The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to the Reformation

Richard Fletcher is one of today’s most renowned medieval historians. In his latest book, he offers a brilliant survey of the relationship between the Islamic and Christian worlds from the seventh to the sixteenth centuries. He shows how, despite long periods of coexistence and overlap, religious misunderstanding between "the peoples of the book" has been present since their earliest encounters. He argues that though there were fruitful trading and cultural interactions between Islam and Christianity during the period when Arabs controlled most of the Mediterranean world, neither side was remotely interested in the actual religion of the other. Christians portrayed Muslims as bloodthirsty pagans and Muhammad as a false prophet while Islam viewed Christianity as a jumble of sects and conflicting stories.

Fletcher’s lucidity, scholarship, and gift for compression make this one of the most elegant and clear-sighted contributions to its subject for many years. It will appeal to readers of Karen Armstrong’s bestselling Islam: A Short History and to all readers looking for a better understanding of the Islamic world’s relationship to the West.

This illuminating study of Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages shows just how intractable the conflict between Islam and the West has always been. Historian Fletcher (Bloodfeud; Barbarian Conversion; etc.), covers the period from the first Muslim conquests in the seventh century to the 16th-century peak of the Ottoman Empire. The story is one of frequent military conflict, but also of trade, diplomacy, technological diffusion and intellectual exchange as the Muslim world absorbed and elaborated the science and philosophy of the Greeks and then retransmitted them to Europe. Despite these far-reaching economic and cultural interactions, Fletcher argues, Christians and Muslims lived in "a state of mutual religious aversion," even in border regions like Spain where substantial populations of both faiths lived side by side; Christians viewed Muslims as bloodthirsty heretics, while Muslims sneered at Christian trinitarianism as a self-contradictory polytheism superceded by Muhammad's revelations. Fletcher's stress on early modern Europe's growing (but unrequited) openness to and curiosity about Islam as the key to the evolution of the notion of religious pluralism-a development rooted ultimately, he feels, in the multiplicity and diversity of Christian theological traditions-is fairly conventional rise-of-the-West historiography. Still, he ably synthesizes a mass of historical material on the ways in which people both accommodated and resisted the influence of alien religions in their lives. The result is a readable, nuanced account that raises profound questions about the role of religion and ideology in shaping our worldview.
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Rather than comparing Islam and Christianity, historian Fletcher surveys the first 900 years of relations between the realms of Christianity and Islam. Following Muhammad's death in 632, an Arab-led Islamic empire explosively expanded to Persia in the east and Spain, via North Africa, in the west and absorbed the previously Christian Levant. When the Crusades began in 1095, Seljuk Turks rather than Arabs or the Persians who succeeded them ran Islam's empire. After the Crusades petered out two centuries later, the Ottomans seized leadership. They lost Spain but rubbed out Byzantium, charged into the Balkans, and by 1529, besieged Vienna. All this time, trade in goods between Christian and Islamic lands flourished. Exchange of ideas occurred mostly between Islamic Spain and Christendom, however, and finally Islam discouraged it altogether. The most striking common characteristic of Christendom and Islam for most of this period was denial of religious pluralism; indeed, no one of either faith formulated anything like it until modernity was at hand. An invaluable, nonpartisan review of some too-little-known history. Ray Olson
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