Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750

by Noel Malcolm

From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the eighteenth century, many Western European writers viewed the Ottoman Empire with almost obsessive interest. Typically they reacted to it with fear and distrust; and such feelings were reinforced by the deep hostility of Western Christendom towards Islam. Yet there was also much curiosity about the social and political system on which the huge power of the sultans was based. In the sixteenth century, especially, when Ottoman territorial expansion was rapid and Ottoman institutions seemed particularly robust, there was even open admiration.

In this path-breaking book Noel Malcolm ranges through these vital centuries of East-West interaction, studying all the ways in which thinkers in the West interpreted the Ottoman Empire as a political phenomenon - and Islam as a political religion. Useful Enemies shows how the concept of 'oriental despotism' began as an attempt to turn the tables on a very positive analysis of Ottoman state power, and how, as it developed, it interacted with Western debates about monarchy and government. Noel Malcolm also shows how a negative portrayal of Islam as a religion devised for political purposes was assimilated by radical writers, who extended the criticism to all religions, including Christianity itself.

Examining the works of many famous thinkers (including Machiavelli, Bodin, and Montesquieu) and many less well-known ones, Useful Enemies illuminates the long-term development of Western ideas about the Ottomans, and about Islam. Noel Malcolm shows how these ideas became intertwined with internal Western debates about power, religion, society, and war. Discussions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire were thus bound up with mainstream thinking in the West on a wide range of important topics. These Eastern enemies were not just there to be denounced. They were there to be made use of, in arguments which contributed significantly to the development of Western political thought.

Genres: History, Islam, Nonfiction, Religion, Politics, Middle East, European History

496 pages, ebook

First published May 2, 2019

Reviews

[Pinar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bu kitap hakkında detaylı bir yorum yazayım. Büyük bir keyifle okuduğum bir kitap oldu. Kitap henüz Türkçeye çevrilmemiş, umarım biran evvel çevrilir. Noel Malcolm'un Haziran 2019'da basılmış bu kitabının ismi benim çevirimle "Faydalı Düşmanlar: Batı politik düşüncesinde İslam ve Osmanlı 1450-1750.

Öncelikle bu kitap bir tarih kitabı olmasına rağmen, 1450-1750 yılları arasındaki Avrupa veya Osmanlı tarihini anlatmıyor. İlave olarak İslam veya Türk tarihi de anlatmıyor, böyle bir beklentiyle kitabı elinize almayın sakın. Ama üç aşağı beş yukarı bu dönemler hakkında bir miktar tarihi bilginiz varsa üzerine oturtacağınız nefis bir eser.

Okuduğum yorumlarda çok kuru, dağınık, çelişkili falan bulanlar olmuş. Ama yazar da başında bu kitabın Osmanlı, Türk, İslam veya Avrupa tarihi olmadığını sadece Avrupalıların yazdığı eserlerden Osmanlı, Türkler ve İslam'ı nasıl gördüklerini değerlendirdiklerini yazdığını belirtiyor. Ki burada Türk-Osmanlı-İslam genelde başlarda hepsi aynı anlamda kullanılıyor. İstanbulun fethiyle başlayan dikkat kesilme ilişkisi, bir miktar korku, iktidar, güç, merak, özenme ekseninde şekillendiği için eserlerde çelişik bölümlerin olması çok normal. Üzerine Avrupa dediğimiz yer de tek başına yekpare bir bütün olmadığı, katolikler, protestanlar, değişik ülkelerin birbirleriyle ve Osmanlıyla ilişkileri olarak değerlendirildiğinde biri iyi ilişkiler geliştirip pozitif şeyler söylerken, başka bir yazarın tamamen aşağılayıcı söylem içinde bulunması çok normal.

Bu arada Osmanlı'daki devlet sisteminin nasıl incelendiği, örnek alındığı üzerine de enteresan çalışmalar var.

Çalışmalardan birinde, Türklerin orijini ile ilgili, onların anadoluda yaşayan Truvalıların çocukları olduğu, işte Truvalıların iki kavime ayrıldığı (biri de Fransızlarmış) falan gibi tezlerden, Sidean'lar olduğu falan gibi tezlere bir yelpaze var.

