most of the public really wanted books on religion and law; and finally early printed books were very crude and competed poorly with handwritten products.