25/08/2026
FINALLY, A HIGHLY SCHOLARLY BOOK THAT DEEPLY SPEAKS TO ME ABOUT COEXISTENCE, HISTORY, AND OUR SHARED HUMANITY!
I am genuinely happy to have finally received this remarkable new book, "Coexistence in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies: Politics, Trade, and Culture in Anatolia and Iberia", edited by Ahmet Usta and Omer Fatih Parlak both from Istanbul, Turkiye (Turkey) and published in May 2026. I recently ordered it from an online seller, and there is something particularly satisfying about holding a book in my hands that connects so closely with the questions I have been discussing with my students through the years in Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy (Political Science 192), especially our conversations about Muslim-Christian coexistence in Andalusia (Muslim Spain) and the wider Mediterranean world. There are books I simply read; others seem to arrive at precisely the right moment in my intellectual journey as an interfaith advocate in Muslim-Christian Dialogue. For me, this is one of those books!
What immediately attracted me to this book is that it does not fall into the familiar academic temptation of presenting the medieval past either as a "romantic golden age" of perfect religious tolerance or as a perpetual battlefield between supposedly incompatible civilizations. Instead, the book gives us a much more complicated, nuanced, and therefore much more human, picture of coexistence. In medieval Iberia (specifically Islamic Spain called "Andalusia"), Anatolia, and the broader Mediterranean and Islamicate Worlds, Muslims, Christians, and Jews did not live in completely separate compartments. They encountered one another constantly—in marketplaces, courts, ports, schools, diplomatic settings, intellectual circles, universities, and ordinary communities. They traded with one another, negotiated with one another, learned from one another, and sometimes fought one another. There was conflict, inequality, political domination, and oppression, but there was also curiosity, accommodation, intellectual exchange, friendship, commerce, academic cooperation, philosophical ferment, mutual translation, and cultural borrowing. In other words, coexistence was not a perfect condition that people simply enjoyed; it was a difficult and constantly negotiated human process.
This is what makes the idea of coexistence or "convivencia" in Andalusian Spanish so fascinating to me. We sometimes speak about coexistence as though it were merely an ethical ideal—a beautiful principle that we hope societies will someday achieve. But this book reminds us that coexistence was also a practical and pragmatic necessity. People who belonged to different religions and cultures had to find ways of living, trading, governing, communicating, reflecting, and surviving together. Their relationships were shaped by changing political circumstances and economic interests, but also by scholarship, philosophy, diplomacy, and culture. Coexistence or "convivencia" could be fragile and imperfect, but it was real, and it left profound marks on the political and intellectual history of both Medieval Europe and the Islamicate World.
The more I read about this interconnected medieval European and Islamicate World, the more I am reminded of how artificial some of our modern civilizational boundaries can be. This book brings together an astonishing range of materials—from Arabic scientific manuscripts and medieval maps to diplomatic records, Turkish Ottoman sources, commercial networks, Jewish-Muslim-Christian life in the Iberian Peninsula, and even medieval chivalric and board games engaged by Jews, Muslims, and Christians. These seemingly different pieces of evidence reveal something very important: ideas, goods, technologies, stories, and human beings were constantly moving, relating, and interconnecting. The Mediterranean World was not simply a boundary separating civilizations; it was also a bridge connecting them. Anatolia and Iberia, although geographically distant from one another, became places where different peoples and traditions encountered, influenced, challenged, and transformed each other.
I am particularly fascinated by the intellectual dimension of this story. Figures such as Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Al-Ghazali (Algazel), De Padua, De Cusa, and Aquinas, and the wider transmission of scientific and philosophical knowledge that eventually reached scholars such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Al-Khwarizm, and Ulugh Bey remind us that knowledge does not belong permanently to one civilization, religion, or language. Ideas and concepts travel. They are translated, debated, criticized, negotiated, refined, absorbed, and transformed. What we sometimes describe today as “Western” knowledge and “Islamic” knowledge was, in many instances, the product of long chains of encounters among Arabic, Greek, Jewish, Latin, Persian, Turkish, Indian, Chinese, Mongol, and other intellectual traditions. The history of knowledge is therefore much more like an intellectual conversation across generations and cultures than a collection of isolated intellectual traditions...
Perhaps, this is why this book has affected me personally. As someone who teaches political science, I am constantly reminded that politics is not only about institutions, elections, power, and the State. It is also about how human beings navigate, imagine, and relate with one another. It is about the stories we tell about people who are different from ourselves and about whether we see difference as a threat or as an opportunity for encounter. When we teach history merely as a succession of wars, armed struggles, and conflicts across and between civilizations, we risk teaching our students that separation and conflict are somehow inevitable. But when we examine the countless moments of exchange, cooperation, negotiation, and intellectual borrowing, we begin to see another dimension of the human story.
