Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination by John V. Tolan (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 266 and selflessness are central to the discussions here since the force of individual will, so central to the fearless confrontation with death by the Christian and Moslem martyrs is precisely what defines the Hindu sati and Gandhi’s ideal of reducing himself to zero. The question raised by all the pieces in the volume, and the question that remains unanswered, is what does the “self” mean in a religious context? Can there be volition in a “selfless” act? That is the question that martyrdom forces us to confront and that separates the religious “faithful” from religions’ victims. CHERYL GOLDSTEIN, Comparative Literature, UCLA John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press 2002) xxiii + 372 pp. John V. Tolan in Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination examines and contextualizes various Christian writings against Islam in the middle ages. The similarity of his project to that of Edward Said is no coincidence; Tolan wants to complement Said’s Orientalism. Yet he has done more; he subverts Said. Tolan thinks that Edward Said’s “Occident” is in danger of becoming the same kind of monolithic caricature as the “Orient” of the worst of the Orientalists. In Saracens, the medieval West is a much more dynamic entity. Furthermore, Tolan uses Said’s Culture and Imperialism to show how the earliest of these anti-Islamic writings were composed by “oriental” Christians colonized, as it were, by the expanding Muslim empire in the seventh and eighth centuries. These texts, Tolan argues after Said, express a “culture of resistance” in which subjected Christians “rejected the triumphalist historiography of the ruling Muslims and countered with their own subversive reading of Muslim history” (276). Tolan begins in seventh-century Roman west Asia and Iberia, where the defeated Christians viewed the Muslim conquest as divine scourge upon an erring flock. As the years went by, authors from these communities treated Islam as a Christian heresy invented by a crafty pseudo-prophet (Muhammad) to fool lascivious people into following him. However, these writings were apologetic, intended primarily to prevent Christian conversions to Islam. In more distant Byzantium and northern Europe, Islam was imagined as a pagan idolatry with colorful rites devoted to Apollo, Jupiter, Priapus, and the special god Muhammad . This idea of an imaginary enemy was used for the redirection of knightly violence outwards, beyond the boundaries of European Christendom, and in order to justify the conquest of Muslim-occupied territories. However, once the Latins came into more intimate contact with Muslims as crusaders, they readopted the old image, forged by the Christians of the eastern Mediterranean, of Islam as a heresy. Here for the first time, Islam, Judaism, and the beliefs of various heretics (Petrobrusians, Cathars, and Waldensians) were lumped together as potentially dangerous influences to be countered. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, scholastic theologians set out on a mission of rational argumentation in order to prove the truth of the Catholic doctrine to Jews, Muslims, and heretics. The failure of this movement, manifested by the fall of the crusader kingdom of Acre and the conversion of the Mongol emperors to Islam, prompted an angry and frustrated response. If the missionaries could not convince their audience with reason, the fault surely lay REVIEWS 267 with the infidels. They were incapable of reason, too obstinate (Jews), lascivious (Muslims), or barbarous (Mongols) for intellectual and spiritual comprehension . Increasingly, the polemical association of Jews and Muslims accompanied judicial association of the two—particularly in post-reconquista Spain. Legislation was passed to protect the Christian community from “contamination ”—sexual contact, marriage ties, and religious influence—by Jews and Muslim. After this point in the thirteenth century, there did not appear any major development in the approach to the “problem” of Islam until the Enlightenment . In the meantime, and even thereafter, Western authors kept referring back to the fundamental texts and images created between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries. Tolan’s Saracens is the history of a discourse—that of medieval Christian authors writing against Islam. It is useful to historians of Europe, both of the pre-modern and modern periods, as well as to those scholars interested in the development and use...