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Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs. By NADIA MARIA EL CHEIKH. Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs, vol. 36. Cambridge, Mass.: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004. Pp. xi + 271. $19.95 (paper).
Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs presents an exploration of the evolution of Muslim views of the Byzantine Empire and its inhabitants from the origins of Islam to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. It is not a complete, comprehensive study; indeed, El Cheikh herself acknowledges that the themes and topics addressed in the book were for the most part dictated by issues of importance, representativeness and source availability. The importance of the work lies above all in its laying out of important groundwork for future research.
In the introduction El Cheikh provides a survey of the sources before highlighting some of the problems related to the representation of the "other" that may be found in their pages. In particular, the vision that the early Muslim authors presented of the Byzantines was conceived, naturally, through their own cultural and religious beliefs, with the Byzantines being used as a deliberate contrast to the Muslims, enabling the Muslim authors to define aspects of their own culture in terms of how they differed from the Byzantines. Later Muslim writers were influenced by these earlier texts, resulting in a certain stability in the way that the Byzantines were perceived, even though such perceptions were also affected by the writers' own experiences.
The meat of El Sheikh's work consists of four chapters. Chapter one, "The Encounter with Byzantium," addresses the formation of the initial Muslim image of the Byzantines and its evolution up to and in the aftermath of the failed Muslim siege of Constantinople in 99/717. El Cheikh shows that Muslim authors exhibit a fluidity with regard to both the terminology used to refer to the Byzantines and their perception of the origins of the Byzantine race. She then goes...