Arabic-Islamic views of the Latin West : tracing the emergence of medieval Europe

Abstract

The study explains how Arabic-Islamic scholars, i.e. Muslim scholars writing in Arabic, portrayed medieval Western or ‘Latin-Christian’ Europe between the seventh and the early fifteenth century. At the end of the period of investigation, Western Europe had not only emerged as a dynamic sphere at the brink of becoming active on a global scale, but also as a discernible though roughly defined and multiple phenomenon in Arabic-Islamic sources. Tracing this double process is the main objective of the present study. Chapter 1 questions previous interpretations of related Arabic-Islamic records that reduce a large and differentiated range of Arabic-Islamic perceptions to a single basic pattern subsumed under the keywords ‘ignorance’, ‘indifference’, and ‘arrogance’. Chapter 2 lists channels of transmission by means of which information on the Latin-Christian sphere reached the Arabic-Islamic sphere. Chapter 3 deals with the general factors that influenced the reception and presentation of this data at the hands of Arabic-Islamic scholars. Chapters 4 to 8 analyse how these scholars acquired and dealt with information on certain themes, i.e. the western dimension of the Roman Empire, the Visigoths and the Franks, the papacy and, finally, Western Europe in the age of Latin-Christian expansionism. Against this background, Chapter 9 provides a concluding re-evaluation.