Description
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.
Author: Noel Malcolm
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 07/09/2019
Pages: 512
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.75lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.30w x 1.70d
ISBN13: 9780198830139
ISBN10: 0198830130
BISAC Categories:
- History | Europe | Renaissance
- History | Middle East | Turkey & Ottoman Empire
- Religion | Islam | History
About the Author
Noel Malcolm read History and English Literature at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was a research student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Thomas Hobbes. He began his career as Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; he was then political columnist and,
subsequently, Foreign Editor of the Spectator, and then chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph. He gave the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford in 2001 and, since 2002, he has been a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow
of Peterhouse, Trinity, and Gonville and Caius. He has published books and articles on, among other subjects, early modern philosophy (with a particular emphasis on Hobbes), and the history and culture of the Balkans, especially during the Ottoman period. He was knighted in 2014 for services to
scholarship, journalism, and European history.