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ISBN: 0393064728
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Price: $36.21 / Rs3,042.00
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Hardback
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GOD'S CRUCIBLE
ISLAM AND THE MAKING OF EUROPE, 570-1215
by DL LEWIS
Publication Date: 2008
Extent: 473 pages
The Book:
A bold new interpretation of Islamic Spain and the birth of Europe from one of our greatest historians. In the autumn of 732, two great armies, one Christian, and one Muslim, faced off on the central plains of France in an epic battle that would define European history. According to what we’ve always been told, Charles Mattel, the leader of the Franks, saved Christianity from Islam and stopped the barbaric Muslim juggernaut from advancing beyond Spain. Not so, says David Levering Lewis, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, who recasts this Battle of Poitiers in a wholly new light. In chronicling the four- hundred-year period of Muslim rule in Europe, an era that began with the surprise assault on Gibraltar by Berber forces in 711 and concluded with the rout of Muslim forces after the fall of Toledo in 1085, Lewis challenges many of the preconceptions that have dominated traditional history. In doing so, he presents a compelling narrative that puts Muslim Spain—and its rich, vibrant heritage—back into the very heart of European politics and culture.
Beginning God’s Crucible with the wars without end between the Roman and Persian empires, Lewis sets the stage for the birth of Islam and the meteoric rise of Muhammad and the spread of the Islamic empire throughout the Middle East and North Africa before arriving in Dark Ages Europe. Quickly established in Hispania in the early part of the eighth century, readily accepted by the persecuted and often enslaved peoples who had suffered greatly as tribal factions sparred for the spoils of the Roman Empire, Muslim society flourished alongside the Jewish and Christian populations with al-Andalus soon emerging as a wealthy and cosmopolitan counterpoint to the anarchy that defined Europe.
God’s Crucible chronicles the fascinating rise of Charlemagne and his campaign to unite the Franks with the calculating pontiffs of the late-eighth-century Vatican. It was Charlemagne, one of the greatest military leaders of world history, who first, albeit unsuccessfully, took the fight against Islam into al-Andalus, laying siege to Zaragoza and plundering the Christian city of Pamplona. From this misbegotten venture emerged the Song of Roland, the great epic that glorified a disastrous retreat over the Pyrenees.
Lewis provides a remarkable portrait of Islamic Spain in all of its vivid historical detail, from the awe- inspiring lii Mezquita, the Great Mosque of Cordoba, to its caliph palace that was grander than Versailles. Cordoba, “the ornament of the world,” would lose its primacy in the politically turbulent but intellectually spectacular twelfth century, but Toledo, the great conveyor belt of knowledge, saved, translated, and transmitted to Christian Europe the wisdom and science of antiquity.
Despite such innovations, the Muslim civilization in Spain lacked stability to insure its permanence. God’s Crucible dramatically ends in the early thirteenth century as enlightened, pragmatic Muslim Spain is overborne by Islamic fundamentalism and Christian militancy Lewis closes his epic with a haunting portrait of two late-thirteenth-century philosophers, the Jewish scholar Maimonides and the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd, whose deaths within a few years of each other spelled the end of a unique and decisive chapter of European and Muslim history.
God’s Crucible is not only a necessary addition to our understanding of world history but also a timely work that puts our current clash of civilizations into a much needed perspective.
The Author:
David Levering Lewis is a university professor at New York University. Both volumes of his biography of W E. B. Du Bois received the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author and editor of eight other books, including The Race to Fashoda, an account of nineteenth-century colonialism in North Africa. The recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship as well as many other awards, he lives with his wife in New York City.
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