God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (Hardcover)

~ David Levering Lewis (Author)
Key Phrases: palace mayor, rashidun caliph, new amir, Ibn Rushd, North Africa, Eastern Roman Empire (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This superb portrayal by NYU history professor Lewis of the fraught half-millennium during which Islam and Christianity uneasily coexisted on the continent just beginning to be known as Europe displays the formidable scholarship and magisterial ability to synthesize vast quantities of material that won him Pulitzer Prizes for both volumes of W.E.B. Du Bois.In characteristically elegant prose, Lewis shows Islam arising in the power vacuum left by the death throes of the empires of newly Christianized Rome and Persian Iran, then sweeping out of the Middle East as a fighting religion, with jihad inspiring cultural pride in hitherto marginalized Arab tribes. After Charles Martel's victory at the Battle of Poitiers in 732 sent the Muslim invaders back south of the Pyrenees, the Umayyad dynasty consolidated its rule in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), forging a religiously tolerant, intellectually sophisticated, socially diverse and economically dynamic culture whose achievements would eventually seed the Renaissance. Meanwhile, the virtually powerless Roman popes joined forces with ambitious Frankish leaders, from Pippin the Short to Charlemagne, to create the template for feudal Europe: a religiously intolerant, intellectually impoverished, socially calcified, and economically primitive society. The collapse of the Umayyad dynasty and the rise of local leaders who embraced Muslim fundamentalism as a means to power destroyed the vitality of al-Andalus, paving the way for the Crusades and the Christian reconquista of Spain. Lewis clear-sightedly lays out the strengths and weaknesses of both worlds, though his sympathies are clearly with cosmopolitan doctor/philosophers like Ibn Rushd and Musa ibn Maymun (better known in the West as Averroës and Maimonides), who represented cultural eclecticism and creedal forbearance, sadly out of place in the increasingly fanatical 12th century. 8 pages of color illus., 4 maps. (Jan.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by James Reston Jr.

The title of David Levering Lewis's surprising new book, God's Crucible, brings to mind another piece of ceramic phrasing, Colin Powell's warning to President Bush about invading Iraq: "You break it. You own it." The people and the land of Iraq that we now own as occupiers can be counted among the shards, but the invasion and occupation have also wreaked havoc on a culture, a country's history, and its religion. For better or worse, every American needs to have a certain working knowledge of the traditions of the Middle East, not only for the momentous task of putting the pieces back together in Iraq, but also to avoid such nightmares in the future and to judge the overheated rhetoric of politicians in the forthcoming American election.

"For a historian," Lewis writes in his preface, "thinking about the present means thinking about the past in the present." So it should be for the citizen as well.

God's Crucible begins with the rise of Islam in the 6th and 7th centuries from the ruins of the conflict between imperial Rome and imperial Persia. This rise, Lewis writes expansively, is nothing short of "the greatest revolution in power, religion, culture, and wealth in history." In the aftermath, the Fertile Crescent, the vast area of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, was forfeited to the Islamic upstarts in the Arabian peninsula.

Lewis's treatment of Islam's explosive beginnings and its expansion across North Africa into Europe is lucid, and his command of detail is encyclopedic. His narrative is enriched by Arabic sources that are often ignored by European scholars. For today's Arabs and Muslims, these seminal events live intensely in the present: the life of Muhammad, the violent struggle for Mecca and Medina, the first four caliphs, the writing of the Koran and the split of the Shiites and Sunnis. If only for practical reasons, all Americans need to understand these things.

In the second half of the book, Lewis turns to the European response to the Islamic invasion from the Iberian peninsula. The Muslims were defeated in 732 at Poitiers, in present-day France. This historic turning point led to the formation of an inchoate Europe in opposition to Islam. When Charlemagne became king of the Franks in the late 8th century, he developed the concept of holy war versus jihad. Folklore created iconic heroes like Roland -- slaughtered with his men at Roncevaux in 778 and memorialized in the "Song of Roland" -- who embodied European chivalry, manly courage and Christian valor in the face of the infidel. "Poitiers and Roncevaux nurtured an ideology of Holy War and in time," Lewis writes, "of national arrogance to counter the advance of Islam." Through mythology, history was framed as a titanic struggle between Christianity and Islam, a struggle for a Christian warrior caste that could only end when Muslims everywhere were defeated and converted to the true faith.

