I suppose if I wanted any single moment of the book to be read by the random reader, it would be a particular battle, the battle of Cortenuova in the year 1237.On the edge of Lake Como, at the foot of the Alps, this is probably the farthest north a Muslim infantry ever fought on the Italian mainland. Even today, eight centuries later, it is remarkable to think that over three thousand Arabic-speaking Muslims, fighting not as mercenaries but as official subjects for their German emperor, would passionately take part in the civil wars of the Italian cities as far north as the cold plains of Lombardy.It is a consequence of our own historical ignorance that the picture of Italian Muslims, in the epoch of Dante and Aquinas, fighting the soldiers of Milan and Bologna against the backdrop of the Italian Alps, seems so strange. The simplistically “Christian Europe” we have all fallen so in love with, which gives us a tingle between the shoulder blades every time we visit a cathedral or listen to a fugue from Bach, has relied on the airbrushing-out of any trace of Islam or Judaism from the tradition. Until this process is reversed, the idea of Arabs fighting for the cities of Cremona and Ferrara, against the armies of Milan, will always sound absurd.The book has a couple of aims. The first is to re-think the idea of “Europe” as a place not of one religion but three, to try to re-connect our European history with a much older context. A whole variety of scholars are already doing this on a number of different levels: by showing how Arab literature produced narratives such as The Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, how Arab scribes were responsible for preserving much of Europe’s classical philosophical tradition. Even on a much more anecdotal level – Da Vinci’s recently discovered Turkish/Arab mother, for example – we are becoming more and more aware of the interrelationship between Europe and the Middle East. A second aim is to show how the idea of a “clash of civilizations” is the kind of nonsense that historical ignorance breeds. Most of the problems this cliché is meant to “explain” – Afghanistan, Israeli-Palestine, Iraq, the attacks in Mumbai, the rise of fundamentalism in Egypt or Pakistan – actually have a whole set of much more concrete explanations. The real explanations for these conflicts are often uncomfortable for the West – they involve US support of Israeli brutality, gas pipelines in Afghanistan run by Californian pipeline companies, oil lobbies, frustration with Western-friendly corrupt regimes, Western approval of Indian Army atrocities in Kashmir. So it is easier to push the “Islam” button every time a conflict takes place.