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The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades 1st Edition

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Paul M. Cobb (Author)
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Paul M. Cobb (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars 6 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0199358113
ISBN-10: 0199358117
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 360 pages
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (July 3, 2014)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0199358117
  • ISBN-13: 978-0199358113
  • Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 1.2 x 6.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #209,133 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Seen from the other side?
By JPS TOP 500 REVIEWER on October 12, 2015
Format: Hardcover
The alleged originality of this book is that it claims to look at the “Crusades” from the Islamic point of view by using medieval Islamic sources. This is largely, but perhaps not entirely true. Paul Cobb has, of course, used numerous Islamic sources, but he has used them alongside the others (Latin, Byzantine, and Armenian). He has also adopted the more modern view of the Crusades, that of a period much longer and more geographically diverse than the less than two centuries during which the Latins set up principalities in the Near East.

This in itself gives a lot of value to this book in several respects. It shows that the wars between Muslims and Christians and the “Reconquista” of territories lost by the latter started decades before the First Crusade. In particular, the Christians in Spain, with some help from those in France (and including some Normans) took Toledo some 14 years before the capture of Jerusalem, while Palermo, at one time one of the largest Muslim ports, fell to the Norman Hautevilles brothers some twenty seven years before. Interestingly, the author goes on well beyond AD 1291 and the fall of Acre.

Since he had chosen to adopt a Muslim point of view, he ends his book with a chapter on the Ottomans, with the fall of Constantinople soon to become Istanbul and the conquest of most of the Balkans, but also with the fall of Grenada and the end of the last Muslim state in Spain.
Another strongpoint is to show the impact and interactions of these events and the complex relationships between medieval Muslim states, between Christian states and between the two sets of states. Interestingly, even if not entirely originally, he clearly shows to what extent the success of the First Crusade was due to division among the Muslims themselves.Read more ›
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For the average reader and specialist alike
By Bryan Gibby VINE VOICE on July 20, 2015
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Professor Paul Cobb's The Race for Paradise does what few books can -- appeal to academic specialists with detail and original sources while constructing an engaging and very interesting narrative story that informs how Mediterranean Muslim societies saw, reacted to, and adapted to the European crusades. His story is broad, beginning with Muslim-Christian conflict well before the traditional first crusade in 1095-1101. As Cobb elaborates, the tension between crusade and jihad had been ongoing for some time in places such as Sicily, Spain/Portugal, North Africa, eastern Mediterranean, long before Pope Urban II called for his holy war to retake Jerusalem. The book's final chapter take the reader past the Mamluk conquest of Acre in 1291, which marked the collapse of the Latin kingdoms in the Holy Land, to assess the rise and emergence of the Ottoman Empire, which was equally smitten with holy war as a means to expand and strengthen the Islamic world. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and the subsequent clashes in the Balkans and Hungary set the tone for conflict in that unhappy part of Europe for five hundred years -- and it's still going.

This book has many strengths, least of which is the broader view taken as described above. More importantly, Cobb explains well the particular Islamic concepts of warfare, political legitimacy, the social contract, and theology that are necessary to understand how Muslims perceived these events. (Incidentally, these same concepts operate in our time too, but there are few non-academics who understand them, so there is much to be learned about modern Islamic society and culture as well.) This context is vital to the story and well worth the time to grasp.

The centerpiece of any good history is the people.Read more ›
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1 of 8 people found the following review helpful
I enjoyed the first several chapters very much but find myself ...
By Mary B Kaczmarek on February 13, 2015
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
I enjoyed the first several chapters very much but find myself bogging down in the middle. Perhaps that's a result of juggling several sources dealing with the same events but at different speeds and from different perspectives. Not only are the events described from different viewpoints, even the names of the places and players shift from one book to another. Not the fault of this text--more of my inability to absorb it all and make sense of it.
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