Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe, by Daniel G. König

Extract

While we have a substantial body of scholarship on medieval European views of the Muslim-governed territories and Islam, the opposite perspective has been hardly analysed yet. This is partly down to a stance best embodied by Bernard Lewis’s oeuvre, which assumed that authors writing in Arabic (or other Islamicate languages) simply had no interest, or at best a negligible interest, in the northern shores of the Mediterranean. This paradigm has been increasingly cracking over recent years, and first publications have shown its weak empirical basis (most importantly, Nizar F. Hermes, The (European) Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture, [2012]). The splendid book under review, by Daniel G. König, is the decisive turning-point in the field and forcefully lays to rest any notion that the Latin West remained a blank space in Arabic-Islamic writings. Most importantly, it moves away from essentialist notions of the ‘Muslim’ mentality/world view as the determining factor, and brings into focus a variety of much more specific variables that influenced what authors had to say about lands in the Latin West and how they said it. While their writings repeatedly represented these lands and their inhabitants as caricatures, this was not necessarily down to religious or ideological reasons—many scholars had, for instance, no qualms about using non-Muslim sources.