Osmanlı devletinin "nasıl böyle başarılılar", "ordularının gücü ne", "ülkeyi nasıl yönetiyorlar" başlıklarında inceleyen çalışmaları okumaktan özel olarak keyif aldım.

Osmanlı güçlenmesiyle beraber bir şekil Avrupa İslam üzerine çalışma ve incelemeye dalıyor, bu çalışmalarla ilgili kısımlar da oldukça ilginç. Katolik-protestan çatışmaları sırasında İslam/Osmanlı ile etkileşim bölümlerinden de özel olarak ilginç.

Diğer taraftan kitabı objektif bir şekilde okursanız mesela Avrupa Birliği'ne niye hiçbir zaman giremeyeceğimizi de anlıyoruz.

1600ler Osmanlı devleti ile ilgili yorumları okurken, Türkiye'nin ve İslam'ın şimdiki haline gerçekten büyük üzüntü duydum. Biraz daha ilerleyen dönemlerde daha çok İslam ve Hz.Muhammed incelemesine ayrılmış.

Kitapla ilgili aklıma gelen bir not, okuyan yorum yapacak olan çıkarsa sevinirim. Osmanlı imparatorluğu incelenirken çeşitli yerlerde "komünist" değerlendirmesi yapılıyor. Bir şekilde bu terim bende Marksizm ile bağlantılı olduğu için, alınan tarihi dönem için bu kavram yerine "toplumun çıkarını düşünen" falan gibi başka bir kelime kullanılsa daha uygun olurdu diye düşündüm. Osmanlı devlet sistemi Avrupa feodalizminden ve kapitalizmden farklı bir sistem, ama komünist...

Kitabın bölümleri
1. İstanbulun düşüşü, Türkler ve hümanistler
2. İslam Görüşleri: Standart varsayımlar
3. Habsburglar ve Osmanlılar: "Avrupa" ve imparatorlukların çatışması
4. Protestanlık, Kalvinotürkizm ve Türkopapalizm
5. Gavurlarla (burada gavur Türkler oluyor) ittifak
6. Yeni paradigma
7. Machiavelli ve Devletin nedeni
8. Campanella
9. Despotizm 1: Kaynakları
10. Osmanlı güç ve zayıflıklarının analizi
11. Savaşın gerekçeleri, savaş ve barış için planlar
12. Politik bir din olarak İslam
13. İslamın eleştirel ve radikal kullanımı 1: Vanini'den Toland'a
14. İslamın eleştirel ve radikal kullanımı 2: Bayle'den Voltaire'e
15. Despotizm 2: 17.yy teorileri
16. Despotizm 3: Montesquieu

[Mohamed Majdi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The mediaeval philosopher St Thomas Aquinas’s suggestion in his Summa theologiae, a summary version of Roman Catholic faith, that non-Christian religions should be tolerated also “left the door ajar for some pragmatic [European] policy-making” in later years, Malcom says, when various European powers sought to make alliances with the Ottoman Empire at the expense of their rivals.

Even if the Ottomans were not seen as being entirely part of the European system, they could be useful allies, perhaps something in the way the Russian tsars could be roped in from time to time to confirm or disrupt the balance of power in Europe.

[Uğur Selçuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great work.
The thing that struck me the most in this book was the analysis of Campanella's "The city of the sun", which apparently was written to describe the Ottoman rule. I will read this book through the lens of what Noel Malcolm put forth.

[Jenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely interesting to see how the rhetoric was developed and shifted over time. So many parallels to ugly rhetoric today tbh.

[Miroku Nemeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Just as that decorative variety of herbs and flowers not only does no harm, but marvellously refreshes the eyes and the senses, so too the diversity of faiths and religions in my empire is an advantage to me, not a liability. . . . That would be just as if I were to pull up all my flowers except those of one single colour; and then what would I be doing except depriving my garden or meadow of its own natural grace and beauty, instead of improving it?” (284)

This beautiful garden metaphor appears in Chapter 12 of Noel Malcolm’s Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750. The German Protestant scholar Philipp Camerarius attributed it to Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, but Malcolm carefully warns that Camerarius, “rather suspiciously,” provided no source for the story (284). We therefore cannot confidently treat it as Süleyman’s own recorded words.

