Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam [Hardcover]

Andrew Wheatcroft (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 2004

Here is the first panoptic history of the long struggle between the Christian West and Islam.

In this dazzlingly written, acutely nuanced account, Andrew Wheatcroft tracks a deep fault line of animosity between civilizations. He begins with a stunning account of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, then turns to the main zones of conflict: Spain, from which the descendants of the Moors were eventually expelled; the Middle East, where Crusaders and Muslims clashed for years; and the Balkans, where distant memories spurred atrocities even into the twentieth century. Throughout, Wheatcroft delves beneath stereotypes, looking incisively at how images, ideas, language, and technology (from the printing press to the Internet), as well as politics, religion, and conquest, have allowed each side to demonize the other, revive old grievances, and fuel across centuries a seemingly unquenchable enmity. Finally, Wheatcroft tells how this fraught history led to our present maelstrom. We cannot, he argues, come to terms with today’s perplexing animosities without confronting this dark past.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Historian Wheatcroft (The Ottomans) adds another volume to the steadily growing literature on the history of Christian-Muslim relations. Part philosophical treatise, part history and part diatribe, Wheatcroft's study adds little that has not been covered already by more thorough and elegant studies such as F.E. Peters's recent The Monotheists. He offers an overview of the tortured relations between Christianity and Islam in various contexts including the Crusades, Spain, the Middle East and Bosnia. Wheatcroft opens his book with an account of the 1571 battle of Lepanto, where Christians triumphed over the Muslims. Using the theoretical writings of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Stephen Greenblatt, Wheatcroft emphasizes that the conflict between the two religions most often devolved into a war of words in which one side used dehumanizing language to describe the other and to thereby sanction war. He helpfully brings his study into the 21st century by examining briefly the religious rhetoric that President Bush and General William Boykin have used to defend the attack on Iraq and other Muslim nations. Unfortunately, Wheatcroft betrays his own ideological position by referring to Muslim terrorists as a "virus" and by defending the Bush administration's positions on the war, thereby diminishing the value the book might have as an objective description of the conflicts between Christianity and Islam.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* In the roar of skyscrapers collapsing in New York and in the thunder of fusillades in Afghanistan and Iraq, a leading British historian hears echoes of battles fought centuries ago. This timely chronicle amplifies those echoes to show how much ancient animosities pervade the modern conflict between radical Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden and American president George W. Bush. Impelling the Muslim and Christian combatants who crossed swords at Jerusalem and Granada, at Lepanto, Constantinople, and Missolonghi, these ancient hatreds inspired daring innovations in military weaponry and tactics, as well as astonishing enlargements in both faiths' religious demonology. Wheatcroft recounts the clashes of arms--jihad and crusade--in narrative taut and memorable. With rare sophistication, he also traces the perplexing ways religious orthodoxy now reinforced, now checked the political and economic impulses shaping Europe and the Levant. But readers will praise Wheatcroft most for his acute psychological analysis of how Muslim and Christian leaders alike imbued their followers with hostility toward those who adhered to alien creeds. It is this analysis that lends force to the concluding commentary on how President Bush has unwittingly tapped into a very old reservoir of religious enmity with his absolutist rhetoric calling for a "crusade" against the terrorist evil. As a work that interprets today's headlines within a very long chronology, this book will attract a large audience. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Random House; First Edition edition (June 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400062306
• ISBN-13: 978-1400062300
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,304,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Original and confusing, July 19, 2004

By 

César González Rouco (Madrid, Madrid Spain) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (Hardcover)

Andrew Wheatcroft's Infidels examines the bloody faultline between Islam and the West. The scope of his book is ambitious: he starts with a tremendous account of the battle of Lepanto in 1571, but then he forgoes the chronology. There are different sections on Andalucia, the Middle East, the Balkans and the Otto-man Empire.You get a bit about the romance of Moorish Spain and some exotic tales from the Crusades.

Andrew Wheatcroft is especially good on the key question of mutual perceptions. His knowledge of the Western representations of Islam in art and literature is impressive. Atrocities were mutual, and Wheatcroft wants to tell us why certain events were remembered better than others; he wishes to find out how we know what we know about the past. The tale is just that: one of difference and enmity and is clearly intended as the final word on the cultural history of the clash of civilizations. His attempt to short-circuit the 'maledicta', the words of pure hate at the heart of the relationship between Islam and the West, through a greater understanding of the history of mutual repulsion should be applauded.

All that said I had the impression that he wanted to cover too broad an issue in a new way. Certainly, he warns that his aim is not to explain why things happened that way, but how they happen, but in my opinion the very choice of some facts supposedly to be relevant implicitly asks for some kind of explanation that in this work is never openly developped.The final result is somehow confusing.

(Given that nowadays it is so difficult to get an objective, nuanced opinion on Islam, neither flattering nor biased against it, as a way to try and achieve that, I would suggest to read several good books on the matter, among them, the following: "The Venture of Islam", by Marshall G. S. Hodgson -nowadays a classic included in any bibliography on Islam-; "The Turks in World History" by Carter Vaughn Findley; "Muslims in the West: Redefining the Separation of Church & State" by Sami Awad Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh; God's Rule : Government and Islam by Patricia Crone and "Understanding Jihad", by David Cook).

