Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery by Ber
The relations of Christians, Jews, and Muslims around the Mediterranean were tumultuous for centuries, and still have consequences (in the Balkans, for instance) that we need to understand if we are to cope with politics and conflict today. In the book Cultures in Conflict. Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery by Bernard Lewis, those relations are examined to reveal the relative position of each and the eventual decline of one to give rise to another. Lewis first examines the way Christians and Muslims looked at one another. Despite their mutual hostility, they understood each other's views rather well. Medieval Christians largely dismissed Muslim theology as post-Gospel heresy; but the Muslims themselves were regarded as serious social and military challengers. By contrast, a still primitive Christendom looked to sophisticated Muslims "rather as Central Asia or Africa appeared to Victorian Englishmen? (pp. 13). However, despite their knowledge of one another (or perhaps because of it), the Christian world was imbedded in a deep conflict with the Islamic and Jewish worlds. The Christian conflict with the Islamic world was, according to Lewis, the result of a rivalry based on three motives: faith, greed, a
The relative positions of Islam and Christendom in 1400 were those of conflict and missionary expansionism. By sharing these positions, they engaged in a religious war of global proportions. After a sympathetic treatment of all three faiths, he comes down squarely in favor of Western culture: "In setting out to conquer, subjugate, and despoil other peoples, the Europeans were merely following the example set them by their neighbors and predecessors and, indeed, conforming to the common practice of mankind? (pp 73). But after asserting this and describing Christianity as, until 1492, an essentially European faith, he goes on to describe how the "vast majority" of Muslim converts in the Middle East, North Africa, Spain, and Sicily came from Christianity. These were days of heightened religious awareness when Christendom saw itself as being threatened by heretics on their own turf. This I agree with completely but in the end he reveals his Western bias. This is all the more puzzling since he rightly points out that the Crusades would be better understood as a kind of reconquista. They were also neighbors and unarmed unlike the Muslims so the conflict between the Christian and Jewish worlds is more than obvious. Printing was yet another catalyst in the rise of Christendom. Eventually, the religious war between the feuding worlds drew to somewhat of a closure. The threat was instead a religious one. From the Islamic point of view, the conflict was entrenched the awareness that Christians were not merely barbarians, but a real threat due to the similarities in ideas and in equal drives of missionary expansionism. The Christian world was in conflict with the Jewish establishment for much the same reasons.
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Acceptance Essays