In his later chapters, there are other important insights. Islam did not stop dead in its tracks in 732, as many believe; Muslim attacks on central Europe not only continued but intensified. If the Islamic forces had prevailed over Charles Martel -- known as "The Hammer" -- at Poitiers, scholars at Oxford and the Sorbonne might have been teaching interpretations of the Koran instead of the Bible afterward. If Charlemagne had been successful in his invasion of Islamic Spain in 778, the confrontation between Christianity and Islam there might have been accelerated by four centuries.

In Lewis's construction, Europe as a cohesive Christian dominion came into existence with Charlemagne. His coronation in Rome as the first Holy Roman Emperor in the year 800 certified the consolidation he had achieved during his 45-year reign. His palatine complex in Aachen stood in opposition to -- and in the shadow of -- Cordoba in Spain, the "brilliant ornament of the world," with its Great Mosque, its dazzling caliphal residence at Madinat al-Zahra, and its fabulous library. At this point, these two dominions, Christian and Islamic, stood in a fragile equipose militarily, but Muslim Iberia was far superior culturally and economically.

In God's Crucible, answers to many urgent questions, currently in the public discourse, can be deduced. Is Islam essentially a violent religion? Why do Sunnis and Shiites kill one another over a genealogical disagreement? Must we worry about the dream of a worldwide caliphate today, or a terrorist fantasy about restoring the glory of al-Andalus in southern Spain? Is Europe really a Christian continent?

Lewis has made an important contribution to the growing body of literature on Muslim-Christian relations that has emerged after 9/11. But his book also shows how daunting the task of understanding the history of the Middle East is for the average American. He makes no concession here to the general reader. While the book is erudite, it is marred by stilted academic prose and an overemphasis, especially in the first half, on the minutiae of tribal and sectarian conflict. Because of this density, it can be difficult to concentrate on the larger narrative, and many of his insights are inaccessible to the people who most need them.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.; illustrated edition edition (January 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393064727
• ISBN-13: 978-0393064728
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #179,358 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

95 of 120 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cultural Difussion, January 22, 2008

By	Retired Reader (New Mexico) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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The central argument of this rather rambling book is that the Islamic civilization that developed in the Iberian Peninsula after the Muslim conquest of the 8th Century contributed directly to the rebirth of Western European culture and learning. A secondary theme is that the Realm of Islam, after its initial and phenomenal expansion, developed into a uniquely tolerant and cultured society that compared very favorably to an intolerant and semi-barbaric Western Europe of the early Middle Ages. Yet this book is not a particularly good history. Nonetheless, it is a fun read. Lewis clearly enjoyed writing it and provides the reader with a lot of interesting detours and asides.

History is as much a matter of interpretation as a recounting of facts. It is certainly true that most Islamic fundamentalist today regard much of the period covered by this book (late 8th Century through the early 13th Century) as a `Golden Age' for Islam. It also appears accurate to argue that during this golden age at least parts of the Realm of Islam (Dar al Islam) achieved a remarkably tolerant society and a high level of culture. Yet this is a very relative conclusion. One suspects that most Muslims of the golden age were more like their contemporaneous European Christian counterparts than not. Golden age Islamic learning and culture, like contemporary European culture, were restricted to a learned minority and were scarcely universal. Also one would suspect that Islamic tolerance to religious minority groups such as the Jews and Coptic Christians was as dicey in the Golden Age as it is today. Still the Islamic society of the Iberian Peninsula had an enviable reputation for tolerance and certainly provided Western Europe with some of the intellectual horse power it needed to move into the high middle ages. Yet other influences also helped propel Europe into the pre-renaissance period. The reign of Charlemagne provided the stability needed to reinvigorate Western European learning and scholarship and by the late 10th Century Byzantine (East Roman) culture began again influencing Europe.

The great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne in 1937 wrote what even today is a brilliant book, "Mohammed and Charlemagne" (Amazon.com). In it he argued that the Muslim expansion and subsequent control of the Mediterranean Sea (7th Century) finally and completely brought an end to the commerce which kept at least the vestiges of the Roman commercial system alive in Europe long after the implosion of the Western Empire. In describing the Muslim influence on European development this is still the better book.

