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:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 29494
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 18 more reviews...
 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 1 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.
 God's Crucible is deceitful or confused June 19, 2008
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
The key to understanding the problems with David Levering Lewis is in the following paragraph:
"Had 'Abd al-Rahman's men prevailed that October day, the post-Roman Occident would probably have been incorporated into a cosmopolitan, Muslim regnum unobstructed by borders, as they hypothesize - one devoid of a priestly caste, animated by the dogma of equality of the faithful, and respectful of all religious faiths. Curiously, such speculation has a French pedigree. Forty years ago, two historians, Jean-Henri Roy and Jean Deviosse enumerated the benefits of a Muslim triumph at Poitiers: astronomy; trigonometry; Arabic numerals; the corpus of Greek philosophy. 'We [Europe] would have gained 267 years,' according to their calculations. 'We might have been spared the wars of religion.' To press the logic of this disconcerting analysis, the victory of Charles the Hammer must be seen as greatly contributing to the creation of an economically retarded, balkanized, fratricidal Europe that, in defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of religious persecution, cultural particularism, and hereditary aristocracy."
There are crucial errors:
1. "Muslim regnum unobstructed by borders". There is no historical basis for this. Anyone that studies Islamic history knows that not long after the 732 AD the Islamic world broke into regions that fought with each other for centuries.
2. "One devoid of a priestly caste, animated by the dogma of equality of the faithful". If Lewis is referring to the equality of the Islamic faithful then this has a modicum of truth, but most of the Islamic world after the initial conquests were populated by Christians and Jews, and Islam has a dogmatic policy inscribed in the Koran and Hadiths to treat them as second class citizens. Unless you come from an Orthodox Christian or Jewish family that lived in the Middle East you can't imagine the horror of the daily life of being non-Muslim in an Islamic controlled society (still true today). A society devoid of a priestly caste? What is he thinking of? The Imams are not a priestly caste? With a few sentences David Levering Lewis shows he is either very ignorant or practicing anti-Western deceit.
3. "Respectful of all religious faiths". This is the opposite of the historical actuality. Islam is not respectful of any religious faith other than its own. It oppresses Christians and Jews (a daily living hell), and all others (such as Zoroastrians) that must convert or be killed. Note that the greatest mass murder in all of human history was committed by the Islamic armies in India; 80 million were massacred. There are many other examples: 1.5 million Armenians, 1 million Assyrians, and others. No Islamic authority has ever apologized for any of this. The Koran and Hadiths justify mass murder so the Imams can't apologize.
If the Islamic armies had won the field in 732 AD then Europe would have become a cultural back water like the Middle East. Islamic societies only thrive while there is a high percentage of subject Christians and Jews, but after Islamic oppression has dissipated those communities then the Islamic majority society shows itself to be uncreative, backward, and turns inward against itself. Don't waste your money on this book.
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