The acrimonious conflicts characterizing the relationship between the West and the Middle East especially since the 9/11 terror attacks lead suggest that Westerners and the mainly Muslim peoples of the Middle East are trapped in an unavoidably adversarial position. It was not always so, however, and as Benson Bobrick argues in The Caliph’s Splendor: Islam and the West in the Golden Age of Baghdad, despite religious, cultural and social differences, Islam and the West enjoyed positive relations during the apogee of Islam’s political dynamism in the 7th-11th centuries AD. Focusing on the reign of Haroun Al-Rashid (r. 786-809), the celebrated Caliph of the “Arabian Nights,” Bobrick’s book is an excellent summary of the first 450 years of Western-Islamic relations, from the inception of Islam as a new faith in 630s AD to the first Crusade of 1095.
The origin, development and expansion of Islam in the mid-seventh century AD rapidly transformed the European and Near Eastern landscapes. After the ancient Zoroastrian Persian Empire disintegrated under Islam’s onslaught, and the Christian Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire was reduced to defending its core territories of the Balkans and Anatolia, the Muslim tide spread as far as southern France before being halted by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 713 AD. The rule of Islam on conquered peoples was often light and religiously tolerant, especially for protected “Peoples of the Book” (i.e. Jews and Christians), and under the reigns of the first Abbasid Caliphs in their glittering new “round city” of Baghdad, the Islamic Caliphate became a thriving center of trade, culture and philosophy, a “Wonder of the World.” Indeed, many classical Greek and Roman works of philosophy, science and mathematics were preserved in the Arabic libraries of Spain, Egypt and Baghdad, and much further advancement in these fields was achieved by Islamic scholars. Though there were sporadic conflicts between the Caliphate and the Byzantines and Western powers during the 8th-11th centuries AD, Bobrick focuses his text on the remarkable relationship between contemporaries Caliph Haroun Al-Rashid, who governed an empire stretching from Tripoli to India, and the ‘Holy Roman Emperor’ Charlemagne, whose empire, by AD 800, extended from Barcelona to Munich and from Paris to Naples. Though Charlemagne’s domain was little more than a crude wilderness of forests and villages relative to the large cities and irrigated fields of the Near East, Caliph and Frankish Emperor nevertheless shared many similar qualities and frequently sent embassies to one another bearing rich gifts from their respective lands. They even negotiated safe passage for Christian pilgrims to the holy sites in Jerusalem, a treaty that would last over two hundred years until the declining fortunes of the Caliphate in the late 11th century AD allowed more militaristic factions in Islam, notably the Seljuk Turks, to not only reenergize Islamic expansion, but also to inadvertently created the theological justification for the crusades in the now-rapidly developing West.
Dr. Bobrick, a veteran historian, uses the wealth of historical information surprisingly available about these “Dark Ages” to bring the world of Haroun and Charlemagne to life, painting compelling portraits of these two titans of the Early Middle Ages. The exploration of the personal relationships between Haroun and his family is a special strength of the book. Though what Bobrick presents is not particularly new or fresh research, it is a stellar and masterful summary and introduction to an oft-overlooked time of fruitful relationships between Christian West and Islamic East.
Rating: *****