A new book reclaims the 1,400-year Muslim history of Europe — challenging myth of a purely Judeo-Christian continent

LONDON (MNTV) — When Tharik Hussain stood in the ruins of Muslim cities in Spain and Portugal that had street lighting and plumbing while London languished in mud and squalor, he was confronting a history that most Europeans — and most European Muslims — have never been taught. 

His new book, Muslim Europe: A Journey in Search of a Fourteen Hundred Year History, published by Viking, is an attempt to recover that history and, in doing so, to overturn one of the most enduring assumptions about the continent: that it is, at its foundation, a Judeo-Christian civilisation into which Islam arrived only recently and as an outsider.

Hussain — a British journalist and travel writer of Sylheti heritage whose previous book, Minarets in the Mountains, was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize — has spent two decades retrieving what he describes as a forgotten, neglected, and deliberately erased Muslim European past. 

Where that earlier work focused on the Ottoman-era Muslim communities of the western Balkans, his new book reaches much further back, tracing the Muslim presence in Europe from the seventh century to the fall of Granada in 1492.

A journey across forgotten ground

The book is structured as a travelogue, following Hussain across Cyprus, Sicily, Malta, Portugal, and Spain. 

The journey begins in the little-known Sufi lodges of Cyprus, where Muslims first arrived on European soil in 647 AD — within living memory of the Prophet Muhammad himself. 

Along the way, Hussain uncovers the tombs of European Muslims who had personally known the Prophet, and at one point becomes, by his account, the first Muslim in more than 900 years to pray inside the remains of an unnamed Sicilian mosque.

Rather than working as a conventional academic historian, Hussain pieces his picture together from physical remains — the ruins of mosques, Muslim cemeteries, Sufi lodges, and pleasure palaces — to reconstruct what reviewers have described as a flourishing and sophisticated Muslim European high culture that embraced Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike.

The detail is vivid and pointed. As the Telegraph’s reviewer Noel Malcolm noted, while English doctors of the era were prescribing crushed snails and smouldering goat’s hair, trained physicians in Muslim Córdoba were successfully performing caesareans and cataract operations. 

Hussain marvels at the free Muslim hospitals of Spain and Portugal — public healthcare a thousand years before Britain’s NHS — and introduces forgotten pioneers such as Abbas Ibn Firnas, an early aviation experimenter, and Ibn Sina (Avicenna), whose work shaped the foundations of modern medicine.

How Islam shaped Renaissance

One of the book’s central arguments concerns cross-fertilisation. In Sicily, Hussain describes a succession of Arab-Norman Christian rulers — including the remarkable Frederick II, who died in 1250 — who styled themselves as sultans, learned Arabic, and established centres to translate pioneering Arabic works of philosophy and science. 

This transmission of knowledge, Hussain contends, fed directly into the later European Renaissance.

The English court was not immune to this influence. Through strong Norman dynastic links, King Henry II married his daughters to rulers in Sicily and Spain and was tutored by Adelard of Bath — often considered the first English scientist — who had learned Arabic in Sicily and Spain and translated numerous Arabic works of philosophy and science into Latin. 

The book makes the case that the intellectual scaffolding of European modernity was, in significant part, built on Muslim foundations.

A sanctuary for Europe’s Jews

Among the book’s most resonant themes is the role Muslim Europe played as a refuge for the continent’s Jewish population. 

For twelve centuries, Hussain argues, Muslim-ruled territories offered Jews protection and the conditions to flourish — a period that produced what is often called the Jewish Golden Age, with Córdoba and Toledo regarded by Sephardi Jews as a high point of Hebrew poetry and language.

Hussain notes a bitter irony: when Jews were eventually expelled from Iberia by Catholic rulers, forced to choose between conversion and exile, it was Muslims in North Africa and the Ottomans in Turkiye who provided them sanctuary. 

Yet, as the reviewer Philip Lewis observed in his assessment of the book, many Israeli visitors to the beautiful synagogues of Toledo and Córdoba today have little awareness of how deeply Jewish culture once flourished under Muslim rule.

“Anti-Muslim DNA”

Hussain does not shy away from explaining why this history has been forgotten. In the book, he maps what he calls Europe’s “anti-Muslim DNA” — a strand of hostility he traces back to the narratives of the medieval Crusades and the nation-building myths that, in his account, foregrounded a Graeco-Roman and Catholic past while erasing centuries of Muslim presence. 

He argues in his introduction that the scarcity of coverage of Muslim Europe, even among prominent historians, perpetuates a post-Christian, Eurocentric narrative that is anti-Muslim at its core.

This erasure, Hussain has said in interviews, has real consequences. A state-school-educated journalist who once embraced an austere Saudi Salafi Islam — a phase in which, he has written, he felt no need to worry about Muslim history or about belonging in British society because his role models lay elsewhere — Hussain came to see the recovery of European Muslim heritage as urgent precisely because of its capacity to anchor identity. 

He has argued that young European Muslims who feel alienated and disconnected have no reason to, because their European heritage is a rich one — and that teaching it in a normalised way could help counter the sense of being outsiders that can make some susceptible to extremist messaging.

Book for polarised times

The book has drawn praise from a range of prominent writers and historians. William Dalrymple called it vital and important, describing it as a book he had long wished someone would write, and one that reminds readers of the immense debt Europe still owes the Muslim world at a time when Muslims are routinely depicted as dangerous outsiders.

The Times described it as offering a fresh, bracing perspective on European history, while the New Statesman’s Daniel Motadel said it complicates the notion of Europe as a closed Judeo-Christian space.

Hussain’s journey ends, fittingly, with a personal note — sharing a curry in Madrid’s equivalent of the “Banglatown” of his East London childhood, alongside a Sylheti relative and friends. 

Like his parents’ generation, his companions express little interest in European Muslim heritage or in belonging to Spain. 

But their children, Hussain hopes, may be different. His aspiration is that his work will help them forge what he calls a “place identity” — a sense of belonging rooted in the recognition that Muslims are not newcomers to Europe but have been an integral part of its story for fourteen centuries.

In an era when debates about national identity, immigration, and who truly belongs in Europe have grown increasingly heated, Muslim Europe arrives as both a work of historical recovery and a quiet act of resistance — an argument, made through ruins and tombs and the testimonies of those who tend them, that Europe has always been more diverse, more interconnected, and more indebted to Islam than it has been willing to remember.