God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 » (Reprint)

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 lives in New York City.

In this panoramic history of Islamic culture in early Europe, a Pulitzer Prizewinning historian reexamines what we once thought we knew. David Levering Lewis's narrative reveals how cosmopolitan, Muslim al-Andalus flourished—-a beacon of cooperation and tolerance between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—-while proto-Europe made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, religious intolerance, perpetual war, and slavery.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In the hundred years between the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632 and Charles the Hammer's victory over Muslim invaders at Poitiers in central France in 732, Islam conquered a huge swathe of the known world, erupting from what had been the historically irrelevant wastes of Arabia as far as central Asia in one direction and western Europe in the other.

List of Illustrations ix

List of Maps xi

Chronology xiii

Notes on Usage xix

Preface xxi

1 The Superpowers 3

2 "The Arabs Are Coming!" 29

3 "Jihad!" 57

4 The Co-opted Caliphate and the Stumbling Jihad 85

5 The Year 711 105

6 Picking Up the Pieces after Rome 137

7 The Myth of Poitiers 160

8 The Fall and Rise of the Umayyads 184

9 Saving the Popes 209

10 An Empire of Force and Faith 224

11 Carolingian Jihads: Roncesvalles and Saxony 251

12 The Great Mosque 268

13 The First Europe, Briefly 282

14 Equipoise - Delicate and Doomed 304

15 Disequilibrium, Pelayo's Revenge 333

16 Knowledge Transmitted, Rationalism Repudiated: Ibn Rushd and Musa ibn Maymun 367

Acknowledgments 381

Notes 385

Glossary 423

Genealogies 433

Bibliography 439

Credits 449

Index 451