The Muslim Discovery of Europe

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 352 pages
• Published by: W. W. Norton & Company October 2001
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0393321657
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0393321654
• Book Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Weighs: 11.5 ounces

Product Review
Full of rare and exact information. A distinguished work. -- New York Review of Books

Product Description
The eleventh-century Muslim world was a great civilization while Europe lay slumbering in the Dark Ages. Slowly, inevitably, Europe and Islam came together, through trade and war, crusade and diplomacy. The ebb and flow between these two worlds for seven hundred years, illuminated here by a brilliant historian, is one of the great sagas of world history. thirty b/w illustrations.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: The Muslim Discovery of Europe (Paperback) I have just finished reading Bernard Lewis' "The Muslim Discovery of Europe" (1982 edition), and I find, once again, that Professor Lewis is a master. Just as he did in "Semites and Anti-Semites," the author provides the reader with the necessary information to start the process of acquiring an educated opinion on the subject. In this case, Professor Lewis deals, as the title implies, with the Muslim "discovery" of Europe, and what emerges is the picture of an entire civilization so certain of its own importance and so sure of its righteousness, that it does not do much to know the barbarians from the North and West, robbing itself of the chance to learn something, maybe little but most probably quite a lot, from a different culture, one that, quite unexpectedly, would turn planetary in a matter of centuries. The Muslim world appears as what great civilizations --and most big countries today-- tend to be: obsessed with itself. Professor Lewis proves that, even if the European attitude towards other cultures was similar to that of the Muslims, Europe always allowed a little window of doubt to upset the perfect order of a religion-based society. Doubt and curiosity blessed Europe. After all the bloodshed and the terrible price paid in lives and suffering, Europe could still astound the world with the "Renaissance" of the 12th century, and the true Renaissance that started in Italy in the 14th. Hand in hand with religious murders, expulsion of Jews and Moors, Inquisition, Reformation, and Thirty-Years War, Europe gave "Don Quijote," Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz, Descartes, Boccaccio, Dante, and thousands of others to the world. While this was happening, Europe's most powerful neighbor was blinded by its own arrogance and its total belief in its superiority. The Muslim world eventually "discovered" Europe, but it was more of a rude awakening than a discovery. This book also states early on what is clear in many history texts, but that tends to be forgotten by overly-sympathetic Western voices: Islam started as an eminently warrior religion, conquering places where Christianity had been established for centuries, like North Africa (Saint Augustine was from Hippo, which is Carthage), and the always improperly named Palestine area. The Muslim conquerors did not go sword in hand to those places to convert idolatrers, and they certainly did not go to Spain because the Visigothic kingdoms were atheist. Eminent historians, like the late Steven Runciman in "History of the Crusades" (3 volumes), and popular programs, like the BBC-A&E "Crusades," can badly serve their readers and viewers by blaming only Europeans for the Crusades, stating that these started in 1096 with the Cristian invasion of Syria, and ended in 1291 with the fall of the last Christian stronghold, Acre. Bur Professor Lewis knows better: the Muslim-Christian confrontation, with ups and downs, years of ferocity and years of coexistence, started when the Muslims broke out of the Arabian Peninsula to conquer the world in the name of Islam, taking the fight to Christianity in North Africa and the Levant and then to Europe itself, invading the Iberian Peninsula and France. They attacked Byzantium for centuries, until the newly-converted Muslim Turks overwhelmed the empire and this collapsed in 1453. After that, Europe was invaded again and it took the Europeans more than 250 years to remove the threat of Islamic conquest from their midst. Since this book deals with the Muslim attitude towards Europe, we get a better picture than the simplistic approach that, unfortunately, Runciman and the BBC program present of bad Christians, good Muslims. In this area, I highly recommend John Riley-Smith's work, as editor, of the "Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades," and Malcolm Billings' "The Cross and the Cescent: a history of the Crusades." Lewis is not interested in good or bad: he presents the Muslims through their own (meagre) documents on Europe, and for us, used to self-criticism and to be very severe critics of Western Culture's shortcomings, it is refreshing and indeed necessary to realize that prejudice is not exclusive of the West. Willful ignorance of others because those others are different was very much at home in the House of Islam. Professor Lewis divides his book into 12 chapters, such as Contact and Impact, The Muslim View of the World, Muslim Scholarship about the West, etc. My only complaint is that many original texts are mentioned but not quoted as much as I would have wanted to. However, the Notes section makes clear that the author has reviewed all the texts that he refers to, many of which are unique manuscripts. I have written before that to read just a couple of Professor Lewis' books is to realize that he realy knows his subject: his sources go beyond traditional European scholarship to the original documents in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. What some readers might consider "bias," I see as letting the Muslims speak for themselves. It is true the the Europeans were were no more enlightened than the Muslims for a long time, but the European stirrings of the 11th and 12th centuries had no parallel in the Islamic world, and the Muslim decision to ignore the Renaissance was a sovereign and fateful one. Preofessor Lewis knows the people and the culture, and he admires what is to be admired (and as a magnificent incentive you should check "Islam, Art and Architecture," edited by Hattstein and Delius). But he does not fail the serious student, nor the serious reader, by sparing us the critical analysis of a society born in conquest, used to military victories and imperial attitudes, that sees itself --suddenly, as it happens-- left behind by those it despised for so long as weaklings and infidels. A quote from the Ottoman author Evliya Çelebi, regarding Austrians and their lack of martial qualities, could very well describe the general attitude of Muslims who should have known better about Europe, and explains in part today's anger and frustration in that region of the world, confronted with a rather dismal present but preceded by a glorious, if self-satisfied, past. The quote appears on page 155: "They [the Austrians] are just like Jews," Çelebi writes. "They have no stomach for a fight." Oh, how the world has changed!