Muslim Europe (a Journey In Search Of A Fourteen Hundred Year History)

By (author) Hussain, Tharik
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‘Vital, important’ WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
‘Perspective-shattering’ CAROLINE SANDERSON
''Offers a fresh, bracing perspective on European history'' THE TIMES

For over 1,400 years, Muslims have been an integral part of Europe’s story, yet their contributions have been pushed to the margins or erased altogether. In Muslim Europe, award-winning author Tharik Hussain restores this forgotten history.

In a revelatory journey across the continent, we tread in the footsteps of the first Muslims who arrived on European soil in 647 AD. We travel through Cyprus, Sicily, Malta, Portugal and Spain, learning about the continent’s great Caliphate culture and Muslim commonwealth, encountering red-haired European Sultans and Arabic-speaking Christian Kings, the Sufi lodges of Cyprus and the palaces of Sicily.

Forgotten Muslim pioneers like Abbas Ibn Firnas gave us flight, Ibn Rushd gifted us modern philosophy and the cross fertilisation of faiths and cultures birthed Europe’s Christian Renaissance. For twelve centuries, Muslim Europe was a sanctuary for the continent’s Jews. Recalling the poignant voices of Hasdai Ibn Shaprut and Abraham Ibn Daoud, Jews flourished under Muslim protection triggering the Jewish Golden Age.

For the first time, Muslim Europe lays bare the cause of our collective Islamic amnesia by mapping Europe’s ‘anti-Muslim DNA’ through medieval Crusade narratives and nation-building myths. But Islam was never a sideshow to Western culture; it was integral to its development for over 1,400 years.

Deep, learned and utterly convincing, this first Muslim Eurocentric history of the continent dismantles the myth of Europe’s Judaeo-Christian cultural foundation, and offers nothing less than a profound shift in our self-understanding.

‘Uncovers a world of which few are fully aware’ COLIN THUBRON

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Tharik Hussain’s travels around the Mediterranean revealed how Islamic culture helped civilise the West . . . Fascinating . . . This is no dry archaeological or architectural study. Much of the human interest here comes from Hussain’s meetings with actual Muslims, both residents and visitors . . . while English doctors prescribed crushed snails and smouldering goat’s hair, learned physicians in Muslim Cordoba were performing successful caesareans and cataract operations
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There is something of Naipaul’s vivid sense of human realities . . . particularly through Hussain’s many many pen portraits of actual European Muslims living their Islam . . . fascinating . . . he hopes to provide a positive charter in in the past for Muslim-Christian relations in the present
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Offers a fresh, bracing perspective on European history . . . Hussain’s mission to restore Islamic heritage to the wider story of Europe’s history is admirable, as are his efforts to foster a “place identity”, a sense of belonging in Europe for European Muslims in general and his children in particular
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A vital, important and sharply observant new voice . . . In an age of growing Islamophobia, when ignorant commentators constantly depict Muslims as the Other, as dangerous outsiders, Hussain reminds us of the long history and the complex, mixed syncretic culture of European Islam, and nudges us to remember the massive debt Europe still owes to the Muslim world . . . A book I’ve been longing for someone to write
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Fascinating . . . complicates our notion of “Europe” as a closed Judeo-Christian space, reminding us that Muslims have since the early days of Islam been an integral, important part of the continent
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Uncovers a world of which few are fully aware
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