Italy and the Islamic WorldFrom Caesar to Mussolini

This book is an ambitious and innovative work of transnational history, for its narrative extends for one and a half millennia: 476 – 1952 AD. Its careful scholarship is enhanced by impressive documentation in both European and Islamic languages (Italian, French, Arabic and Turkish), full of kaleidoscopic and arresting detail. An extensive glossary covers place names, famous persons and technical terminology. The book places certain Italian cities at the front and centre of international commerce over many centuries, linking Europe with key areas of the Middle East and North Africa, a feature with tap roots in the ancient world, revealing, for example, how Carthage and Arabia fostered a global trade between West and East. Later chapters are enlivened by European travellers’ accounts of the long contact between Italy and the Muslim world, documenting the commercial links that Venice and Florence established with the Mamluks of Cairo and the Ottomans of Istanbul. Time and again, the author demonstrates how the interface between Orient and Occident surprised, fascinated and enriched both cultures.

Ali Humayun Akhtar’s Italy and the Islamic World: From Caesar to Mussolini is an ambitious and innovative work of transnational history. It distils an expansive body of scholarship and research into an engaging and accessible narrative that illustrates the centrality and the enduring impact of Italy's long and fruitful relationship with the Islamic world from Imperial Rome to Fascist Italy and beyond.

This book fills a gap in existing literature and a textbook in English with the focus on Italy and the Islamic World will be especially welcome by undergraduate history and culture teachers.

Italy and the Islamic World makes for fascinating reading and enables us to think about the history of the Mediterranean and the interconnectedness of societies over the centuries...ideal for the casual reader and, for the more specialist reader, it might provoke a new way of thinking about these communities and connections between countries.

[Akhtar] aims to show that Italy constituted a "bridge connecting Europe with the Middle East and North Africa," approaching this history from a global and longue durée (long-term) perspective. The author thus highlights, over the centuries, signs of relations and "porosity" across cultural borders, in order to show that modern Europe was built through Italy and its relations with these regions...He follows a more or less chronological outline, successively addressing the relations of the late Roman Empire with the Arabs, then the policy of the papacy in the first centuries of Islam, the Crusades, followed by four chapters dealing with Pisa, Genoa, Venice, and Florence, before ending with three chapters on the migrations of Italians to the Islamic world and of "Easterners" (including Andalusians) to Italy. From Zenobia to Dalida, the author parades a gallery of characters...well-contextualized, who bear witness to these relations—particularly commercial ones—cultural transfers, or forms of coexistence, and even multiculturalism.