Its precise origin, however, does not diminish the beauty or significance of the metaphor. A garden is not improved by tearing out every flower except those of one color. Its variety is part of its “natural grace and beauty.” Malcolm observes that the metaphor conveys “an intriguing suggestion” that “variety in itself was of positive value” (284).

That remains a necessary political and ethical vision. In a period marked by resurgent racism, anti-Muslim hatred, white nationalism, and so-called “great replacement” theories, the many-colored garden offers a direct moral alternative. Difference is not contamination. Diversity is not civilizational decline. A society of different peoples, religions, cultures, languages, and histories is not damaged by its variety. It is made more beautiful by it.

Four hundred years ago, I would have been called a renegado.

It was through Nabil Matar’s Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 that I first began to understand the historical significance of that word. A renegado, or renegade, was what Christian Europeans often called one of their own who crossed into Islam. As a Muslim convert of thirty-three years, and as someone of Hungarian, English, German, French, and Scottish descent, I recognized that this was not merely an exotic category from early modern history. It was a name that would once have been applied to someone like me.

My academic interest in this subject goes back much further than my recent reading. My second master’s degree was in English literature, with a focus on postcolonial studies and the representation of Muslims in Western literature. My thesis was situated in the Victorian period, but my research required me to trace those representations back through the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Crusades, medieval polemic, and the earliest European responses to the appearance of Islam and the mission of Sayyidna Muhammad ibn Abdullah, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. I studied the work of Norman Daniel, Edward Said, and other scholars of Orientalism and representation, and I have continued writing and teaching about anti-Muslim discourse, literary mythology, political propaganda, and the ways knowledge about Islam is produced.

Useful Enemies belongs within that larger intellectual history. It also forms part of a more recent course of reading that has included Denise Spellberg’s Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: Islam and the Founders, Jerry Brotton’s The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam, Adrian Tinniswood’s Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean, and Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger’s Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History.

Those books are not intellectually equivalent. Kilmeade and Yaeger’s book is an absurd Fox News propaganda tract that retrofits the Barbary conflicts into a precursor of the modern American “war on terror.” It reduces a complex Mediterranean history of diplomacy, piracy, slavery, trade, shifting alliances, and imperial competition into a permanent civilizational war between Muslims and Christians. Tinniswood’s book is far more serious and valuable, particularly in its treatment of European converts and the unstable identities hidden beneath labels such as “Turk,” “Moor,” “corsair,” and “pirate.” Yet it remains heavily dependent on English viewpoints and often narrates from within the archive without fully interrogating how that archive was created.

Malcolm does something more difficult.

He shows how the archive was constructed.

Of all the books I have read recently on this broad subject, Useful Enemies contains the most thorough scholarship. It is also probably the least accessible to most readers. This is an extremely academic work: dense, methodical, heavily documented, and built around close analysis of political and philosophical texts rather than a continuous historical narrative. For readers interested in European intellectual history, however, it is extraordinarily rewarding.

Malcolm tells us from the beginning exactly what he intends to do. This is not a general history of the Ottoman Empire. It is not primarily a social history of Muslims in Europe, a history of Muslim political thought, or an account of relations between Muslims and Christians from both sides. It is a study of Western political writing about the Ottoman Empire and Islam between 1450 and 1750.

Because of that focus, the book also becomes an extensive overview of major currents in Western philosophical, political, and theological thought during the period named in the title. Malcolm moves through Renaissance humanism, the Protestant Reformation, Catholic political theory, diplomacy, theories of sovereignty, republicanism, monarchy, religious toleration, absolutism, warfare, despotism, and the development of early modern political philosophy. Erasmus, Luther, Machiavelli, Campanella, Grotius, Hobbes, Bayle, Montesquieu, and many less familiar figures appear across its pages.

