Ian Almond

I want to commend this book. Ian Almond has written before about the place of Islam in European consciousness, and this book takes five episodes from European history - from medieval Spain and Southern Italy, from Asia Minor in the period just before the collapse of Byzantium, from early modern Central Europe, and from the c19th Crimea - and explores the porous edges of the rhetoric of 'Christendom' in those places and times where cultural and geographical boundaries have been in dispute: mindful of the alarming heightening of a polarising rhetoric of 'Islam' against 'the West' in the world today, Ian Almond writes convincingly of the ways in which, down on planet earth where real people exist, these tensions have been far from simple 'clashes of civilisations'; in each instance, or set of instances, Christians and Moslems have sided with each other quite as often as they have sided against each other; in particular the battlegrounds have on both sides consistently contained warriors from both cultures and religions alongside each other.
So this is not a book which tries to claim that there has not been conflict; nor does Almond try to claim that the rhetorical account of conflict has not tended to abstract an ideology of Christendom often under threat: but what I think he does show, clearly, is that this account is precisely 'abstract' and has not reflected human actuality on the ground, where things have always been much more nuanced and fluid than the ideologues allow.
This is not a complete history of Europe's southern and south-eastern borders; it is not a comprehensive analysis of the relationship on these borders between Christianity and Islam, nor between Christians and Moslems; but in a generation in which histrionics risk amplifying religious division, this modest book of modest scope appeals, instead, for something like human graciousness in the conflict zones and in our description of them. In that respect it strikes me in some ways as not entirely unlike William Dalrymple's 'From the Holy Mountain', with which it shares an intelligent and humane gentleness which many of us hope will be heeded.… (plus d'informations)