Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe by Daniel G. König (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 464 pages.)

Abstract

Interactions between Latin Europeans and the Islamic world during the medieval
period have received great attention in numerous scholarly studies. The
focus of such works often consists of an attempt to delineate the construction
of identities and the extent to which they were utilized to mark out an “other.”
By contrast, one of König’s most important conclusions demonstrates that for
medieval Arab-Islamic scholars writing about the Latin West, these Latin Christian
societies “were often simply regarded as alternative manifestations of
human life and its social and political organisation” (pp. 327-28).
This is primarily a historiographical investigation with a macro-historical
approach. König analyzes material spanning the early Islamic period (the seventh
century) to the later medieval period (the fifteenth century) and covers a
range of genres. It could be said that such an approach fails to critically analyze
the motivations of individual Muslim authors, something that the author does
acknowledge in his preface. However, such analyses lie beyond the scope of
the project at hand. Furthermore, a macro-historical approach is necessary for
challenging previous scholarship on the subject. Bernard Lewis asserted that
the Latin West was perceived as a united barbaric monolith, one viewed at best
with disinterest in the minds of Muslim writers – a view that continues to influence
scholarship to this day ...