Customer Reviews

Faith and Sword: A Short History of Christian-Muslim Conflict (Reaktion Books - Globalities)

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A brief, but comprehensive account of the thirteen hundred year conflict between Islam and the Christian civilizations of Byzantium and Western Europe. The book is only 222 pages in length. Yet it is amazingly inclusive. Nothing significant has been left out. At the same time the author's non-judgmental approach eschews the usual anti-western/anti-Christian, or anti Muslim, harangue.

The Crusades, for example, are presented as just one episode in the millennia long see-saw struggle for control of the borderlands between the Islamic World and the West - a European push-back that came after four hundred years of Islamic Jihad and conquest of the Christian lands around the Mediterranean from the Levant to Spain and Portugal.

This book serves no ones ideological or political agenda. It is an objective historical account of the perennial struggle for dominance between Dar al Islam and the Christian (later secular) West. It is primarily a study of conflict, rather than of peaceful intercourse, between two civilizations. (For that see: Zachary Karabell's PEACE BE UPON YOU.)

Four centuries of Muslim expansion and Christian defeat were followed by a period of Christian recovery (during the era of the Crusades and the Reconquest of Sicily, Spain and Portugal), which was followed by four more centuries of Muslim advance under the Ottoman Turks. Finally, the tide of Islamic expansion was reversed by a secularized Europe remade and revitalized by the commercial, industrial, technological and military revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

What we are witnessing today is a renewed Jihad (Holy War) against a predominantly secular Western Civilization led by fanatic Islamists from some of the most remote and primitive reaches of the world, whose proclaimed objective is to topple the most economically and militarily powerful nations on earth.

Can they succeed? Only if the west crumbles from within through a loss nerve, a collapse of will and self hatred. Only a loss of faith in its own historical achievements, culture, religious and political beliefs and institutions, and a loss of confidence in the rightness of its cause and the will to defend it, can bring Western Civilization down.

It is well to remember, however, that once before (in the seventh and eighth centuries) a horde of backward desert tribesmen inspired by a fanatical faith in Allah overran and destroyed the vastly more advanced Roman Civilization lying peacefully and contentedly around the littoral of the Mediterranean basin.