Customer Reviews

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

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Clearly a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Europe's origins and Islam's role in it, but it is a trial. What starts out as a fascinating narrative soon devolves into a hard slog thanks to the author's annoying habit of infusing his own anachronistic presuppositions into the history.

The central argument of the book, and a valid one I think, is that Europe might have advanced more rapidly in its development had the Franks not checked the advance of Muslim armies into Europe at the Pyrenees. Lewis' hero, Abd al-Rahman, the first self-styled Amir of Andalusian Spain, was the sole survivor of the Syrian Umayyads, once proud rulers of Islam in the East, overthrown at last by the Abbasids. The boy made one narrow escape from assassination after another until he reached Spain where he rapidly rose to become the sophisticated ruler of al-Andalus, the parts of the Iberian Peninsula and Septimania under Muslim rule.

Lewis is at his best here. His love for the culture of Andalusian Spain and his appreciation for the sophistication of Arab culture is contagious and I found his overview of the rise of Islam thoroughly engrossing. But it's fairly plain that Muhammad brought the new faith of Islam into a civilization that was already ancient, prosperous and sophisticated. And this certainly is a factor in the speed with which it spread.

The same simply cannot be assumed about Europe, the very idea of which simply did not exist, even as the young Charlemagne earned his spurs fighting back the armies of pagan Saxons, Slavs and the many petty dukes ruling in the regions that would become France. The land mass that would become Europe was a cauldron of barbarous fights for survival as isolated pockets of learning desperately fought to keep what little learning existed afloat. There was no economy to speak of, no single currency, and no established rule of law apart from that enforced at the end of a sword.

But Lewis cannot restrain repeatedly expressing his sneering contempt for this proto-society as he highlights the stark differences between Dark Age Europe and al-Andalus.

For all of his vaunted academic credentials, Lewis' writing style often leaves much to be desired.

In his New York Times review of the book, Eric Ormsby rightfully points out:

"Lewis has a penchant for awkward turns of phrase. In discussing the translation of ancient texts into Arabic, for instance, he refers often to the "Toledo conveyor belt," making the slow, meticulous translation of Greek treatises into Arabic sound like something carried out at an Ohio auto plant. Occasionally he goes even farther astray; in discussing the Prophet's views on women, he writes, "Muhammad's comparatively enlightened ideas (as explained by Allah) about gender roles positively distinguished the Koran from its misogynistic Mosaic and Pauline analogues." It's hard to know what disturbs more here, the factual inaccuracies or the personal opinions inserted under cover of jargon."

It gets worse. On page 165 for example, Lewis ludicrously refers to the English monk and historian, the Venerable Bede, as 'the Einstein of the Dark Ages', an analogy so clueless this reader could only put the book down for a moment and shake his head. What exactly Einstein and Bede have in common is never made plain, but I soldiered onward.

Almost two hundred pages later Lewis describes the rise of the monk Gerbert, who we are told learned a great deal during his sojourn in Barcelona, particularly, so the author tells us, in mathematics and astronomy. He writes of this future Pope Sylvester II: "In 980, the priest published his revolutionary four-page textbook on the new mathematics. It was a pivotal moment in the intellectual history of the West, reminiscent of the four physics papers published by Albert Einstein in 1909."

1909?

For all his merits as an historian of al-Andalus, clearly the author is as unfamiliar with the life and work of Einstein (whose 'miracle year' was 1905) as he is with the 'mumbo jumbo' of church Latin which he repeatedly condemns.

The usual ignorance of medieval scholarship is also on display throughout the book. Thomas Aquinas is once again dismissed as an over cautious scholar only interested in accepting what was 'theologically safe' from the works of Maimonides and Ibn Rushd. Lewis fails to point out that, far from being acceptable to the Christian theologians of the time, Aquinas' careful synthesis was condemned as harshly as Maimonides and Ibn Rushd were by their own communities. His detestation of Christianity's role in Europe simply blinds him to the possibility that these intellectuals were three peas in a pod, not two.

At the close of the book Lewis repeats the standard cliches about the authoritarian Pope Innocent III and his stipulations, that Jews and Muslims dwelling in Christendom should be set apart with distinctive garb. This was a hideous practice...earlier instituted in al-Andalus by Abd al-Rahman. Europe certainly benefited from the mores it learned from al-Andalus, the enlightened and the not-so-enlightened.

