St Augustine was probably the first major thinker to discuss at length how states use enemies for their own internal purposes. He traces with acid clarity the way in which the Roman Republic begins to collapse from its inner tensions and conflicts once Carthage, the great historic enemy, has been destroyed, and concludes that if you have no means of generating coherence and justice within your own polity, you will always be on the lookout for new enemies on to whom you can displace the threats arising from your own political failures.
It is an analysis that applies with uncanny accuracy to a range of modern political phenomena, from the insanity of the nuclear arms race in the Cold War to various more recent mythologies, including some popular characterisations of “the West” against “the Muslim world”. Noel Malcolm's brilliant study looks at a period not wholly unlike the Cold War: the three centuries during which the Ottoman empire was the unsettling Other to the Western Europe of early modernity. It was a period of sporadic (sometimes very extreme) military collision and long stretches of uneasy stand-off, complicated by the fact that the empire could be and was drawn into the diplomatic and military conflicts between Western states. Malcolm has some wry and intriguing pages on the theological gymnastics required to justify the fairly consistent pro-Ottoman diplomatic policies and strategic alliances of the “Most Christian” kings of France.
But his interest, as he states clearly in his introduction, is not so much in the details of diplomatic relations (though the book is a splendid guide to much of this history), nor in the actual development of social and political institutions in the Ottoman world. The focus is on the ways in which Western thinkers used what they knew about Islam and the Levantine world to make points to their own European readership. The utility of having on hand a sort of reversed image of one's own society is not only its helpfulness for rallying people in solidarity against a manifest threat; it is also about how the real and imagined strengths of this enemy throw light on the failures and weaknesses of one's own environment.
In the process that Malcolm nicely calls “shame-praising”, Western intellectuals can point to the discipline of Ottoman armies, or the visible piety of Muslim citizens, or the orderliness of Levantine households in order to reproach their own societies. Muslim forces are prevailing against Christian ones because Muslim populations exhibit virtues that Christians have forgotten – despite the superior truth of Christian teaching and the innate feebleness of “Orientals” in general (thanks to the hot climate of the region, apparently, which suggests that not enough of these experts had spent time in Thrace or Anatolia in November).
