Islam: The Straight Path by John L. Esposito

To many of those familiar with the subject-matter this may seem strange, because since the eighteenth century there has been little threat from Islam to Christianity. Yet the statement should be taken seriously, since within the last decade, not least in 1990, there have been signs of a renewal of the threat. (Watt, 1991) The books under review illustrate aspects of this topic. In its first wave of expansion the embryonic Islamic state wrested from the Byzantine Empire the provinces of Syria and Egypt and the whole of North Africa, and then in the eighth century, occupied Spain. At this period Western Europe was culturally far inferior to Spanish Islam. The first step in the Christian Reconquista, the capture of Toledo in 1085, and the beginning of the Crusades, made some Western European scholars, notably Peter the Venerable, interested in obtaining more accurate information about Islam, to counter the false ideas that prevailed. (Watt, 1991)

Norman Daniel's important book, Islam and the West: the Making of an Image, (Edinburgh University Press, œ9.50) was the first comprehensive examination of the work of the Latin scholars from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. They translated the Quran and studied other Muslim sources, but, although they thus collected much genuine information and corrected many errors, the image of Islam which they presented to their contemporaries was distorted in various ways. They portrayed Islam as a religion which spread by the sword (offering captured peoples the choice between conversion and death), which encouraged self-indulgence especially in sexual matters, and founded by a man with many moral weaknesses. (Watt, 1991)

The aim of this false presentation was to enable Western European Christians to feel that, even if they were inferior to Muslims culturally, they had a superior religion. Not unnaturally this distorted ...