CHAPTER 38 Islam Both foreign and integral to Europe JOHN TOLAN Although the subject of Islam now provokes impassioned debates, Europeans are familiar with its religion and culture, which were brought to the continent through the Arab conquests of 711 CE and have been explored and studied here ever since. In the Middle Ages, Islam was regarded as a rival, and therefore dangerous monotheistic faith whose founder was a false prophet. Conversely, it was a focus of fascination in the Age of Enlightenment – indeed, Napoleon was described by Goethe as a ‘new Mahomet’. In 1916, Belgian historian Henri Pirenne was placed in a detention camp by the German military forces of occupation. In captivity, as Europe was torn asunder in the Great War, he reflected on the birth of Europe, which he placed not in classical Greece or Rome but much closer to home, in the Carolingian heartlands that straddled what were now Germany, France and the Low Countries. And the midwife of that birth, so to speak, the outside factor that made it possible, was Islam. By turning the Roman Mediterranean into a Muslim lake, by cutting Northern Europe off from commerce with the East and South, the Islamic conquests provoked the foundation of a new civilization based in Northern Europe. As he subsequently wrote in 1922: ‘Sans l’Islam, l’Empire franc n’aurait sans doute jamais exist é, et Charlemagne, sans Mahomet, serait inconcevable.’ Over the past century, Pirenne’s thesis has been critiqued, nuanced and revised: he had exaggerated the importance of trade between Northern Europe and the pre-Islamic Eastern Mediterranean and underestimated the continued links between Latin Europe and the Muslim Mediterranean world. For some of these historians, Medieval European history is on the contrary a story of the gradual inclusion of Latin Europe into the wider oecumene centred around the Near East and the Mediterranean, facilitated by the trading of Italian merchants in the Levantine ports, by scholars who translated and transmitted Arabic learning to the Latin world, by princes, Muslim and Christian, who imposed their rule on mixed populations of Jews, Christians and Muslims. Europe became Europe, it seems, in partnership with and in opposition to Islam, conceived both as an ‘Abrahamic’ religion close to and rival of Christianity and as a civilization that could allure and repulse those Europeans who contemplated from Collective Memory in Europe Vol 1.indb 291 27-04-2021 19:09:22