Christian-Muslim Relations 1500-1900 (CMR1900)

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Reports and comments about relations between people from Christian and Muslim backgrounds appear daily in the news, whether it is politicians using the term crusade for Western incursions into Muslim countries, Pakistani courts trying Christians thought to have blasphemed Islam, or French police detaining Muslim women for defying dress laws. The inaccurate words and actions employed by people from one faith origin when thinking of the other frequently reflect attitudes about the other faith and its followers that are inherited from many centuries past. This project, Christian-Muslim Relations 1500-1900, is about these attitudes and the ways in which they were formed and have developed.The history of relations between Islam and Christianity stretches over 1400 years. Followers of the faiths have lived closely together from the beginning, and have sometimes benefited one another, as in 9th century Baghdad where important works of science and philosophy were translated from Greek into Arabic by Christians for Muslims, though they have more often defamed and attacked one another, as most dramatically in the Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries, which were seen as representing a Christian attack on Islam. This project seeks to uncover the stages of this history from 1500 to 1900, both to discover what was actually thought and written, and to explore what was taken as the norm about the character and status of the other. It is a continuation of an earlier AHRC-funded project that traced the history from 600 to 1500. It will build on this and take it forward to 1900, and it will explore the records of encounters between Christians and Muslims in all parts of the world. It has two objectives.The first is to compile a detailed history of all the known writings by Christians and Muslims about and against one another in the period 1500-1900. For this bibliographical history, four teams of specialists, each focusing on a major sector of the world, will bring together accounts of the works written in their sector, commissioning specialists on particular authors, regions and periods to write detailed analytical entries on the works. An entry will include information about the author, the contents of the work, its significance, the main themes within it, and full details about publication and studies written on it. Each entry will in this way contain a comprehensive account of a work, and the compilation into a connected history will place each one in the wider sweep of Christian-Muslim relations. The result, the collaboration of hundreds of scholars, will be a multi-volume history in unprecedented detail of the development of Christian-Muslim relations between 1500 and 1900. It will give readers access to a wide range of information that in the past has been restricted to specialists possessing particular language skills.The second objective is to use this bibliographical history to trace the main images and attitudes that have gradually become established as the accepted portrayal of the other, lodging in believers' minds and bedevilling efforts to move away from old ways of relating. Either themselves or in collaboration with others, the four project teams will produce thematic studies of attitudes held by Christians and Muslims about one another as they were transmitted through the centuries. In order to do this, they will use the analyses from the bibliographical history of the 1500-1900 years period, and also the history of the 600-1500 year period that has been produced in exactly the same way by the earlier project. The result will be a single or multi-volume history of images and opinions of the other held by Christians and Muslims from the 7th to the 20th century.The two histories will shed new light on a frequently troubled record. They will open up a new field of enquiry, and will also contribute towards explaining why Christians and Muslims often continue to misunderstand one another today.