43 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Laughably overwritten and PC, March 16, 2006

By 

David W. Nicholas (Van Nuys, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (Paperback)

This is a book I wanted to like, and so I'm frankly very disappointed with it, and therefore very negative about it. The idea appealed to me: the author proposed to study the conflict between the worlds of Christianity and Islam, and the circumstances, causes, and consequences of that conflict. The idea, while interesting in concept, has been hopefully mangled in execution.

Wheatcroft very transparently has an agenda, and it's apparent from the word go what it is. After an introductory chapter describing the Battle of Lepanto. The famous question "Why do they hate us?" has for Wheatcroft only one answer: "Because we've been horribly unfair to them." This becomes immediately apparent when he jumps across the first four centuries or so of Islamic conquest of much of the Middle East for a favorite subject for Muslim apologists: the Muslim kingdoms in Spain. He spends most of this part of the book describing the Kingdom of Granada, contrasting what he refers to as Christian "perfidy" with Muslim "convivencia", the term used to describe the Kingdom's tolerance of Christians and Jews.

From there, the author turns to the Balkans. He spends considerable time discussing the various collisions between Muslims and Christians in the region, without of course discussing the fact that the Muslims were invading Christian territory. Other parts of the book deal with more modern subjects, the study finally concluding with a discussion of President Bush and his advisors fighting the War on Terror.

One of the more annoying things the author does in this book is what a friend of mine once referred to as putting sand on the scales. Every time he tells you something bad or negative about the Muslim world, he immediately tells you something equivalent that the Christian world did at the same time. It gets a bit tiring, and of course if the book was complete, it wouldn't always work. One damning aspect of this is a specific subject: that of the Janissaries. The Janissaries appear in the book in several places (you can't really write about the Balkans during the Muslim incursions there without mentioning them) but beyond telling you that they're soldiers, the author says nothing. This is probably because of how they were recruited: Christian boys were kidnapped from their parents, raised as Muslims, drafted into the army, and sent to conquer Christians and oppress those in occupied territory. They were very effective at this, and Christians hated the whole practice, but since Wheatcroft can't tell you this and then follow the story with something equivalent that the Christians did to Muslims, he leaves the whole thing out.

By two thirds of the way through the book, the author shifts the focus of the book to a discussion of the words used in the conflict. The author is able, therefore, to avoid the circumstances of the War on Terror (he only very briefly discusses 9/11) and go right to criticising Bush. Strangely, he avoids the usual "Bush is an idiot" criticisms, and instead goes for a more nuanced complaint about the ideas he expresses and the people who surround him. It's still off the mark, I'm afraid: much of the criticism involves a discussion of the fact that the president is a religious man, and apparently religion shouldn't play a part in government decisions. I'm not a religious man myself, much, but this is to my mind a bit of a stretch.

I wanted, as I said, to enjoy this book. I am afraid I found it very tedious, long, and difficult to follow, and I really didn't enjoy much of it, or feel I was informed by it.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Andrew Wheatcroft loves islam., January 14, 2006

By 

Dalton C. Rocha (Fortaleza, CE, Brazil.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (Paperback)

This book has some good things and also some bad things.The first chapter of this book, talking about the battle of Lepanto is amazing.

And after a great begining, the book becames more and more biased, supporting islam.

The base from the believes from Mr. Wheatcroft, is that Islam and Christendom are basically the same.Two religions looking for domination over all the world.Both are rooted in same basic believes, uses and results.

If fact, the treatment of red indians from bible's americans in XIX Century wasn't better than the treatment for christians and jews, under islamic control, at the same time.

But there's another problem.Christendom changed with the time. The bible supports the witch-hunting?Yes, but there's any christian country hunting witches?NO!

The Kuran supports that every muslin who changes his religions, should be killed?Yes.And there's more than 45 islamic countries who exterminate every muslin who changes his religion or to everyone who preaches anyother religion to muslins?YES AGAIN!

Today there's mosques even in Rome.Since VII Century, there's no a single christian church or sinagogue in Arabia.Muhammad itself ordered the demolition of all of then.And is a capital crime (death penalty)to open any church, sinagogue,etc. in more than 50 muslin countries in the world.

Bible and Kuran are supporters of slavery, ignorance, bigotry,etc. The diference is that bible isn't law in the USA, Brazil, Europe,etc.And Kuran is the law, in more then 50 muslins countries.All of then third world countries.

In one of the last chapters of this book ("Maledicta"), Mr. Wheatcroft compares one islamic first-minister Mahathir and an american general.The comparasion is again, a fake.The american general was behind military obedience.And Mahathir was the leader of an important asian country.

Mr. Andrew Wheatcroft loves Islam and Morroco's tea.This book isn't the best answer to someone looking for to see, the real things about the war between Islam and Christendom.The best option is "Jihad in the west", from Paul Fregosi, available here, in Amazon.It's more expensive and bigger, than this book.

But if you read "Jihad in the west", you will see the true.