33 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Perils of Extremism, February 16, 2008

By	William J. Bowers (Beaufort, SC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"God's Crucible" is Pulitzer-Prize winning scholar David Levering Lewis's contribution to the ever-growing body of literature that seeks a better understanding of Islam and the roots of its long and complicated struggle with the west. Unlike other scholars of Islamic and Middle Eastern history who have dashed off books in the wake of September 11 -- Bernard Lewis (whom the author consulted) and Michael Oren are among the best known -- Levering Lewis's prior books have focused on Martin Luther King Jr, W.E.B. DuBois, and the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. This gave Lewis a fresh perspective in writing "God's Crucible" as he was not burdened by what he might have written in earlier books. Still, it is clear that Lewis himself did not really know where his research would take him, what his main points would be, or even what to call this book before he started (a friend, Sandra Masur, suggested the eventual title, "God's Crucible"). With that said, this is a useful and thoughtful book.

"God's Crucible" refers to al-Andalus, or Muslim Spain, as the site of the first clash of civilizations between Islam and the Christian west. Lewis's "God's Crucible" emphasizes three major themes: (1) the rise of Islam was enabled by perpetual conflict between the Roman Empire and the Iranian Empires (Parthian, Sassanian, Persian); (2) Islam and its Caliphates almost immediately were infected by the inevitable power struggles that plague all such institutions, and even in the so-called glory-days of the first Caliphate, Islam was not monolithic; and finally (3) coexistence between Islam and Christianity in al-Andalus (if not entirely peaceful) engendered the transmission of knowledge and ancient texts from the more-advanced civilization of the caliphs in the east to the backward, medieval Christians of Europe.

The first theme is that the centuries-old imperial struggle between Latin Rome and Persian Iran created the conditions for the disunited Arab tribes living in the deserts of Arabia to unite, found a new religion, and create a greater Islamic Empire. This "Caliphate" subsequently encompassed Arabia, all of modern Iran, and stretched west across North Africa to the pillars of Hercules and north into Europe up to the Pyrenees. Perpetual conflict arguably began in 53 BC when Marcus Crassus infamously brought an invasion force across the Euphrates River Valley. Crassus's expedition met with disaster at Carrhae, resulting in his own destruction and that of seven legions. The Roman Emperors never entirely lost their thirst for expansion into the east however, and Emperors such as Trajan, Severus, Justinian, Constantine, and Heraclius would all bring armies into the fertile crescent in an effort to subdue this troublesome region. This perpetual warfare fatally weakened both the Roman and Persian Empires to the point that although Khosrow II of Persia had thought he won a decisive victory in Jerusalem in 615 AD by bringing back the relics of the Holy Cross, his victory was largely Pyrrhic. A new force led by Muhammad was emerging from the barren sands of Arabia.

Muhammad was born in Mecca, a small town on a popular Roman trade route, in 570 AD. In the month of Ramadan in the year 610, the 40-year old Muhammad began to hear messages from God that he spread to others through his teachings. By the time he died in 632 AD, Muhammad had united all of the tribes of Arabia into a powerful military force that rapidly expanded into the vacuum left by the militarily exhausted Roman and Persian Empires. Riddled with internal decay, the Persian Empire was soon swept away by Islamic forces while these same forces concurrently spread like wildfire across formerly Roman North Africa and into Spain. By 711 AD, Islamic Armies had advanced into and established a firm foothold in Spain, or al-Andalus. But this newly created Islamic Empire was hardly united.

Lewis's second theme is that Islam itself was never monolithic, and that while the caliphs did not distinguish between church and state, both church and state suffered major cleavages early in the first Caliphate. Almost immediately after Muhammad's death, conflict arose over who his legitimate successors should be. One faction argued that it should be Muhammad's familial descendants, who became the Shi'ites, while another faction thought the community of the faithful should choose their own rulers to follow Muhammad, who became the Sunnis. These factions remain locked in perpetual conflict to this day. On the state side, the Umayyad caliphs ruled from 711-750, but suffered defeat at Poitiers (in southern France) in 732. While not catastrophic, this defeat weakened the Umayyads at a time when they were also plagued with rebellion from the North African Berbers. The Abbasids eventually took advantage of this Umayyad weakness and overthrew the caliphate, establishing their own in 750 and moving its capitol from Damascus to Baghdad. But this story gets more complicated. An incredible 19-year-old Umayyad named Abd al-Rahman I escaped from certain death in North Africa into al-Andalus, eventually establishing a power base there that enabled him to rule for 25 years. Nicknamed "The Falcon" for his cunning, and with survival being the mother of all necessity, Rahman I cooperated with Christians to defeat Abassid armies dispatched to bring him to heal. With these dynamics at play, the conditions were created in al-Andalus for Islamic and Christian coexistence in "God's Crucible."

