Introduction

Abstract

In a thought-provoking essay written in 1996, Roger Ballard explains how the geographical entity known as Europe became the product of a long process of ‘imagination’. Ballard suggested that the continent was effectively imagined out of a disparate group of peoples, speaking different languages, often pitted against each other in protracted and devastating wars. Not the product of a common history, or even of a common culture, the emergence of Europe was not as obvious a development as it might appear. As many commentators suggest (Ballard 1996, Delanty 1995, Neumann 1999), Europe, at the time of its inception as a cultural and geopolitical signifier, was a loose collection of Christian peoples. Christianity, of course, was by no means confined within the boundaries of today’s Europe as further to the East, in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the rest of North Africa flourished old, established Christian communities. What provided the impetus for the emergence of Europe was the rise and spread of Islam. As the new religion started appealing to the populations of traditional centres of Christendom, and Muslim armies spread the rule of Islamic leaders in the East and then further West to North Africa, Southern Europe and later on in the Balkans and beyond, Europe started taking shape largely with reference to the Muslim threat that lay just beyond its boundaries.