This is a concise, clear, well-researched overview of an immensely complex and important topic. Maurits Berger brings a decidedly contemporary European perspective to the question of how “Islam” has manifested itself on European soil throughout the ages, and how such manifestations have had both a real and imaginary impact on the present. Acknowledging the inevitable pitfalls and oversimplifications of such an undertaking, Berger has nevertheless performed a valuable service for educators, policy-makers and nonspecialist historical researchers. His book helpfully situates modern experience in its proper historical context, and, if widely read, could elevate significantly the tone and utility of current debates over integration and the accommodation of Muslim communities living in minority contexts.
The book is divided into five chapters, following traditional historiographical periodization from the early Middle Ages (“Uncivilized Europe”) to the present (“Struggling Europe”). Each of these chronological sections is further split into two analytic categories: “Physical Islam” and “Virtual Islam.” This allows for an important distinction, since neither the actual presence of Muslim-identified populations (in Spain and the East, above all), nor their varied interactions with non-Muslim neighbors (e.g., conflict, trade, etc.), have had much of a direct relationship to how Europeans came to understand and perceive the religion of Islam itself over time.
Two parallel (if, at times, intertwined) histories thus form the core of the book. In the first, practitioners of the Islamic faith shift from minority to majority status (and back again, in some regions) amid the drama of war and high politics, as well as more mundane cycles of daily life—all of which may or may not have had anything to do with their religious identity. Berger is laudably clear in understanding that people who find themselves organized into “Muslim” communities exist as human beings above all, and that their actions should not always be attributed to religious (or cultural) motives. Emblematic events such as the Ottoman sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683, for example, were indeed carried out by Muslims and even justified in militantly “Islamic” terms. But they were also executed by political actors working within specific diplomatic and economic contexts, which here included long-term alliances between the Ottoman sultan and the Christian king of France. Berger's coverage is extensive, discussing episodes of persecution, piracy, and enslavement (practiced by Christians and Muslims alike in premodern times), as well as more pacific exchanges of goods and ideas over the centuries. The reader is left with a sense that Muslim life in Europe, for all its particularities, tended to differ little from that of other groups that occupied comparable socio-economic and political positions.
Appearances, beliefs, and myths nevertheless do matter. Berger is careful to acknowledge that seemingly minor historical events—like a failed raid at Poitiers in 732—can be assigned tremendous significance when they serve to tie into and illustrate larger narrative or ideological claims. Islam, he argues, has for centuries occupied a unique place in European collective memory as the imagined “Other” par excellence, a hostile and inassimilable inversion of European identity and values. From medieval theological condemnations to early modern geopolitical anxieties, as well as to modern Islamophobic outbursts, Berger therefore traces Islam's tendency to loom larger in the European psyche than its potential to pose an actual threat could ever justify.
The evolution of Christian theological and scholarly Orientalist research on Islam is duly addressed in sections on “Virtual Islam,” as are popular stereotypes and the passing aesthetic fad of Turquerie. But it is ultimately the more recent phenomenon of modern Islamophobia that Berger seems most eager to explore. Its shadow lurks throughout the text, though analysis is, for the most part, left to a final chapter and epilogue. The author is clearly sympathetic to those who, like Richard Bulliet (The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization [2006]), see Muslim peoples as constituting a relatively normal and unthreatening segment of the Western world, and indeed of Europe itself throughout much of its history—as opposed to others, who see that same history as a long stretch of more or less permanent conflict and antagonism (Bernard Lewis is presented as representative of the latter group). Yet, in his concern to address the anxieties of contemporary European Islamophobes, Berger falls at times prey to their rhetorical assumptions and exaggerations: hence an arguably excessive focus on the potential “security threat” posed by modern European Muslims, as well as the notion that unchecked growth in Europe's Muslim population is “ominous” (199). Berger's perspective may be colored by his professional work, which includes briefings to security agencies. But if he is correct that the majority of Europeans have such a frankly negative impression of Islam, then this is indeed cause for concern.
When specialists examine “Islam in Europe,” their frame is usually reduced to a single region or historical period. Berger's original contribution is thus his telling of a complete story, from start to finish, with consideration not only of Muslim Spain and the Balkans but also of how areas that never experienced significant influxes of Muslim settlement until modern times—such as Sweden, Holland, or Germany—were still aware of and responsive to Islam and the Muslim world. Polish, Lithuanian, and Austro-Hungarian experiences with, and legal accommodations for, Muslim minorities provide further scope for comparison and reflection on the normativity of Islamic presence in European history.
Such a wide-ranging book is necessarily dependent, to a large degree, on secondary scholarship. This is well deployed and accurately summarized, for the most part, though some sections seem, based on the bibliography, to rely on a small number of less-than-current sources. This results in no serious deficiencies, however, and the book as a whole remains exceptionally useful for introductory purposes.
