anyone trying to understand the complexity of the ME gotta go back to the roots. I can recommend the "Sea of Faith": Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World.
The long, shared history of Christianity and Islam began, shortly after Islam emerged in the early seventh century A.D., with a question: Who would inherit the Greco-Roman world of the Mediterranean? Sprung from the same source—Abraham and the Revelation given to the Jews—the two faiths played out over the course of the next millennium what historian Stephen O’Shea calls “a sibling rivalry writ very large.” Their cataclysmic clashes on the battlefield were balanced by long periods of co-existence and mutual enrichment, and by the end of the sixteenth century the religious boundaries of the modern world were drawn.
Have fun.
