Author:Richard Fletcher
A short, brilliant account of the relations between Islam and Christianity from Muhammad to the Reformation. Fletcher argues that though there were trading and cultural interactions between Islam and Christianity during the period when Arabs controlled most of the Mediterranean world, neither side was remotely interested in the religion of the other. "Christian and Moslem lived side by side in a state of mutual religious aversion. Given these circumstances, if religious passions were to be stirred up, confrontation would probably be violent." He shows how religious misunderstanding and antagonism between "the peoples of the book" has been present since their earliest encounters.
His delightful ingénue receptivity amused and won the trust of elderly, dispossessed aristocrats, whose lives had been spent in quietest retreat from brutish nationalism and cultural pauperization. His delicious memoir admires their fortitude, evokes their dignified isolation with elegiac tenderness, and shows him to be a connoisseur of human types. Bassett's perfect observations haunted, charmed and inspired me.
—— Richard Davenport-Hines , Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year[Gottlieb] writes with fluency and lucidity, with a gift for making even difficult matters seem comprehensible.
—— Richard Jenkins , New York TimesGottlieb is as enjoyable as he is intellectually stimulating.
—— Robert Conquest , Los Angeles TimesHe draws crowds that no other spiritual leader or politician could hope to match...he seems to look at life in a different way to everyone else
—— The Times
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