Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [3]
I am especially grateful to my editor, Eleo Gordon, on two particular grounds. First, she accepted that, while delivery kept on slipping, I was in fact working hard on the book. Second, as with my two previous books for Viking, every editorial suggestion she has made has been delivered with such tact that it was easy to accept. And in every case, her judgment has been incisive and absolutely right. I am especially grateful, too, for Elisabeth Merriman’s patient and painstaking editing of the text. Her suggestions for rephrasing, clarification, or additions have almost invariably been an improvement; I have adopted them readily and with gratitude.
The final part of the book is different in this edition from the text I completed in the summer of 2002. Connecting the present to the immediate past has proved much more complex than I had first imagined. So I am immensely grateful to Will Murphy, senior editor at Random House, who courteously but decisively stripped away redundancies, byways, and authorial meandering. The responsibility for the book is entirely mine, but it has gained a great deal from working with a fine, creative editor.
There is a penultimate acknowledgment that I must make. I knew Lawrence Stone for over twenty years, for some of that time in the ambiguous role of his “commissioning editor.” Being Lawrence’s editor was a wholly one-way process. He wrote and his editor merely organized the book for publication. It was not that he would not take advice, which he did, but it was rarely needed. In the reverse process, seeking his advice for my own work, it was a very different matter. Lawrence contributed a great deal. We met annually, either in Oxford or in Princeton. He made suggestions, provided contacts, was a rigorous critic of my musings, but always encouraged me to continue. Lawrence was a wonderfully supportive friend, and had I written a little faster and followed fewer of the byways that Lawrence so actively endorsed, he might have seen this book before his untimely death.
My last and greatest thanks are due to my wife, Janet Wheatcroft. She has suffered from more than ten years of my worrying preoccupation with this dark topic, read drafts that are too many to count, and gently edged me away from the wildest extremities. But she has also measured what I have written against her own experience of living an essentially medieval life, solitary, in another culture, with no roads, without electricity, telephone, and lacking a common language. She lived by her wits and the loving-kindness of those around her. They could not understand why she was there, but they accepted her presence. That was in Nepal, not a Muslim culture, but that made little difference. She was a silent observer, seeing Sherpa family and village life and relating it to her own experience. What I could only sense about the past, about similarity and difference, she could gauge against what she had seen and felt. Without the benefit of her insight gained over those many months, painfully lonely for both of us, I should never have been able to complete this book.
Editorial Note
PROBLEMS OF TERMINOLOGY ARE INHERENT IN A BOOK LIKE THIS. “West” and “East,” “Europe,” “Mediterranean Islam,” “Christendom” are all terms that I have used regularly, while recognizing that they will offend purists. Likewise I have been very chary about using now commonplace, heavily charged terms like “the Other,” “Orientalism,” or “fundamentalism,” and on the whole avoided all three.
Place-names and proper names always pose a problem, especially in this book, where the names themselves can be a source of bloody dispute. The general rule has been to use the form most recognizable to the English-speaking reader, but even that is not wholly systematic. The normal English version for Islam’s holy text is “Koran,” but I have habitually written “Qur’an.” There are other similar instances.
I have also faced a dilemma. Many images are mentioned in this text, many more than are actually illustrated. Where I have not shown a visual