God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 | 
 enlarge | Author: David Levering Lewis
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 38156
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.7
ISBN: 0393064727
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.1
EAN: 9780393064728
ASIN: 0393064727
Publication Date: January 21, 2008
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Condition: A Nice Tight Clean Copy
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Product Description
In this panoramic history of Islamic culture in early Europe, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian reexamines what we once thought we knew.
At the beginning of the eighth century, the Arabs brought a momentous revolution in power, religion, and culture to Dark Ages Europe. David Levering Lewis's masterful history begins with the fall of the Persian and Roman empires, followed by the rise of the prophet Muhammad and the creation of Muslim Spain. Five centuries of engagement between the Muslim imperium and an emerging Europe followed, from the Muslim conquest of Visigoth Hispania in 711 to Latin Christendom's declaration of unconditional warfare on the Caliphate in 1215. Lewis's narrative, filled with accounts of some of the greatest battles in world history, reveals how cosmopolitan, Muslim al-Andalus flourished—a beacon of cooperation and tolerance between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—while proto-Europe, defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, religious intolerance, perpetual war, and slavery. A cautionary tale, God's Crucible provides a new interpretation of world-altering events whose influence remains as current as today's headlines. 8 pages of color illustrations; 4 maps.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Extreme Bias August 16, 2008
This book is so extremely biased as to be silly. For example, speaking with regret of the victory of Charles Martel at Poitiers:
"The European shape of things to come was set for dismal centuries following one upon the other until the Commercial Revolution and the Enlightenment."
So short shrift is given to the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery etc. etc.
Erudite but overly ambitious July 23, 2008
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.
 The Beginning of Modern Science July 14, 2008
The book is great because it brings together all of the factors that brought about Western Europe. I have however one criticism. The author tells about the Roman Catholic Church's excommunication of the followers of the Aristotelian philosophy of Averroes. Lewis implies, however, that this condemnation was scientifically backward like the condemnation of Galileo in later centuries. I would say the condemnation is the beginning of modern science since Aristotle and Averroe were being unscientific. The following quote is from the Bishop of Paris's Letter of Condemnation of 1277:
"We excommunicate all those who shall have taught the said errors or any one of them, or shall have dared in any way to defend or uphold them, or even to listen to them, unless they choose to reveal themselves to us or to the chancery of Paris within seven days; in addition to which we shall proceed against them by inflicting such other penalties as the law requires according to the nature of the offense....
25. That God has infinite power, not because He makes something out of nothing, but because He maintains infinite motion....
66. That God could not move the heaven in a straight line, the reason being that He would then leave a vacuum.... "
The Bishop of Paris and his advisers from the faculty of theology at the University of Paris knew that vacuums did not exist in nature. However, they could see no reason why vacuums could not exist. They assumed that God thought the same way they did, and concluded that vacuums were possible. In other words, they were assuming that the universe was intelligible, which is what modern science is based on. The following quote of Albert Einstein is from D. Overbye, "Einstein Letter of God Sells for $404,000," New York Times, May 17, 2008:
"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility."
Interesting But Incomplete July 14, 2008
0 out of 8 found this review helpful
The thesis that Europe might have been better off in the eighth century under liberal Umayyad Islam than under Charlemagne's conservative European monarchy is interesting. But Lewis points out that Al Andalus was saved, if temporarily, from being over run by the conquistadores by radical Islamic conservatives, making his point in the end unclear.
The book's title says that it ends in 1215. But after about 1050, the story runs out of steam.
And what is an "ideational matrix?"
 Well documented 379 page overview of 645 years July 6, 2008
This book is a fresh look at a dimly viewed time between the fall of Rome and a time before this Renaissance. 37 pages of notes/references. 8 page glossary, 14 pages combined between genealogies and bibliography.
To the negative reviewers of this book, your reviews remind me the authors description of Ibn Rushd's and Musa ibm Maymum's detractors, "As men of culture and principles, they came to be regarded as liabilities at best and dangerous subversives at worst."
The author goes into the key points of the founding of Islam, it's spread, particularly into the Iberian Peninsula and it's halting at the Pyrenees. Then he covers the years of Islam's control of what is now Spain, the infighting, the palace intrique and finally the losing of their grip of control on this piece of ground. The result of this still effects the world today.
Keep a dictionary handy as Mr. Lewis has a wide and deep vocabulary and uses it.
Well worth the read, but take your time as it is densely written.
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