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Useful Enemies - Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Hardcover)
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Useful Enemies - Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Hardcover)
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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.
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