Anyone considering this book should understand that. The Ottoman Empire is the organizing subject, but the intellectual territory is much larger. Readers are essentially receiving a survey of European political thought as refracted through Western arguments about Ottoman government, Islamic belief, religious diversity, military power, political authority, and the supposed character of “the Turk.”

That breadth makes the book difficult. It also makes it valuable.

Malcolm traces how European writers repeatedly used the Ottoman Empire as a political instrument. Some treated it as a warning against despotism. Others praised Ottoman discipline in order to shame European armies. Some invoked Ottoman religious toleration to criticize persecution among Christians. Others attempted to explain away that toleration as cynical taxation policy or political expediency. Still others admired particular aspects of Ottoman government while continuing to repeat crude theological attacks against Islam.

The title captures this perfectly.

The Ottomans were not simply enemies. They were useful enemies.

They were useful for defining Christian Europe against an external religious adversary. They were useful for justifying crusades, centralizing political authority, defending monarchy, attacking monarchy, disciplining armies, debating toleration, criticizing clerical power, and constructing theories about political strength and decline. The Ottoman Empire could be praised or condemned depending on the argument a writer wanted to make. Even admiration could be instrumental.

The phrase also resonates far beyond Malcolm’s stated period. Edward Said’s Covering Islam has a similarly powerful title because “covering” means both reporting upon Islam and obscuring it beneath inherited frameworks. The concept of the “useful enemy” recalls the political need for endless enemies within the modern military-industrial and security apparatus. When war is defined against an abstraction—“terror,” extremism, disorder, threat—rather than against a geographically bounded and politically identifiable opponent, the war has no necessary endpoint. It can expand indefinitely.

The “war on terror” demonstrated that logic. So do contemporary systems of mass surveillance, predictive policing, data aggregation, artificial intelligence, private military contracting, and companies such as Palantir. Institutions built around identifying threats acquire a material interest in the continued production of threatening populations. The enemy sustains the apparatus created to confront it.

Malcolm is not writing about those modern institutions, but his title gives us a language for recognizing the pattern.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is that Malcolm does not merely catalogue anti-Muslim hatred. He also recovers the writers who challenged inherited prejudice, questioned conventional assumptions, admired aspects of Ottoman society, defended religious toleration, or used Islamic and Ottoman examples to expose failures within Christian Europe.

That makes Useful Enemies comparable in an important way to Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an and The Sultan and the Queen. All three books document bigotry without allowing bigotry to monopolize the historical record. They recover conflict within Western thought itself. Anti-Muslim prejudice was powerful, but it was never entirely uncontested.

This matters. A history composed only of hatred can make hatred appear inevitable. It was not.

European writers inherited a vast body of polemical mythology about Islam. Some repeated accusations that Islam was a Christian heresy, a form of paganism, a vehicle of the Antichrist, or a religion propagated solely by violence. These claims were often mutually contradictory. Islam could be denounced as radically legalistic and dangerously permissive, excessively sensual and brutally ascetic, irrationally fanatical and coldly political. The point was not consistency. The point was opposition.

Islam is, of course, radical monotheism. Worship is directed to Allah alone. Yet European writers repeatedly represented it as paganism or idolatry because those categories served Christian polemical needs better than an accurate understanding of Islamic theology.

Malcolm is particularly strong when he distinguishes outright fantasy from partial knowledge. The most dangerous representations are not always the most obviously absurd. Propaganda frequently combines facts with distortion. A writer may possess real information about Ottoman institutions, military organization, or Islamic practice while arranging that information inside a false interpretive structure. The appearance of evidence makes the resulting prejudice more persuasive.

Malcolm refuses to place all writers into a single category. Some were deeply hostile and poorly informed. Some were hostile but serious scholars. Some admired the Ottomans selectively. Some used Eastern examples to challenge their own societies. Some moved between fascination, envy, fear, and contempt.

That range is one reason the book is so intellectually rich.

It also contains remarkable lives that appear only briefly because Malcolm’s subject is political thought rather than biography. One of the most fascinating is Çığalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha, originally Scipione Cicala. Malcolm explains that he had been captured as a boy, converted to Islam, and achieved “an immensely successful career in the service of the Sultan” (189). He rose to become a major Ottoman commander and returned to Calabria with the Ottoman fleet partly to visit his mother.