As I said, worth reading, but with caution over the author's political correctness.

"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.

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.

The author writes from a strong political and social perspective of portraying the occupiers of Andalus as a peaceful and sophisticated civilisation and the Europeans and Christians as coarse and brutish. Handle this book with care. It's a good read but the historical analysis is questionable.

I'll quote from a review by By Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times - "Lewis sets out to show that the failure of what he calls "the jihad east of the Pyrenees" is "one of the most significant losses in world history." He argues that the ... In other words, the West would be better off if it had been incorporated into an all-conquering Islamic empire in the early Middle Ages.

OK.

Still, it's fair to wonder why, if that's true, the West ended up with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Revolution and the Islamic world got chronic underdevelopment, a pervasive religious obscurantism, Al Qaeda and the trust fund states of the Arabian peninsula? It's also fair to point out that both the Muslim philosopher Averros and the Jewish philosopher-physician Maimonides were sent fleeing for their lives by Islamic fundamentalists and not the Christian Reconquista. Moreover, the Carolingian incursion into Spain -- over which Lewis frets so forcefully -- was undertaken in response to an invitation by Saracen grandees fearful of Abd al-Rahman's expanding hegemony.

Moreover, Lewis isn't the first "big picture" thinker to go down this road. As the formidable historian of fascism Stanley G. Payne pointed out in his recent study of wartime relations between Spain and Germany, Hitler mused that Europe would have been much better off if the Muslims had won at Poitiers because a German state possessed of a "warrior" ideology, like Islam, rather than a crippling Christianity would have conquered the world long before.

The only thing the Fuehrer and an impeccably democratic, humane scholar like Lewis have in common is an understanding of the origins and failures of European civilization that far surpasses their knowledge of Islam Take, for example, the chronology with which Lewis begins his book. At the date 610, a reader finds: "Angel Gabriel visits Muhammad."

Right.

At 650: "Definitive Qur'an produced."

In fact, we know comparatively little about the origins of the Koran because Islamic hostility to the kind of source criticism to which the Hebraic and Christian scriptures have long been subjected has made scholarly research into the evolution of Muslim scriptures -- and they evolved as surely as the Bible did -- physically dangerous. Even today, efforts by German scholars to produce a critical edition of the Koran proceed almost in secret out of fear of reprisal.

Somehow, that ought to be factored into Lewis' reckoning of what flowed from the Frankish victory at Poitiers."

And look at the review in the New York Times - google it - by Eric Ormsby who write " Occasionally he goes even farther astray; in discussing the Prophet's views on women, he writes, "Muhammad's comparatively enlightened ideas (as explained by Allah) about gender roles positively distinguished the Koran from its misogynistic Mosaic and Pauline analogues." It's hard to know what disturbs more here, the factual inaccuracies or the personal opinions inserted under cover of jargon."

And look at the review by Ed Voves in the Californian Literary Review. - google it

And a centrpiece of the book is that the Chanson de Roland - epic poem or oral history - was falsified to portray Roland as killed by forces of the Caliph of Cordoba instead of being killed by Basques. However "according to the thirteenth century Arab historian Ibn al-Athir, Charlemagne came to Spain upon the request of the "Governor of Saragossa", Sulayman al-Arabi, to aid him in a revolt against the caliph of Cordoba. Arriving at Saragossa and finding that al-Arabi had had a change of heart, Charlemagne attacked the city and took al-Arabi prisoner. At Roncevaux Pass, al-Arabi's sons collaborated with the Basques to ambush Charlemagne's troops and rescue their father."

I have no problems with opinions, it's part of the clash of ideas and civilisations. But read this not as an impartial history, read this in the knowledge that it will be a political narrative from the perspective of 'the West and Christianity are bad/doomed/failed/never any good'.

For convenience I won't cite the dozens of times the text contains a phrase along the lines of '[sundry Umayyad or Berber or Arab] sacked [town] and killed many people but this was a necessary part of restoring order and living the civil intellectual life ...' whereas the Christian or Visigoth equivalents were coarse and brutish. What's of concern is the repetition, the sense of PR implicit in the analysis and the rooting for the invaders. It's like Stockholm syndrome (victim sympathising with invader) and a parallel would be a French Vichy or Pole writing about how the Nazis were really quite civilised. Perhaps it's hard for a historian to maintain balance, but it makes me feel as though I'm reading a hagiography not a history.

