Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [205]
Ultimately the real hope for a better future is, in Maier’s words, this process of “hearing the whole together with the parts.” The power of the word might, at first sight, seem much less reliable than relying on overwhelming military power, which Frum and Perle assure us is our best hope. Of course, might is always right on the battlefield. But as every empire has learned, over years and, ultimately, decades, exercising that kind of military effort in the long term carries an insupportable price, in both human and economic terms. Sustaining a long war often demands a reversion to maledicta—to the language of “crusade” and “evil”—and the attitudes that belong to it. But reviving the past comes at a cost: an ideology based on these atavistic responses will fail; and worse, in failing, may even slowly unravel the last two centuries of the West’s social, cultural, and spiritual development.
Notes on the Text
Note: Unpublished Spanish sources are referred to as Document, with a number, and are listed in full at the beginning of the Sources and Select Bibliography. For published works cited here in a shortened form only, the complete bibliographic details appear in the Select Bibliography. Other published sources appear here in full, and not in the Select Bibliography.
PREFACE
1. And of course, we do not have Urban’s precise words, but only the memory of them through a number of different writers.
2. This is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement in the preface to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), that “what can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” But this translation does not really capture the resonance of the original (“Was sich überhaupt sagen lässt, lässt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen”).
3. See Lance St. John Butler, Registering the Difference: Reading Literature Through Register, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
4. Iliad, bk. I, l. 201.
5. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, London: Pan Books, 1979, pp. 144–5.
Part One
CHAPTER 1: “WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD”: LEPANTO, 1571
1. Twenty-four feet long by thirteen feet wide.
2. Cited in Rodgers, Naval Warfare, p. 179.
3. Although the French were not present, popular emotions in France seem to have been with the forces of the Holy League. In the Protestant states, sentiment likewise seems to have been united with the arms of Catholic Europe.
4. “Christendom” and “Islam” are both complex terms, which many theorists might (appropriately) term “discourses.” I have certainly used “Christendom” in this way, not just as a term meaning a monolithic Christian society, which never existed after the early days of the faith, but rather to describe cultures derived from a long history of Christian belief. Islam is not exactly a comparator of Christendom in its structures, but we have no single word in English to encompass that discourse either. The phrase Dar ul-Islam has been variously translated as the abode, house, or Domain of Faith, Righteousness, or Peace. The basic point is that for a sincere and committed Muslim all that is good and necessary exists within the world of Islam, while all outside is of a lower order. But what is outside can often be brought inside and rendered good. On these topics see Hentsch, Imagining.
5. They escaped, by this papal decree, 200 years of purgatory.
6. The banner, which was long kept as a trophy in Spain, was destroyed by fire in the nineteenth century.
7. Ali had formerly been second in command to Piali Pasha.
8. Genesis 4:14. The traditional explanation, that the Arabs descended from Ishmael, the elder son of Abraham, and his concubine Hagar, elided with the legend of Cain, also the elder son and also cast out. For the instability and mutability of these legends of origin, see Freedman, Images, pp. 89–96.
9. The leader of the poor warriors of the First Crusade, the king of the Tafurs, called Muslims “sons of whores and of the race of Cain”; see Cohn,