A life like that deserves an entire book.

Figures such as Sinan Pasha expose the artificiality of a civilizational narrative that places Christian Europe on one side and an alien Muslim world on the other. Early modern Mediterranean societies were connected through conversion, trade, slavery, diplomacy, family, warfare, migration, and political alliance. Europeans became Muslims. Muslim and Christian rulers allied against members of their own religions. People crossed boundaries, crossed back, and lived within more than one political and cultural world.

Islam was also not merely an external presence pressing against Europe. Muslims were Europeans. They were indigenous to Iberia, Sicily, the Balkans, Crimea, Circassia, the Caucasus, and other regions treated as part of Europe whenever doing so served European intellectual or racial narratives. Islam has been part of European civilization for centuries, not simply through individual renegades but through entire peoples, states, languages, cultures, and intellectual traditions.

The insistence that Islam is foreign to Europe therefore requires historical erasure.

That erasure continues to shape modern conversion narratives. European and white American converts are often presented as anomalies, curiosities, or people who have crossed outside their presumed civilization. But conversion by Europeans has existed throughout Islamic history. The renegades were not exceptions to an otherwise impermeable boundary. Their lives reveal that the boundary was always more porous than later ideological narratives admitted.

At the same time, I increasingly want to read these histories from the other direction.

Tinniswood includes many European converts, but they usually reach us through English or other non-Muslim observers. Malcolm mentions figures such as Sinan Pasha because they intersect with the Western political texts he is studying. What remains difficult to recover are the voices of converts themselves: why they became Muslims, how they understood their faith, what they rejected, what they embraced, and how they interpreted the worlds through which they moved.

I want the renegades as subjects, not specimens.

That desire does not constitute a criticism of Malcolm for failing to write a different book. He defines his scope clearly and fulfills it with extraordinary thoroughness. But his scholarship repeatedly reveals the need for another kind of history: biographies, letters, memoirs, court records, and writings by European Muslims who can speak as historical actors rather than merely appearing as objects of Christian anxiety.

The garden metaphor provides one of the book’s most powerful examples of the complexity Malcolm uncovers. Camerarius first argues that rulers who maintain justice without imposing one religion are less likely to face religious rebellion. He then tells the story of Süleyman directing officials to look at the many flowers growing together in his garden. Toleration in the story is not presented only as a reluctant concession. Religious diversity becomes “an advantage,” and the destruction of that diversity would strip the empire of its beauty (284).

On the following page, Malcolm shows that the metaphor continued circulating. A writer explaining why the Ottomans had welcomed Jews expelled from Spain described the sultan’s empire as “a pleasant garden, more beautified by the differently coloured flowers of several religions than by one on its own” (285).

The historical attribution may be uncertain. The intellectual meaning is not.

Some European writers could imagine Ottoman religious diversity not only as pragmatic statecraft but as beauty.

Malcolm’s discussion of Edward Said near the end of the book is one place where I am less fully persuaded. His criticism is careful and substantial. He argues that the model developed in Orientalism applies more readily to the nineteenth-century colonial situation than to the early modern period, when the Ottoman Empire remained a major power and large parts of the East were not under Western imperial rule. He also objects to treating Western writing about Islam as though it were all part of a single disciplinary project of domination.

There is force in that correction. The political relationship between Europe and the Ottoman Empire in 1550 was not the same as the relationship between Britain or France and colonized societies in the nineteenth century. Malcolm is also right that early modern writing was too diverse to reduce to a single pattern.

Still, I am not convinced that Said’s framework is as easily displaced as Malcolm sometimes suggests. Said’s analysis of representation, epistemology, power, and the production of an imagined East can accommodate greater historical complexity than Malcolm allows. The existence of Ottoman military and political power does not eliminate the ideological work performed by Western representations. Nor does the diversity of those representations negate the larger structures through which “Islam,” “the Turk,” or “the East” became objects of European knowledge.

