One-Note History

With the depressing post-9/11 climate of extremist and xenophobic posturing currently dominating international affairs, any attempt to deal with the history of Muslim-Christian relations must surely be a hazardous undertaking. Prior efforts have tended to vacillate between finding some irreconcilable unchanging “essence” in either or both societies (with Islam usually appearing the worse) and arguing that the whole conflict is some sort of lamentable cultural misunderstanding. Alan Jamieson’s present work, Faith and the Sword: A Short History of Christian-Muslim Conflict, does its best to evade either approach, but in so doing it completely fails in its back cover’s claim of “revealing the essence of this enduring struggle.” Despite a dramatic opening and a cautious introduction, the book neglects to meaningfully examine the central question of causality. It never really ventures beyond a selected chronology of battles and wars between some western...