God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (2008)

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.

Endorsements

Paul Kennedy, Yale

“Lewis’s range is really remarkable, and this surely is a remarkable contribution to a still understudied and much misunderstood period of history.”

Anthony Appiah, NYU

“This marvelous book offers a magisterial---and splendidly readable---guide to the history of the cultures of the Mediterranean world, as Rome declined and Islam exploded out of Arabia, showing how Europe and Christianity were shaped through the conflict with the Muslims of al-Andalus.”

Amartya Sen, Harvard

“This is a wonderfully interesting contribution to understanding the modern world in the light of genuine, rather than dogmatic, history.”

Reza Aslan, California-Riverside

“A magisterial work . . . God’ Crucible tells the tangled tale of Islam’s collision with Christian Europe with the same wit, acuity, and awe-inspiring authority we have come to expect from David Levering Lewis. This is a marvelous book.”

John Derbyshire, Claremont Review

“David Levering Lewis’s God’s Crucible has not been well received by the Islamophobes . . . along with historian of religion Karen Armstrong. (Ms. Armstrong . . . committed the unpardonable crime of writing a sympathetic and very readable biography of the prophet Mohammed.)

New York Times Sunday Book Review

“Lewis’s narrative turns on a constant play of contrasts. . . . In his preface, he urges us ‘to resist the eschatologies of the cultural and political simplifiers’; yet despite his best intentions, the story he tells remains one of a long drawn-out ‘clash of civilizations,’ lasting nearly a half millennium.”