Malcolm’s strongest correction is therefore not that Said was fundamentally wrong, but that the early modern archive requires a more differentiated application of Said’s insights. Power was uneven, shifting, and reciprocal. Representations could serve domination, but they could also serve admiration, reform, criticism, provocation, or intellectual curiosity.

Malcolm himself articulates that complexity beautifully in the final pages. He writes that early modern engagement with Islamic and Ottoman subjects was often part of European writers’ own political and religious arguments. Eastern material could be used “to shake things up, to provoke, to shame, to galvanize” (417). It did not merely confirm Western superiority. Sometimes it exposed Western failures.

He concludes that European thinkers viewed their powerful Eastern neighbors through “the whole gamut of attitudes, from fear and fierce disapproval to fascination, admiration, and envy” (417). Islam and the Ottoman Empire were not merely subordinate “others” to be dismissed. They were active ingredients within Western political thought.

Malcolm’s final sentence brings the entire argument together:

“The East was not only too important to be ignored; it was too interesting—and, most of all, too useful” (417).

That is the achievement of this book. Malcolm demonstrates that Islam and the Ottoman Empire were never merely passive objects in the Western imagination. They were enemies, allies, warnings, models, mirrors, provocations, and sources of political thought. They helped Europeans define themselves, criticize themselves, frighten themselves, and imagine alternatives to their own institutions.

The question remains urgent because useful enemies have not disappeared.

They are still manufactured through selective evidence, inherited mythology, racial fear, political opportunism, media repetition, and institutional power. Muslims remain particularly useful enemies in American and European politics because anti-Muslim narratives can be made to justify war, surveillance, exclusion, censorship, policing, militarized borders, and the concentration of state authority.

[Jonathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

My family was saved by the Ottoman empire. I have traveled in Turkey several times. Ottoman culture fascinates me.

This book bored me beyond tears.

I have struggled for OVER one year trying to read it. Each instalment has grown more monotonous than the last.

Basically it is very one sided. ie. What were Europeans various and schizophrenic attitudes toward the Ottomans. It is a monograph on this subject. a LENGTHY monograph which I quit after 47%.

My lesson is this: If you buy an audiobook, and can't finish it in 2 months return it. After over a year, they don't want it back, any more than I can read it.

[Yicheng Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly thorough and historical insight into the history of western sociopolitical thought about Islam as an organised religion, a paradigm of political governance, and also the Ottoman Empire’s utility as both an effective demonstrable foe to rally against and a rhetorical point they can use to employ for or against any particular views they held as justifications or accusations. 8/10 highly recommended.

[Jack Taccons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grandissima prova di erudizione da parte di Sir Noel Malcolm, illustre intellettuale inglese e professore ad Oxford. Colpisce per la qualità delle fonti, la conoscenza delle diverse lingue e per le coerenti e ben condotte analisi. Storia intellettuale di altissimo livello.

[Baher Soliman · Rating 4 out of 5]

هذا الكتاب هو أحد الكتب المهمّة التي تتكلم عن العلاقات المتشابكة بين العالم الإسلامي والغرب، وكثيرة هي لحظات الاشتباك، لكن الكتاب اختار لحظة تاريخية فاصلة في التاريخ الإسلامي و الأوروبي معًا، وهي لحظة سقوط القسطنطينية في يد السلطان العثماني محمد الفاتح . هذه اللحظة التي شكّلت صورة العدو العثماني الشرس والخطير عدو المسيحية في المخيّلة البابوية الأوروبية.

هذا الكتاب الذي كتبه " نويل مالكولم" هو ثمرة محاضرات كارلايل في تاريخ الفكر السياسي في أكسفورد، وكما يقول في المقدّمة " إنها دراسة للتفكير السياسي الغربي حول الإسلام والإمبراطورية العثمانية في أوائل العصر الحديث، وليست دراسة للإسلام والإمبراطورية العثمانية في حد ذاتها". من ناحية أخرى ما دلالة عنوان الكتاب " الأعداء النافعون" ؟ كيف يُمكن أن يكون العدو نافعًا وفق هذا العنوان؟ . بلاشك المقصود بالعدو هنا هو التركي العثماني، ووجه النفع هنا في أطروحة مالكولم هو ما يُحاول إيثباته على طول الكتاب أنّ العلاقة بين العثمانيين والأوروبيين ليست على طول الخط علاقة مبتسرة ليس فيها سبل للتعاون .

