“Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World”, by Stephen O’Shea

432 pages, Walker Books, ISBN-13: 978-0802715173

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet!” – so said Rudyard Kipling, an adage that has served as an able guide for many a cultural historian in both his time and ours…and yet his maxim has always left one question lingering: we know what is of the Occident, and we know what is of the Orient, but what do we make of those betwixt the two? How should we classify those kingdoms and cultures caught between both the East and the West? Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World by Stephen O’Shea is, overall, an effective work by a writer with a command of prose and storytelling. It must have been quite difficult to render such a massive time period of change in a thought-provoking manner which doesn’t lose the well-informed or inexperienced historical reader (especially interesting is his particular emphasis of periods of stable Convivencia periods such as Cordoba, Palermo/Sicily, etc.). It was a different subject that is often overlooked by other historians remarking on the period and was quite interesting to read about. Perhaps this accounts for the fragmented nature of the work, for rather than reading like an over-arching history of the Christian/Muslim feud, Sea of Faith reads as a series of vignettes that exist on their own without an overarching theme, which is not, I think, what O’Shea was gunning for.

This is, however, the least of the author’s problems, for it feels that O’Shea subtly takes sides in order to push an agenda of historical revisionism, concentrating on these multi-religious periods and completely disregarding the relative nature of other dramatic changes brought on by Islamic and Christian expansion. He easily discards the impact of faith/religious zeal and can’t seem to understand the effect on people, always pointing towards economic, politics or any number of secular rationales behind all acts versus faith. While certainly these reasons partially characterized the age, it’s very out of balance. It was very challenging to read through without being battered by venom/disgust Mr. O’Shea shows toward religion – specifically in regards to Christianity while letting Islam mostly off the hook. Furthermore, I am at a loss why O’Shea ends his history with Malta when the battle raged on for centuries afterwards (almost immediately after Malta the first of the never-ending Russo-Turkish Wars started, and then soon the terrific thumping at Lepanto). He leaves the story half-finished with no adequate explanation. The jump to Jerusalem today with the troubles there was hardly satisfying; it is much deeper today than the writer suspects (i.e., the border between Armenia and Turkey is still patrolled by the Russian army a hundred years after WW1 keeping the two people apart, or the current terrorist campaigns with al-Qaeda and the neverending conflict in Cyprus between the Turkey and the Greeks). Not a bad book, but incomplete and, despite its premise, lacking a theme.