INFIDELS: THE CONFLICT BETWEEN CHRISTENDOM AND ISLAM 638-2002 By Andrew Wheatcroft, Viking, £ 15

Crusade and jihad, mirror images of each other, are the products of competition and confrontation between Islam and Christianity from the 7th century onwards. Andrew Wheatcroft traces the trajectories of political and cultural tussle between the Christian West and the Muslim East.

Enmity and hatred characterized the relationship between Islam and Christianity from the beginning. Each considered the other as infidels. During the 8th century, as Islam spread across the Levant, insecure Christian theologians portrayed prophet Muhammad as the Antichrist. The dominant Western paradigm of Islam, which focusses on oppression, savagery and degradation, emerged when in the eighth century the Arabs invaded Spain.

The decline of the sovereign power of the German emperors enabled the popes to intervene in the temporal domain. Pope Urban II in the 11th century gave the call for launching a crusade to recover the “holy land” in the Near East — a holy war against the infidel Muslims. Such a holy war, argued the Church, was an obligation on all “good Christians”.

The Reconquista, which resulted in the loss of Spain and Christian intervention in the Levant, provoked the Ottoman Sultanate to launch a jihad against the feranghi kafirs. The Islamic concept of jihad is based on some of the shuras of the Quran as well as on the hadiths of the Prophet. Jihad could be of two types, internal and external (Wheatcroft categorizes them as greater and lesser jihads). The first is a struggle against one’s own raw passion, while external jihad is to be waged against the dar al harb (domains of the non-Muslims) to bring it within dar al Islam (domain of Islam).

The rise of the print media enabled the Christian world not only to create new forms of enmity but also to sustain it. In the new millennium, both the Christian Biblical societies as well as Osama Bin Laden’s group are using the internet for conducting their “holy wars”. Wheatcroft writes that Bin Laden, unlike the pre-modern Ottoman ulemas, is not averse to using images and pictures while waging jihad. Again, under Mullah Omar’s taliban regime, leaders allowed themselves to be photographed when they blew up the statues of Buddha in Bamiyan.

The author claims to have consulted 2,000 books for writing his own. Strangely, he misses out Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. Also, Wheatcroft’s narrative does not explain the ebb and flow of the fortunes of the Ottomans in different regions of the Mediterranean over the years. Even with a few limitations, the work is important as a comprehensive survey.