وعلى الجانب الآخر الأوروبي الصليبي بدا وجه النفع في ظهور أطروحات تتخذ من العداء العثماني، والتأمل في أسباب ظهور العثمانيين وسيلة للإصلاح الداخلي، فبعد سقوط القسطنطينية ظهرت الأفكار عند الكتّاب الإنسانيين واللاهوتيين التي تتكلم عن العثمانيين بوصفهم " آفة الله"، أي عقوبة الرب بسبب تقصير الأوروبيين في إيمانهم المسيحي، ومن هنا في بداية الكتاب يرصد مالكولم الأثر المدوّي لسقوط القسطنطينية في الغرب الأوروبي، هذا الأثر الذي امتدّ منذ تلك اللحظة وتعاظم في فترة سليمان قانوني إلى نهايتها حيث كما يقول مالكولم " بعد العرض المرعب للقوة العسكرية للعثمانيين في القسطنطينية عام ١٤٥٣، وبالنظر إلى التسلسل المستمر لتقدمهم غربًا ، كان هناك تركيز جديد على الدفاع عن النفس، أو الدفاع المتبادل، كهدف رئيس لتبرير الحرب ضد العثمانيين " .

ويظهر البابا " بيوس الثاني" أحد هؤلاء الباباوات الذين قاموا بالتنظير للحرب ضد العثمانيين، بل هو وفق مالكولم أعاد إحساس الأوروبيين بالشعور بهويتهم الأوروبية عندما تكلم عن خطر غزو العثمانيين " في ديارنا أوروبا" . وهناك نقولات كثيرة لمالكولم تجسّد هذه النزعات العدائية ضد العثمانيين، ربما كثرة الأسماء، وصعوبة نطقها اللاتيني على اللسان، تجعل القراءة مزعجة أحيانًا، لكن مما لاشك فيه، هذه النقولات كنز كبير، لاسيما من مصادرها اللاتينية والإيطالية التي اطّلع عليها المؤلف .

هل تختلف وجهة النظر المعيارية للإسلام عن العثمانيين في المخيال الأوروبي؟ بالتأكيد هناك نوع من التماهي بين هذا وذاك، وبالتالي فالكتاب أوضح أنّ الطعن في العثمانيين يرافق الطعن في الإسلام نفسه في الكتابات الأوروبية، ويعتذر مالكولم عن نقله الطعن بنصه على فجاجته، وعذره أنه يحافظ على طبيعة الكتابة في تلك الفترة كما هي كي يسوعب القارئ كيف كانوا يكتبون. هنا ظهر الطعن في الإسلام على عدة تصورات، منها أنّه من تأليف محمد ( صلى الله عليه وسلم)، والقصة التقليدية لبحيرا الراهب، أو الاستمداد من اليهودية والنصرانية ..الخ، لكن واجه الكتّاب الإنسانيين معضلة، وهي كيف يمكن تفسير الفضائل الإنسانية في الإسلام؟ وهذا انسحب بدوره على الكلام حول فضائل الأتراك.. كيف يمكن أن اعتبرك عدوًا فاضلًا أخلاقيًا، ذلك كان مأزقهم الفعلي .

تنوعت التفسيرات، التي لا ترى مشكلة في أن يتمتع الآخر الكافر ( من وجهة نظرهم) بالفضائل، أو التي تنسب الفضائل للاستمداد من المسيحية، لذلك كان أحد تفسيراتهم أنّ الاسلام استمر كل تلك المدة لتبجيلهم المسيح ( يسوع في النصرانية). ومن ثم أدركوا وجود نوع من التقارب بين الإسلام والنصرانية، يمكن معهم كما تخيلوا دعوة المسلم بسهولة للنصرانية. [ هناك خطابات مشكوك فيها مثل خطاب بيوس الثاني لمحمد الفاتح يدعوه للنصرانية، وهو خطاب شكك فيه مالكولم].

