But it is true that while Muslims established fruitful relations with Mongols, Greeks and Hindus, they remained utterly uninterested in the west. The great 14th-century traveller Ibn Battutah journeyed all over the known world, but never visited Europe. His contemporary, Ibn Khaldun, a historian and faylasuf (philosopher), dismisses the rumour that philosophy and science were developing in western Christendom: “God knows best what goes on in those parts.” Why this indifference? It springs, I believe, not from an inherent flaw in “one-text” Islam, but from the kind of superiority that, until recently, caused western people to dismiss Islam with such patrician disdain. In the early 16th century, when Fletcher ends his account, the Ottoman empire was probably the most advanced state in the world, and had no way of knowing that Europe, which had for so long been a backward region, was about to develop a civilisation that was entirely without precedent in world history, and which would have a catastrophic effect on the Muslim world.
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Also this part:
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He calmly and effectively disposes of the popular myth that Islam is an inherently violent and intolerant faith, while at the same time showing that Christians could not be expected to see it in any other way. He shows clearly that far from forcing their subjects to accept their religion at sword-point, Muslim rulers did not initially encourage conversion. There seems to have been much “good-mannered discussion” between Christians and Muslims in the Middle East, where, after centuries of Byzantine oppression, many of the churches flourished as never before.
But in other parts of Christendom, Islam was experienced as a military threat. Constantinople was constantly under attack until, in 762, the Abbasids moved their capital from Damascus to Baghdad, and ceased to harass Byzantium. In north Africa, west of Egypt, the Islamic conquest was more disruptive: Christian leaders seem to have migrated to Italy or France, and churches in the Muslim wild west, which had fewer intellectual resources, gradually died away. Freelance Muslim pirates constantly assailed Italy, and even in Spain, where Muslims, Christians and Jews eventually managed to live together successfully, there was tension in the early days of Muslim occupation.
Nevertheless, as Fletcher shows, there were many fruitful contacts between Muslims and Christians in the Mediterranean region. They traded with one another and shared such technological advances as the invention of the abacus and the production of paper. In the Middle East, Christians played a crucial role in the translation of Greek philosophical, scientific and medical texts into Arabic during the 8th and 9th centuries. Yet Muslims and Christians showed little interest in one another’s religion. Christians contemplated Islam with sullen hostility, while Muslims regarded the Christian faith with disdain.
Source | Karen Armstrong reviewing Fletcher’s book for Guardian