IMHO all the civilisations of that era were bloodthirsty and they all had arcs of influence rising and falling. However there's no black and white as this book attempts to portray.

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.

On balance, I was glad I read this book - but it was something of a near thing, and I had to push myself a couple of times when I was tempted to give up on it. It details some fascinating history, which should be better-known to educated Westerners - particularly Americans - than it is. And the author is without question a distinguished historian, who has won both a McArthur "genius" fellowship and two (count `em) Pulitzer Prizes for the successive volumes of his biography of W.E.B. DuBois (a figure, however, who is remote in time and subject matter from this book). But there were several factors that caused me to enjoy this book rather less than I expected when I began reading.

The first was the writing style. At times, it seemed as though Lewis was showing off for fellow academics or Manhattan intellectuals, not writing for an audience of educated laymen. Thus, he resorts to words like "vigesimal" (291), or uses "creedal" rather than "religious" (139), or refers to "eyes straining in the penumbra" rather than "in the dim light" or "shadows," or describes "a tesselated political landscape devoid of a core" (346), or produces sentences like, "It was the ideational script from which the Latin `race' would read down through centuries of self-construction, the Ur-text in Latin and German from which the Franco-Latin persona was gradually redacted" (141-42) or "Greater Frankland - the evolving Francia - was now a possibility to be formed out of a mystique, itself an evolving one of providential uniqueness sustained by war" (183). There are also less elaborate sentences that struck out for originality but that simply impressed me as tone-deaf: "The Theodosian Walls were Constantinople's longevity girdle" (63).

On the other hand, Lewis's writing sometimes displays real vividness and spark - "Clothilde appears in the Catholic Church's iconography as a willowy blonde, svelte by comparison to the typical large-framed females of her class" (139); "As the walled metropolis held out against Shahin and his Avars, two Iranian armies scissored what remained of Graeco-Roman defenses in the Caucasus" (63); "After a quarter-century of war, taxes, oligarchic oppression, universal conscription, and increasingly capricious behavior on the part of the exalted shahanshah, the Sassanid Empire imploded like a rotten desert cactus" (68) - or straightforward elegance: "The new Carolingian order, therefore, was religiously intolerant, intellectually impoverished, socially calcified, and economically primitive" (286). Or consider his splendid introduction to the final years of the Umayyads in Spain:

"The Umyayad Caliphate of al-Andalus ends like silent film footage in a runaway old projector. Jerky actions by protagonists leading or fleeing a cast of thousands flit past. Scenes of triumph and tumult alternate with a suddenness fatal to an understanding of [the] original plot line. Flickering images disappear to snapping sounds and leave the screen of history momentarily blank." (343)

My sense was that Lewis needed an editor who was willing to rein in some of his more showy and obscure impulses, and that didn't happen. The problem may have been a shortage of time; Lewis indicates in his "Acknowledgments" that this book took five or six years to write, and ultimately assumed a scope that was very different from his original intentions. Perhaps, when the manuscript ultimately arrived, his publisher just wanted to get it into print ASAP. In any case, when you run across two sentences like these on facing pages - "Charlemagne's alliance would answer all future questions about the number of divisions available to the pope" (240) and "The king's alliance would answer all future questions about the number of divisions available to the pope" (241) - it is clear that all was not as it should have been in the editing process.

My second main reservation about this book is that its title is seriously misleading. It suggests a broad-spectrum analysis of the impact of Islam on the development of European civilization during the Middle Ages, but that's not what you get. Beginning with Chapter 5 (105), the book's focus telescopes down to the Iberian peninsula and France. The Muslims ruled Crete and Sicily from the early 9th century through 963 and the late eleventh century respectively, and they exerted a profound cultural influence on the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and its successor, the Hohenstaufen Empire of Frederick II, but you won't find anything about that here. Of Byzantium's 800-year struggle to hold back first the Arabs and then their Turkish successors in Asia Minor, Lewis also has little to say; "Byzantium" rates only ten mentions in the book's Index.

