Europe and the Islamic World: A History by John Tolan Gilles Veinstein & Henry Laurens

Author:John Tolan, Gilles Veinstein & Henry Laurens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

PART III

Europe and the Muslim World in the Contemporary Period

by

Henry Laurens

INTRODUCTION TO PART III

EUROPE AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD have a long, shared past. The very concepts “Europe” and “Islamic world” assumed meaning only in their opposition to each other. The conquests during the first Muslim centuries put an end to the Mediterranean unity inherited from the Roman Empire, creating a new geographical reality, and the first occurrence of the term “Europe” to name that reality appeared in reference to the Battle of Poitiers in 732. Of course, Europe had other borders, such as those with paganism, then with Orthodoxy, where the front lines of conversion, running from the Balkans to the Baltic, converged. In the same way, the “House of Islam” rapidly reached the conflictual borders of the Chinese and Indian worlds and their cultures, not to mention its first slow advance into sub-Saharan Africa. But because of its proximity to the vital cultural, religious, and political centers of the two worlds, the Mediterranean border has always been the most important.

From the seventh century to the eighteenth century, multiple military conflicts and exchanges were the rule. For centuries, vast territorial advances by one camp corresponded to the retreat of the other, back and forth in a zero-sum game. Geopolitics imposed its rules with its hybrid alliances, France with the Ottoman Empire, the House of Austria with the Persian Empire of the Safavids. The material culture represented by commerce in raw materials and manufactured goods constantly crossed borders. Large portions of the culture of antiquity, having been reworked by that of classical Islam, returned to Europe. Technological exchanges were a permanent part of the Mediterranean space, as attested by the many traces left in the linguistic vocabulary of the two worlds.

And yet the great rift took place in the second half of the eighteenth century.

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