This brings us to Lewis's third theme: that important knowledge from the center of Islamic civilization in Baghdad made its way across North Africa, onto the "conveyor belt" of Toledo, and into Christian Europe. Lewis argues that this knowledge provided critical building blocks for the Renaissance and western awakening centuries later. He also seems to lament how the Christian response to jihad, which became officially sanctioned Holy War, gradually erased the "middle ground" that had existed in al-Andalus that allowed the transmutation of such valuable knowledge. al-Andalus deteriorated into extremism on both sides. In this lament, he seems to be speaking directly to the modern world of the dangers and lasting harm caused by extremism.

In conclusion, this is a useful and thoughtful book that sheds much-needed light on a period of history that is rarely examined or understood. The book contains abundant maps, a glossary of terms, and a genealogy of both Muslim and Christian rulers. Still, I would hesitate to recommend this book to everyone as it often wanders a field, is dense with difficult names and places, and reads as if it were written for an academic rather than a general audience. Lewis himself says that this project started out as a small book that became a large one, and the reader is left to wonder if the abundance of Lewis's research and the complexity of his subject caused him to write a book that surpasses the reach of those he likely intended it for. In a larger scope though, "God's Crucible" is an important contribution to understanding Islam's long struggle with the Christian west, which is a topic that will remain with all of us for some time.

55 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Glory of Al-Andalus, March 8, 2008

By	Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The subtitle of this work indicates that this is a history of Islamic influence on Europe from the birth of Muhammad in 510 to the Pope Innocent III's 1215 decree that all Muslims should be expelled from Iberia. That it does in a rough outline; the main focus of this story, however, is about Arab civilization on the Iberian Peninsula -know as Al-Andalus - from 711, when Arab armies intially crossed the Strait of Gibralter, to 788, with the death of Abd al-Rahman - who is in fact the main character of this narrative.

Students of the Middle Ages know this period as the golden age, a period of relative enlightenment in a long stretch of darkness. David Levering Lewis chronicles the achievements of this period. Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in functional harmony known as "convivencia." It was a time of robust commerce and open-minded inquiry. Averroes (Ibn Rushd) wrote his works on Aristotle and Moses Maimonides his "Guide For the Perplexed." (Read also Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages by Richard Rubenstein.) This was in fact the gateway through which the classics of Ancient Greece and Rome entered Europe. Lewis takes this a step further and makes the claim that Europe would have been well served if the Muslims had conquered the entire continent. He argues that this would have given Europe a 300 hundred year headstart on the path of development.

Such claims of course are pointless unless one has an agenda, and apparently Lewis does. The point he's trying to make is that Western historians have misrepresented Islam. Taking a page from Edward Said's playbook countering Western orientalism, Lewis argues that Islam was superior to Western culture. This view naturally will not be very popular with Western audiences. It may have been true for a brief period during the Middle Ages, but it certainly hasn't been true in the modern period. Islam, as well as Christianity and other religions, went through periods of tolerance and intolerance, depending on historical circumstances. It is not by nature tolerant or intolerant. The Koran, which is a collection of writings, speaks both ways on the subject.

And when one looks more closely at the so-called golden age, we see a variety of ethnic and religious groups forced to live together, not by choice but of necessity. Jews and Christians lived more restricted lives than Muslims. They were forced to pay taxes. The only way to avoid taxation was to convert to Islam - which many did. In 732, with the tax base shrinking, the Arabs decided to cross the Pyrenees to increase their revenues. They were stopped, however, at Poitiers by Charles Martel and his ragtag band of warriors. The Arab defeat was due not so much to the superiority of the Franks but rather to the discord within Arab ranks. The Arab march into Europe had come to an end and the golden age with it.

Lewis never misses an opportunity to extol Muslim civilization and to denigrate the European. Europeans were always ignorant, rude, unwashed, violent, and they lived in makeshift settlements and encampments. Although Charlemagne was a brief bright spot in the narrative, things went into futher decline for Europe with the Viking invasions of the 9th century.

Lewis' attempt to show that Islam was a religion of tolerance and prosperity in the Middle Ages was correct as far as that period was concerned. He is not convincing when he claims that it is by nature tolerant, for it was and is many things to many people. What it becomes in the 21st century is still an open book.