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����������-Boulder religious studies professor who argues that Muslim culture in the Middle Ages was neither in a clash with the West nor in complete peaceful accord receives second NEH fellowship

Brian Catlos isn’t a big believer in the  view of Western history, which posits that Muslim culture and values are fundamentally at odds with those of the so-called West.

But neither does Catlos, professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, have much truck with the opposite school of thought, the rather nostalgic view of “,” the idea that peace and harmony prevailed between the three religions during the Middle Ages.

As with most relationships, he says, the reality is more complicated.

“You see that even within the same kingdom, the same individual, there are conflicting attitudes and policies toward people of different cultures,” says Catlos, whose 2014 book , received the  from the Middle East Studies Association.

“You have some leader spouting anti-Jewish rhetoric who has Jewish friends. There might be a Crusader who has Muslim allies.”

Diversity, in fact, was fundamental to the idea of “nation” at the time, with people of many cultures “bound under the domination of ruling elites that alternately played the cards of ethno-religious inclusion or exclusion, characterized as much by convivencia as violence,” says Catlos, a pioneer in the emerging cross-disciplinary field of Mediterranean Studies.

It was “a world of many Christianities, Judaisms and Islams, in which members of the various faiths fought, collaborated, debated and engaged together in the joint venture of creating the West.”

"It was ‘a world of many Christianities, Judaisms and Islams, in which members of the various faiths fought, collaborated, debated and engaged together in the joint venture of creating the West.'”

But something shifted around the turn of the 17th century, leading to a new Western ideology that defined nations by ethnic homogeneity, nationalism and religious orthodoxy.

Now, Catlos has time to explore that shift, thanks to a second fellowship from the . He is already at work on a book intended for a mass audience tentatively titled The Crucible of the West: The Mediterranean, Modernity and the Clash of Civilizations.

“It’s something I have wanted to do for a long time,” he says.

Though he originally planned to focus the book on the Middle Ages, Catlos and his agent decided to broaden its scope, beginning with the roots of Western civilization in Mesopotamia and extending into the 21st century, where daily headlines make clear that the subject is far from dry, dusty history.

“For a thousand years or longer, Christians, Jews and Muslims in the Mediterranean functioned pretty well together. Despite occasional wars and pogroms, it was generally stable,” Catlos says.

“After the 16th century, that really changes because of the emergence of the ideology of ethnic nationalism and religiously and racially based concepts of race that precludes that sort of diversity arises in northwest Europe.”

"My West is a big West that did not originate in northwestern Europe, but in the Helleno-Persian and Abrahamic cultural mileux that stretched from the Indus (river in present-day Pakistan) to the Atlantic.”

Until the 16th century, the Mediterranean region was the epicenter for art, culture, science and technology, and theology. But by 1600, northwest Europe—notably England, France and Germany—was rising in economic power as a result of maritime exploration.

“Through most of (Western history), northwestern Europe was little more than an underdeveloped corner of a Western world that was, in fact, centered on the Mediterranean,” he says.

Catlos argues that the region was the cradle for a new kind of nationalism, which defined cultures not by their diversity, but rather homogeneity and religious orthodoxy. Because Western academic tradition developed in those cultures, contemporary Western ideas of history generally hew to those assumptions.

“This is the same impulse in the last century would crystalize into the notion of the ‘secular state’—purportedly neutral in terms of values and identity, but … in fact an expression of a modern Christian culture, disguised by a thin veneer of rational secularism and shot through the prism of materialist ideologies such as ethno-centrism, communism, or free-market capitalism,” Catlos says.

Experts praise him for his use of archival documents to develop his argument.

“Catlos brings the study of the economic, social, cultural and religious life of these minorities a major step forward,” writes Gerard Wiegers, professor of religious studies at the University of Amsterdam, of Muslims in Medieval Latin Christendom.

But in shaking the tree of both the “clash” and “convivencia” camps, Catlos has been labeled an apologist for Muslim extremist violence, “anti-Jewish” and “anti-Christian,” as shown by comments to his recent piece in the Washington Post, 

But Catlos isn’t taking cues from critics, headlines or pundits. He’s delving deep into the historical record to make his case.

“The aim of my project is to confront the fact that our history of the West is a narrow West,” he says. “My West is a big West that did not originate in northwestern Europe, but in the Helleno-Persian and Abrahamic cultural mileux that stretched from the Indus (river in present-day Pakistan) to the Atlantic.”

Clay Evans is director of public relations for .