Schwartz on Islam

I have been reading Stephen Schwartz’s wonderful pieces on Islam in the Weekly Standard for several years. Schwartz has done as much as any journalist to highlight the responsibility and role of Saudi Arabia for the rise of radical Islam, and particularly the central importance of the Wahhabi sect in modern Islam. I have been eager to dig into his recent The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror . It is even better than I expected, and I was expecting it to be good. Schwartz has a profound historical sense, and has done extensive research in various issues related to the Middle East.

The “two faces” of his title are the peaceful, tolerant, and pluralist face of traditional Islam and the violent and intolerant face of the Wahhabi sect. Early in the book, for instance, he challenges the notion that hatred between Muslims and Jews is centuries old, a myth that leads to a vicious quietism in the face of Jewish-Islamic conflict. He explains his research into the “dhimma,” the “contract” concerning Muslim relations with “People of the Book”:

A valuable truth about the dhimma and its consequences emerges from a topic seldom discussed in this context: Jewish printing. The first book printed by Western technique in Asia was a Jewish legal code, the Arba Turim or Four Rows , authored by Rabbi Yakov Ben Asher of Toledo (c. 1270-c. 1343). This exquisitely designed typographical gem was issued in Constantinople in 1493 . . . . The first book printed in the continent of Africa was an edition of Abudarham , a collection of laws and commentaries on prayer, written in 1340 by Rabbi David Ben Yosef of Sevilla. This volume was produced in the Moroccan city of Fez in 1516. Both of these books, and hundreds more after them, were produced under Muslim rulers.

Schwartz goes on to point out that Jews were free and unpersecuted in the Ottoman empire during the time that Jews were being persecuted in parts of Christian Europe.

I’m not far enough into the book to know how sharply Schwartz distinguishes between the “two faces,” but the historical details cited above point to the fact that Islam is far more complex than some Christian rhetoric has suggested.