Islam in Europe

Abstract

Islam in Europe, by Jack Goody (Oxford: Polity P., 2004; pp. 178. £45; pb. £14.99). Although this book contains a wealth of information about the past, it is not really a work of history. Nor, despite the fact that the author is Emeritus William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in Cambridge, is its principal focus ethnographic. Convinced that religious differences play a much greater role in conflicts than most social scientists recognise, Goody sets out ‘to show something of the nature of the interactions between Islam and Europe, taking seriously the actors’ view of the situation'. More than half the book is devoted to ‘Past Encounters’. In this initial chapter, which grew out of a lecture to the Socialist History Group in London, Goody chronicles the Arab-Berber invasions of the Iberian Peninsula, southern France and southern Italy; the Ottoman invasions of Greece, the Balkans and eastern Europe; and the Mongol invasions from the north. He then deals in turn with Islamic cultural influences, trade, values, and contemporary immigration. Chapter 2, ‘Bitter Icons and Ethnic Cleansing’, was published in 2002 as an article in History and Anthropology. An earlier draft appeared in The New Left Review the previous year. Here Goody first offers his reflections on the deep-seated human ambivalence towards the very process of representation as evinced by the abrupt changes in style of ancient Greek pottery and the iconoclasm inherent in the Ottoman transformation of Nicosia's cathedral into a mosque. He suggests that this ambivalence is one of the factors that divide Cyprus's Muslims and Christians. He then turns to the subject of ethnic cleansing, arguing that it is more often religious than ethnic and that Hobsbawm, Gellner and Giddens have underestimated the role of religious ideologies in nationalism. In Chapter 3, ‘Islam and Terrorism’, which is a revised version of another article published in History and Anthropology, also in 2002, the ‘actors’ whose views he takes seriously are those whom most Europeans currently consider terrorists. For example, he offers what amounts to a militant Arab perspective on Israel (pp. 133ff.) and tells us that for some in the East the massacre in Bali was ‘comparable to God's punishment of the Sodomites’ (p. 137). With the final chapter, ‘The Taliban, the Bamiyan and Us—the Islamic Other’, Goody returns to the subject of iconoclasm. He gives Christian and Buddhist examples of the alternation between representation and its absence, and reminds us that the founders of the French Revolution were opposed to representation. Most of the information that Goody relays is accurate, although he is slightly confused about the Reconquista: he seems unaware that Spain was largely under Christian control long before the fall of Granada in 1492 (p. 34) and elsewhere he even gets the date of that wrong (p. 125). More importantly, however, he sometimes oversimplifies the issues. The Palestinians have undoubtedly had a very raw deal, but to attribute the founding of Israel to ‘Jewish terrorists’ supported by the USA (p. 134) is to disregard both the history of anti-Semitism and the motives of the Zionists. Similarly, to assert that after 1948 the Muslims became ‘the new terrorists’ simply because they ‘had lost control of the country’ (ibid.), is to oversimplify. I share Goody's conviction that, over the centuries, Muslims have made many positive contributions to Europe, and, like him, I am concerned that since September 2001 Muslims have been demonised. Nevertheless, we should not be blind to the fact that some of the Islamic organisations that are rapidly gaining influence in Europe are skilled at exploiting liberal values in order to further a far from liberal agenda, and that these organisations have little in common with the high culture of the Spanish Umayyads or the Ottomans.