Bishop's Book Review
Sea of Faith
Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World
By Stephen O’Shea
Walker & Co., 2006) 411 pages
For a thousand years, the Mediterranean Sea would be the epicenter of the military struggle between Islam and Christianity. In Stephen O’Shea’s history “Sea of Faith” the great battles that surrounded the Mediterranean from 636 to 1565, pitting Muslims and Christians, are magnificently detailed. Even to one who has studied and read some Medieval history, there is much new information shared. In fact, each battle chronicled reads more like a novel than a dull historical narrative.
Traveling around the Mediterranean in the writing of this book, O’Shea talks of modern Berber children playing on the same ground that crusaders and jihadists massacred each other. He shares the connection between Islamic Spain and western civilization while discussing the lives of the modern secularized European Christian and North African Muslim.
Islam, as a military force, blasted out of the Arabian peninsula in the Seventh century armed with its five pillars: profession of faith in the One God, ritual prayer, alms giving, fasting and pilgrimage. After its sweep and destruction of much of Mideastern and North African Christianity, the forces of the Latin West answered the new religion’s armies with armed forces of their own. Crusade after crusade of European knights and soldiers from as far away as England, with mixed success, would raid and pillage Muslim society in modern Spain, Italy, the Balkans, Palestine and into Syria. Establishing the Crusader Kingdoms in Jerusalem and in other places, the Christians of the West would also battle their Greek Byzantine co-religionists visiting terror on Muslim, Eastern Orthodox and heretic alike. It was a terrible time of slaughter, reprisal and general disaster.
In that context of ruin and triumph, O’Shea discusses another great theme of the interaction of Islam and Christianity in the millennium. It was “convivencia” or a time of coexistence and comingling of cultures. Most famously in Spain when the Muslims were in charge, and to some degree, in Palestine when the Crusader Christians ruled, there existed a rich symbiotic relationship between Muslim and Christian. The Muslims, by and large, also practiced this “live and let live” reality with Jews and other religious groups. And on some occasions, Christian rulers would allow “infidels” freedom in their midst.
As I reflect on this book, I am struck by the success of both Islam and Christianity to develop huge military forces and to marshal their civilizations’ economies and cultures to devastating ends. Both religions would claim divine approval of their cause. The sad reality is that both religions would claim God’s approval for even their most horrific excesses of mayhem and destruction. This book also reminded me there were many decades of peaceful relationships between religions and their individual adherents. Those who say that in the 21st century Mideast there has always been war, just do not realize that there have been times over the centuries when Muslim, Jew and Christian lived together in relative harmony, if not outright peace.
What is also helpful in this book is O’Shea’s one hundred pages of maps, indexes, glossaries and notes. In some ways, this book is not for the faint of heart; it is often grisly reading. However, the author points to a time in our Western past when civilizations battled each other to near extinction. The question for our time, and indeed the question for any time, is what we, as a people, learn from our history.
+Thomas A. Skrenes, Bishop