The book's last twelve chapters and 275 pages therefore concentrate on the Muslims in the Iberian peninsula and their Merovingian and Carolingian neighbors and enemies across the Pyrenees in France. (Chapters 6, 9, 10, 11, and 13 focus almost entirely on the latter.) Lewis is starry-eyed and romantic about the early centuries of the Arabs in Spain, especially during the period of Umayyad rule from 756-1009. But the history of Muslim Spain in the last two centuries Lewis covers was an inglorious tale of fundamentalism and factionalism, and he plainly lacked the stomach to recount it in any detail, polishing it off in a mere 35 pages. The Nasrid emirate of Granada (1236-1492) is left out of his story entirely.

While I therefore generally enjoyed reading this book, it may help to come to it with more tempered expectations than I did. Its focus and coverage are less ambitious than its title suggests, and the nearly 100 pages on the Carolingian empire struck me as far more than was necessary. Notwithstanding the various reservations I have expressed above, however, there is much here that is fresh and interesting, and it is often conveyed with real verve and zest.

I sometimes wonder why it is increasingly so that the history books worth reading are being written not by college and university professors but by skilled journalists, military men, think tanks, and even by people in fields as remote as medicine. Oh, wait! Perhaps it is because those fields tend to be populated by people who believe in research, evidence, and logic while for 50+ years the historical "profession" has prostituted itself to abject laziness and (far worse) ideologically motivated deconstructionalism! While "geschichte wie es eigentlich gewesen" may be a goal forever just out of reach, it is a goal nonetheless without which historical study becomes empty of anything except the political content with which the author intends to infuse it before he even begins -- rather like the continual rewriting of Soviet encyclopedias during the Stalin era. The difficulty of objectivity, accuracy, and comprehensiveness cannot excuse the profession to which I was trained having completely unmoored itself from any standard other than the ideological purposes to which its work can be put. This book is just another example of that.

As a chronology of major events in the history of Iberian Islam and its interaction with Christendom, this book is acceptable, despite its somewhat confused presentation.

As an analysis of the interaction of the two civilizations, it is yet another shabby apology by a self-deprecating Westerner for a civilization which he can endow by force of his own will with those virtues that he is determined to deny in his own. It is especially telling that Lewis, like so many others of his kind, is determined to praise Andalusian Islam for virtues that would not be considered virtuous at all according to the standards of the Qur'an, the ahadith, and the schools of Islamic law. All matters here are judged by the standards of the professional American academic of the late twentieth century. There is no effort to explore or explain the competing mindsets of the medieval protagonists. This alone marks the book as essentially a "puff piece" designed to appeal to a certain following.

The author scarcely ever troubles himself with reality where a good point can be made for multiculturalism. My favorite (though certainly not the only) example was his suggestion that it is somehow a Western "put-down" that there is not a forever-fixed and invariable method of transliterating Arabic "with all its diacritical marks" into the Latin alphabet -- a goal that he says he ardently hopes to see. What diacritical marks? If Lewis means all those suspended dots, accents, and squiggles above and below a line of Arabic script, one would think that before writing such a comment he would have taken the opportunity to learn that those marks are not "diacritical" marks at all. They are in some cases integral and distinguishing elements of Arabic consonants; in other cases, they are actually vowels ... or serve to double the consonants over which they appear ... or may even themselves be consonants for which there is no equivalent in the Latin alphabet. And how would he transliterate accurately the second letter of the article "al?" Would it always be "l" which is the nearest Latin equivalent of the Arabic letter, or would he instead reflect Arabic pronunciation, in which the letter changes its pronunciation dramatically to elide with the first consonant (if any) of the word following? This is just one example of the author's refusal to allow his own ignorance to stand in the way of a useful point.

The overwhelming shabbiness of this effort is the author's inability or refusal to consider the complex web of cultural, economic, and political influences within which the Iberian interface between Islam and Christendom took place. One would think that the Greco-Roman tradition was just totally eradicated from Europe, when actually -- and particularly in the period considered by Lewis -- the Byzantine Empire and Orthodox Christianity were in close and continual contact with the Germanic successor-states of Western Europe. He seems barely to tip the hat to the huge disruption of Northern Europe in the 9th and 10th centuries by the Norse invasions. Nor does Lewis give any credit to the indications that the "Islamic contribution" in preserving and passing along classical learning was actually the work of conquered peoples of the old Roman and Sassanian empires who preserved their own pre-Islamic learning despite the indifference and hostility of the Arab conquerors. Indeed, it appears that most of the Islamic contributions themselves came from "dhimmi" populations and from indigenous converts whose learning had more to do with their own pre-Islamic heritage than some would like to credit. When he does bring up facts that would tend to validate such a conclusion, his solution to the problem is simply to ignore them in his conclusions.

