Saracens - Islam in the Medieval European Imagination

Erscheinungsjahr 2002
ISBN: 978-0-231-12332-7
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 400 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 660 g

In the first century of Islam, most of the former Christian Roman Empire, from Syria to Spain, was brought under Muslim control in a conquest of unprecedented proportions. Confronted by the world of Islam, countless medieval Christians experienced a profound ambivalence, awed by its opulence, they were also troubled by its rival claims to the spiritual inheritance of Abraham and Jesus and humiliated by its social subjugation of non-Muslim minorities. Some converted. Others took up arms. Still others, the subjects of John Tolan's study of anti-Muslim polemics in medieval Europe, undertook to attack Islam and its most vivid avatar, the saracen, with words.

In an effort to make sense of God's apparent abandonment of Christendom in favor of a dynamic and expanding Muslim civilization, European writers distorted the teachings of Islam and caricatured its believers in a variety of ways. What ideological purposes did these portrayals serve? And how, in turn, did Muslims view Christianity? Feelings of rivalry, contempt, and superiority existed on both sides, tinged or tempered at times with feelings of doubt, inferiority, curiosity, or admiration. Tolan shows how Christian responses to Islam changed from the seventh to thirteenth centuries, through fast-charging crusades and spirit-crushing defeats, crystallizing into polemical images later drawn upon by Western authors in the fourteenth to twentieth centuries. Saracens explores the social and ideological uses of contempt, explaining how the denigration of the other can be used to defend one's own intellectual construction of the world.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tolan, John

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Dialog & Beziehungen zwischen Religionen
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Systematische Theologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Islam & Islamische Studien Islam & Islamische Studien

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Riccoldo's Predicament or, How to Explain Away the Successes of a Flourishing Rival CivilizationPart 1: Foundations (Seventh--Eighth Centuries) 1: God and History in the Christian West c. 6002: Islamic Dominion and the Religious Other3: Early Eastern Christian Reactions to IslamPart 2: Forging Polemical Images (Eighth Twelfth Centuries) 4: Western Christian Responses to Islam (Eighth Ninth Centuries)5: Saracens as Pagans6: Muhammad, Heresiarch (Twelfth Century)Part 3: Thirteenth-Century Dreams of Conquest and Conversion 7: The Muslim in the Ideologies of Thirteenth-Century Christian Spain8: Apocalyptic Fears and Hopes Inspired by the Thirteenth-Century Crusades9: Franciscan Missionaries Seeking the Martyr's Palm10: The Dominican Missionary Strategy11: From Verdant Grove to Dark Prison: Realms of Mission in Ramon Llull

Über Autor(innen)

John V. Tolan is Maître de Conférences en histoire medievale, Department d'histoire, Université de Nantes. He is the author of Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers and editor of Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam: A Collection of Essays.