Useful Enemies, Noel Malcolm
Useful Enemies, Noel Malcolm
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Useful Enemies
Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750

Author: Noel Malcolm

Narrator: Michael Page

Unabridged: 16 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/21/2020


Synopsis

From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the eighteenth century, many Western European writers viewed the Ottoman Empire with almost obsessive interest. Typically they reacted to it with fear and distrust; and such feelings were reinforced by the deep hostility of Western Christendom towards Islam. Yet there was also much curiosity about the social and political system on which the huge power of the sultans was based. In the sixteenth century, especially, when Ottoman territorial expansion was rapid and Ottoman institutions seemed particularly robust, there was even open admiration.



In this path-breaking book Noel Malcolm ranges through these vital centuries of East-West interaction, studying all the ways in which thinkers in the West interpreted the Ottoman Empire as a political phenomenon—and Islam as a political religion. Examining the works of many famous thinkers (including Machiavelli, Bodin, and Montesquieu) and many less well-known ones, Useful Enemies illuminates the long-term development of Western ideas about the Ottomans, and about Islam. Malcolm shows how these ideas became intertwined with internal Western debates about power, religion, society, and war.

Author Bio

Noel Malcolm read history and English literature at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was a research student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Thomas Hobbes. He began his career as fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge; he was then political columnist and, subsequently, foreign editor of the Spectator, and then chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph. He gave the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford in 2001 and, since 2002, he has been a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is a fellow of the British Academy, and an honorary fellow of Peterhouse, Trinity, and Gonville and Caius. He has published books and articles on, among other subjects, early modern philosophy (with a particular emphasis on Hobbes), and the history and culture of the Balkans, especially during the Ottoman period. He was knighted in 2014 for services to scholarship, journalism, and European history.

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