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    Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750
    Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750
    Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750
    Audiobook16 hours

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

    Written by Noel Malcolm

    Narrated by Michael Page

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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. 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. Malcolm shows how these ideas became intertwined with internal Western debates about power, religion, society, and war.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateApr 21, 2020
    ISBN9781705200704
    Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750
    Author

    Noel Malcolm

    Noel Malcolm is one of Britain’s most original scholar-journalists. He is the chief non-fiction reviewer for the ‘Sunday Telegraph’ and writes widely on both literary and political matters. He is the editor of Hobbes’s correspondence and author of best-selling ‘Bosnia: A Short History’. He briefs governments all over the world on Bosnia and Balkan matters and speaks most western and eastern European languages, both ancient and modern. He is now writing a biography of Hobbes.

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    • 2/5
      Intellectually dishonest.

      If Malcolm’s point was to challenge Edward Said, or challenge scholars applying Said to a certain historical timeframe in which he believes it is inappropriate, he should have said so from the beginning. Instead, the raison d’etre is thrown like a bomb in the conclusion. As it stands, he basically proves Said’s point for 900 pages.

      1 person found this helpful