Scribner's Review: Sword and Scimitar, by Raymond Ibrahim

 

Sword and Scimitar by Raymond Ibrahim is a fast read, but it is very light on the research that backs the text. It does make use of legitimate secondary scholastic sources, such as Islam and Dhimmitude by Bat Ye'or (good book, for those who want to know more about specific aspects of Islamic society), but it suffers from the very modern tendency to reduce the on-again, off-again struggle between Christendom and the Dar-al Islam (Realm of Islam) as one singular, endless war equivalent to the Cold War (which in fact is/was much closer to being a struggle between two powerful states and their supranational spheres of influence), and makes some glaring, if not intentional, fallacies in the general story of Christian-Muslim interactions. 

A good enough map, but the parts conquered by Islamic polities in Eastern Europe are not totally accurate. For one thing, the Crimea and the Caucasus should be light gray, being territories once controlled by Islam but later seized by Christian powers.

For one thing, Roman success was not genetic, and there is no way that the Roman/Byzantine defeat at Yarmouk in 636 AD was an unusual, mysteriously disastrous defeat. If one understands the incredibly lengthy, sometimes contestable history of Rome, one realizes that Roman endured its fair share of significant defeats, some of them crippling: Brennus's sack of Rome, Pyrrhus's famously empty victories, Cannae, Carrhae, Teutoberg Forest, the unending thorn of Parthian/Sassanian humiliations (including the capture and presumable execution of Valerian by the Sassanid king Shapur II), the whole Miltary Anarchy/Third Century Crisis, Adrianople, the highly disastrous and destructive Gothic War, and the even more disastrous and destructive Final Roman-Persian War of 602-628 (which Ibrahim mentions, but does not reference the mass destruction involved). Those all indicate that Rome was never a singular and unstoppable being. Raymond also makes the same mistakes about the Islamic world that any other historian, left or right, would make. The Dar-al-Islam was never a consistently united realm as much as Christendom was, but Raymond hardly mentions the profound ramifications of the fitnas, or the major political crises that tor apart the Abbasid Caliphate in their very heartland, the Zanj Rebellion and the Anarchy of Samarra. 

Understanding that Christendom was never a homogenous supranational organization is crucial to any in-depth analysis of the Christo-Muslim interactions, especially regarding the Crusades. For one thing, the Byzantines were never fond of the western Crusaders, and as The Alexiad attests to, Emperor Alexios I saw the Normans, led by Robert Guiscard and Bohemond, as barbarous marauders. Sadly to say, Raymond only seems to care how impressed Anna Komnena was by Bohemond big brawny stature, and not his greedy wanderlust that he shared with his fellow Normans. <a href="https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/sbook1k.asp">There are plenty of other accounts on the First Crusade, many of them written by western Christians themselves, that tell of the hostility they faced from the Christian states they passed through,< /a> but those go unacknowledged in favor of a more generic "good vs evil" narrative. When he later mentions about the great European powers' interest in the ailing Ottoman Empire during the 19th century, he seems to think that Tsarist Russia, in the typical modern alternative interpretation of it as a "Theocratic Paradise", was acting saintly compared to the British and the French, who provided aid to the Ottomans to counter a Russian invasion. This in fact did not have as much to do with religion as with the French and British desires to carve up the Sick Man of Europe to enrich their own pockets (which they indeed carved up the Ottoman Empire after WWI). Those three great European powers, all Christian at the time, had their own vested interests. To be fair, Raymond did mention about this, but he also assumes that it all had to do with secularization (which he never explicitly explains how this had to do with schisms). It is true that the first significant attempt at state-sponsored secularization happened in Catholic France during the French Revolution, but even states with different religious beliefs often fight each other because, people are selfish and greedy. Had he mentioned something like the Fatimid-Abbasid rivalry, the breakup of the Abbasid Caliphate into dozens of smaller states, and the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry, it would make the book have less shaky foundations. 

Sword and Scimitar by Raymond Ibrahim is a sometimes fun, fast-paced light historical read that might not be legitimate scholastic material, it is at least worth investing time into during a rainy day. 

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