As chronology, the book is confusing. As historical analysis, it is a waste of time.

An unfortunate aspect of Political Correctivism is its intellectual arrogance that denies the existence of alternative, valid interpretation, and the first paragraph of Notes on Usage in God's Crucible is PCism at its most chauvinistic. Beyond this paragraph, however, the book is one of the most rewarding histories I've read.

The historical narrative is compelling, from the rise of both the Muslims and Islam through the imposition of their empire around the non-European Mediterranean. The parade of unfamiliar personages and names is managed with skill. The principle participants are invested with personality, reflecting insightful reading and understanding of what I imagine to be dry sources. Only occasionally does the author seem to lose himself (and the reader) in minor, convoluted episodes as if a favorite person or event just couldn't be sacrificed. While the superiority of Islamic culture during the so-called Middle Ages is not news, discovering the full range of its sophistication and accomplishments in architecture, literature, math and science was the gem of discovery between these covers.

The author has also corrected two personal misconceptions. First, I had always believed that the purpose of Islamic conquest was to spread Islam. Au Contraire! It was pure naked imperialism -- the desire for, referencing one of the author's recurring phrases, power, wealth and women. Second, I had always thought that the conquest extended over several centuries. Wrong again. The Christian East and Sassanian Persia were conquered at a meteoric speed that must have seemed divinely ordained.

There are speed traps, however. The author insists that the Battle of Poitiers had little to do with the "saving" of Europe, insisting instead that it was due to a breakdown within the Islamic empire. Why can't both be true? He also spends what seems an inordinate amount of energy debunking the Roland myth while appearing to have an unjustified respect for the Cid (why was he incomparable?: p.378). When Christian forces massacre and pillage and carry off women the behavior is condemned as characteristic of a primitive and brutal society. The same behavior in Muslims, however, escapes such censure.

The analysis of religious differences (Shi'ites and Sunni) and the ebb and flow of tolerance vs persecution (the latter particularly by Christians) is effectively interwoven in the narrative, but important questions are glossed over. While it is true that Muslims were tolerant of non-believers, the religious, political and economic restrictions imposed upon those non-believers meant they were 3rd and 4th class citizens. I suppose that is tolerance of a kind. Worse, on several occasions the author comes within a hair's breath of stating that Christian Europe would have been better off under the domination of al-Andalus because of its superior culture -- a sentiment that would have undoubtedly warmed the hearts of all good 19th Century European colonialists. I doubt that a Muslim Europe would have inspired the traditions of individual rights and modern democracy.

In spite of its shortcomings I recommend this book. The reader can easily sift through the author's biases in reaching his own conclusions. And in the final analysis, one never learns by reading only what one wants to believe. One learns only through exposure to the widest possible spectrum of interpretations. From that perspective, this book has broadened my knowledge and understanding.

A scholarly treatment of the subject that contains relatively novel insights, but the book's actual scope is a good deal more narrow than its expansive title suggests. The author should have limited his focus to Spain or concentrated more on other centers of violent or passive interaction between the two faiths. Additionally, the intersparsing of references to more recent phenomenon such as blitzkrieg were historically questionable and detracted from otherwise strong writing. So it was a mixed bag; some elements of it were superb and should serve as a model for writing accessible scholarly history, while other aspects, both organizational and specific, were wanting.

This book provides a good basic overview of the birth and development of early Islam, the conquests that followed, and the impact on early Spain and Europe. The author however plays fast and loose with quite a few details which seriously detracts from the quality of the book. Specific examples: the author lists the Via Augusta as going from Cadiz all the way to Rome, having an astonishing length of 13,000 miles (that would be halfway around the equator). In fact, the Via Augusta went from Cadiz, crossed the Pyrenees and joined the Via Domitia and its overall length was a respectable 1000 miles (approximately). Another example - the legendary Berber queen Kahina who fought the Arabs in the 7th century is listed categorically as being Jewish. Maybe, maybe not. The Encyclopedia Judaica as well as a few other sources seem to be quite dismissive of this notion and at best, it is controversial. One would expect such a respected Historian and Pulitzer winner to be much more careful because I'm sure that the last thing he would want to do is perpetuate errors through sloppiness.

Overall - quite an enjoyable read.

These comments pertain to the Kindle edition.