Saracens

When Muslim armies took over most of the former Christian Roman lands between Syria and Spain within a century of Islam's founding, medieval Christians faced a puzzle. Many were dazzled by Muslim wealth and learning, yet they were unsettled by Islam's competing claim to Abraham and Jesus, and by the lower status it imposed on non-Muslims. Responses varied: some converted, some fought, and others wrote.

John Tolan's study follows the writers who set out to attack Islam, and its most striking figure, the saracen, through polemic. Faced with the apparent withdrawal of God's favor from Christendom as Muslim civilization grew, these authors bent Islamic doctrine out of shape and reduced Muslims to crude caricatures. The book asks what ideological work these portraits performed, and it also considers how Muslims saw Christianity. Rivalry, scorn, and a sense of superiority ran in both directions, sometimes mixed with doubt, curiosity, or admiration.

Tolan traces how Christian attitudes shifted from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, across periods of crusading zeal and painful military reverses, and how those attitudes hardened into stock images that Western writers drew on from the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries. The work pays close attention to how contempt for an outsider can be used to shore up one's own understanding of the world.