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

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 384 pages
• Published by: W. W. Norton January 21, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0393064727
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0393064728
• Book Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.7 inches
• Weighs: 2 pounds

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's Book World/washingtonpost.com


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 requirements 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 magnificent 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 greater narrative, and many of his insights are inaccessible to the people who most need them.




Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Reader Reviews
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. Comment | | (Report this)