ثقل الصراع الأوروبي المسيحي في البداية كان ممثلًا في الهابسبورغ، وكما يقول مالكولم " كان نظير السلطان على الجانب الغربي هو الإمبراطور تشارلز الخامس"، ويقصد بالسلطان هنا سليمان القانوني، وظهرت الكتابات التي تحذر العالم المسيحي من الفرقة والصراعات الداخلية . ( مثل كتابات لويس فيفيس بعد انتصار العثمانيين في موهاج) . وكان هناك عنصر وعظي وأخلاقي في حجته، مفاده أنّه لا يمكن هزيمة العثمانيين ما لم يصلح المسيحيون سلوكهم.

سيتطور النقاش إلى جودة الجيش العثماني مع جيوفيو ومؤرخ البندقية ماركانتونيو كوتشو، وبالتالي آلت هذه الخطابات إلى ضرورة الاصطفاف خلف آل هابسبورغ لمواجهة العثمانيين.

يرصد الكتاب ظهور البروتستانية والكالفينية ودورهما في النزاع البابوي التركي، أشار لوثر في نقده للكاثوليك أنّ الباباوات أكثر شراسة من الأتراك، لكنه رغم إشادته بجوانب كثيرة عند الأتراك كنوع من اللمز للكاثوليكية قال في كتابه " عن الحرب ضد الاتراك" أنه لا يمكن عيش حياة مسيحية طبيعية في ظل الحكم العثماني. وبعد حصار فيينا دعا لحمل السلاح ضد العثمانيين، وكان يُعمل إسقاطاته الإنجيلية على العثمانيين حتى أنه اعتبرهم شعب يأجوج مأجوج المشار إليهم في حزقيال.

لم يمنع هذا من تعاون البروتستانت مع العثمانيين ففي وقت لاحق تعاون الكالفينيين مع العثمانيين عندما غزت قوات هابسبورغ ترانسيلفانيا، لقد انضموا إلى جانب العثمانيين لمنع عملية الكثلكة التي يقوم بها آل هابسبورغ.

الكتاب غني بتفاصيله وبموضوعاته ويستحق القراءة .

[Konrad · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book didn’t give me exactly what I wanted. But that’s kind of a me problem.

I wanted to read more about the actual Ottoman Empire, especially its wars against various European powers in the 1500s. I also wanted to know how the image that the empire had in Europe compared to the actual reality of the place.

This book doesn’t really go into that. There are very few places in the narrative where there is any mention of whether depictions of the Ottoman Empire were fact-based or not. It’s almost exclusively comparing European depictions to one another.

The sixteenth century is really only considered in terms of how the conflicts of the time influenced later thinking about the Ottomans. The core question of this book is how the idea of Oriental Despotism came to be, and how it was discussed by people like Montesquieu. And it does explain all that very well! I’m happy I read this book. It just didn’t answer my original questions at all.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A whitewashing of the Ottoman's to make them palatable and appear civilized to the West and Nato. Malcolm ignores so much of the Arab-Uighur pact that the book is almost laughable at points. I really cannot say that there is much in here to recommend it as history -- perhaps a re-categorization of historical fiction would be better.

[Peter Thew · Rating 3 out of 5]

A difficult read for the general reader. The specialised nature of its survey of western attitudes to Islam and the Ottoman empire makes for hard going sometimes, but there are gems within it. Towards the end of the period, western writers were increasingly positive in their views contrasting with the harsh views in 15th century Europe.

[Isa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of names mentioned & seems to start without much chronological order. Having said that, it was an intriguing read & certainly explains why the western world is the way it is in regards to its reception of Muslims.

It was entertaining to read about the confusion of the scholars of the west wandering why the Ottomans were so superior.

[Måns Sunesson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is good. It is also quite boring.

[N · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shameful editing. This could have been twice as short as it is.

[Erol Yeşilyurt]

Like it. Illuminating