Josef W. Meri - Routledge Revivals: Medieval Islamic Civilization (2006): An Encyclopedia - Volume I

The study of Islam as a religion and the languages of the Middle East, especially Arabic and Persian, has gained in prominence. In the West, a common misperception exists that there is something intrinsic in Islam as a religion that engenders acts of violence and terrorism and that Islamics history is replete with instances of pogroms against non-Muslims. On the contrary, the origin of violent acts lies not in the ontology of any given religion whether Islam, Judaism, or Christianity, in any given Scripture whether the Quran, Torah, or Bible, or in any given civilization whether Islamic, Greek, or Roman, but rather in a number of factors, including the psychology of human behavior and the often desperate and trying human conditions that compel humans to carry out desperate acts in times of war and peace, sometimes in the name of religion. The historian of any civilization or historical epoch is keenly aware that no premodern (medieval) society was left unscathed by warfare and political conflicts. Lamentably, until now the paucity of easily accessible English language reference sources about the medieval Islamic world has led to a situation in which some discourses concerning the clash of civilizations, current affairs, and modern ideologies and nationalisms have become synonymous with the whole of Islamic civilization. By contrast, the scholar is able to communicate the defining characteristics of a civilization and is moreover, able to critically understand and engage the Islamic world on its own termsas heir to one of the worlds greatest civilizations, not simply as heir to a world religion whose adherents have historically been in conflict with adherents of other faiths.