This does not mean romanticizing Andalusia, or Ottoman Anatolia, or the medieval Mediterranean. I think it is important to resist that lazy and easy temptation to do so. The past was not an idyllic Paradise in which everyone lived peacefully together. There were serious inequalities, religious tensions, political struggles, persecution, and violence. But acknowledging those realities does not diminish the significance of coexistence or "convivencia". In fact, it makes coexistence even more remarkable. The lesson is not that people of different faiths always lived harmoniously; the lesson is that despite their differences and despite periods of conflict, they repeatedly found ways to encounter one another and to construct forms of shared life, mutual community or "koinonia", and shared "oikumene" or broad human solidarity. That is a much more honest lesson—and perhaps much more hopeful lesson.
And this, for me, is where this book becomes more than a study of Medieval History and Culture. It becomes a philosophical reflection on what it means to be human. We often imagine civilization as something that develops within clearly defined boundaries, but history suggests almost the opposite. Civilizations grow through encounters. They borrow, adapt, imitate, resist, reinterpret, and transform. No culture is completely self-created, and no civilization exists in an intellectual vacuum. Behind the great achievements of any society are countless encounters with people who came before and with people who lived somewhere else, spoke another language, practiced another religion, or understood the world differently.
There is something deeply humbling about that realization. It reminds us that none of us inherits a completely isolated intellectual or cultural tradition. We are all, in one way or another, beneficiaries of encounters that took place long before we were born. The book's medieval Mediterranean World is therefore not merely a story about Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the distant past. It is also a story about us—about how human beings have always been connected, even when political boundaries and religious differences tried to separate them.
I find this especially meaningful in the world we inhabit today. We live in a day and age when it is very easy to emphasize differences and "group othering": Muslim and Christian, East and West, European and Asian, “our civilization” and “their civilization.”, etc., etc. Political rhetoric can make these distinctions appear permanent and absolute. Yet history continually complicates such narratives into a nuanced pluralist discourse. The people whom we imagine as belonging to separate civilizations were often trading in the same markets, reading translated versions of one another's books, using one another's scientific knowledge, negotiating treaties, sharing cities, and influencing one another's intellectual lives. The boundaries were there, but they were never impermeable nor rigid.
For me, perhaps the greatest inspiration of this book is the realization that coexistence is not the disappearance of difference. It is the ability to live with difference without allowing difference to destroy our common humanity. It requires negotiation, patience, curiosity, humility, and sometimes simply the practical wisdom to recognize that our lives are connected to those "Other" whom we do not fully understand. It is not always easy, and it is never perfect, but history shows us that it is possible.
I have found this book intellectually rich, beautifully interdisciplinary, and deeply spiritually enriching. Although it is certainly a very serious academic work and, at times, dense in its scholarship, I find it remarkably readable, especially because every chapter seems to open another window into a medieval world that was far more interconnected and intellectually vibrant than the simplified narratives we often inherit. I already know that this book will enrich my classroom discussions and give me much more to share with my students as we explore the political, intellectual, and historical dimensions of Muslim-Christian relations in Medieval Andalusia and beyond.
More than anything, I am grateful for books like this because they remind us that history is not merely a record of what human beings have done; it is also a record of what human beings have been capable of doing. The medieval Mediterranean World of Andalusia and Anatolia gives us examples of conflict, certainly, but it also gives us examples of encounter, exchange, adaptation, and coexistence. If people separated by religion, language, geography, and political allegiance could, under difficult circumstances, find ways to share a world, perhaps we ought to be more hopeful about our own capacity to do the same.
That is why I love this book. It does not ask us to forget our differences or to romanticize the past. Instead, it invites us to look more honestly at history and to recognize something profoundly human within it: we have always been connected to one another, and perhaps the challenge of civilization has never been to eliminate our differences, but to learn how to live with them.
I am very grateful to have this wonderful new book in my hands right now, and I look forward to reading it seriously, slowly, thoughtfully, reflectively, and perhaps even philosophically or spiritually. I have a very strong feeling that this will not remain merely another of those many books on my shelf. It will become part of my ongoing conversations with my students—and, hopefully, part of the continuing discussions about whether a world divided by religious and cultural differences can still choose coexistence over separation, dialogue over suspicion, and human solidarity over the thick, hardened, and massive walls we so often build between ourselves... This book is indeed a beautiful and sublime addition to my library, and, I suspect, a book that will stay and resonate with me long after I have finished reading its final page.
(Written by Prof. Henry Francis B. Espiritu on August 25, 2026 at 6:02 PM.)
