Seville's Alcazar, home to Muslim rulers from the ninth to the 14th century.
(Consorcio de Turismo de Sevilla)
God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215
By David Levering Lewis
Norton, 473 pp., illustrated, $29.95
The jacket of David Levering Lewis's densely written page turner, "God's Crucible," features a photo of part of the famed Mosque of Cordoba above a detail from "Battle of Poitiers," by French artist Charles de Steuben, depicting the epic confrontation of 732 that, according to many historians, stopped a surging Islam from conquering all of Europe.
However important that battle and the many other conflicts described in this book, the intricate Islamic geometry of the mosque reminds us that relations between Islam and the West have also been long characterized by cross-fertilization and cooperation. "God's Crucible" does an admirable job of showing how messy, improbable, and often surprisingly positive was that history. It's a story that needs to be told today, as Islam and the West hover at the edge of the latest abyss separating their peoples. Lewis, a New York University professor and the author of many award-winning books, is as capable as any contemporary writer of presenting history on this grand a scale.
The book begins with the rise of Islam in the seeming backwater of seventh-century Arabia, and moves westward through five centuries and many lands before concluding on the eve of the Crusades six centuries later. But the main focus surrounds Muslim Spain, or al-Andalus, during the eighth through 13th centuries. It was the rich yet conflicted landscape of early medieval Spain that, Lewis argues, served as the crucible of modernity.
As I read this book, however, a different image came to mind than the iconic ones of the jacket: that of one Muslim and one probably Christian musician playing the medieval lute-like baldosa. The image is from the famous 13th-century manuscript "Cantigas de Santa Maria."
Where Lewis's jacket presents swords and blood, this image offers two musicians jamming and represents the apotheosis of the "Convivencia," which enabled the flowering of one of the world's richest intercultural civilizations. These two images point to the dilemma Lewis faced.
Should he focus on the "great men," battles, and diplomacy that have traditionally composed histories of Islam's relationship with the West? Or should he focus on the musicians, and the everyday people across the Iberian peninsula and on the other side of the Pyrenees against whom they so often fought?
Lewis chose the former, and in so doing produced a narrative filled with more names, dates, and battles than a world history textbook. Yet despite an exceedingly thick plot line that presumes significant historical knowledge, Lewis succeeds in creating what scholars like to call a "relational history" of two great civilizations.
The lightning speed of Islam's advance turned the Mediterranean into an "Islamic lake" by the turn of the eighth century. What Lewis describes as the rapid commingling of Arabs and Berbers with Visigoths and Hispano-Romans produced the rich culture of Spain, and of the Mediterranean more broadly.
As fascinating as Lewis's vignettes are, by focusing on history from above, he doesn't have the chance to tell us whether elite relations reflected the interactions and perceptions of regular people. For example, he informs us based on the perception of contemporary leaders and chroniclers that the Pyrenees Mountains dividing Spain and France constituted a natural border between a relatively enlightened Muslim Andalus and the still semi-barbarian Europe. As he describes it, the two sides were "effectively checkmated at the Pyrenees."
But just as scholars have largely discarded the once-widespread depiction of an isolated imperial China, Iberian scholars today understand there was far more interaction at the everyday level between the two Europes than allowed for in Lewis's elite-driven history. Had Lewis been able to consult the still-underutilized Arabic and Latin primary sources for this period, he would have likely produced a more path-breaking account.
Moreover, Lewis's narrative leaves him neither the time nor space to develop his claim that medieval Andalus prefigured Christian European modernity. We are never told what factors determined that modernity. Was it the "repression [that] accompanied progress" under 11th-century leader al-Hakim? Or the entrepreneurial spirit and long-distance trade that connected Andalusia to the Arab-Islamic East and provided the foundation for capitalism's rise a few centuries later? As important, did the threat to cosmopolitan Andalusian Islam posed by what Lewis describes as the "Muslim fundamentalism" sweeping across North Africa in the 10th century also prefigure the threat from radical Islam in the modern world?
In evaluating the failure of the Andalusian experiment, Lewis wonders whether Europe "was better off politically, culturally and economically" for having been able to beat back the Muslims. It's an interesting question, but one that he cannot answer within the scope of his narrative. To do so would have required Lewis to examine how, in beating back Islam, Western European leaders planted the seeds of the nation-state identity and political system - and with it modern capitalism - that a reconquered Christian Iberia would bring to the "West" through the colonization of the New World, a process that also resulted in the deaths and enslavement of millions of American Indians and Africans.
This was the unintended consequence of the search by Europeans for a route to the Far East that would bypass Islamic territory. Without it, European nationalism and capitalism - and through them, modernity - would have likely remained in the inchoate state depicted at the close of "God's Crucible."
The world is still paying the price for the inability of Christian and Muslim Europe to move beyond their checkmate along the Pyrenees and re-create the unprecedented free market in goods and ideas that, as Lewis describes it, stretched from China to Spain during the heyday of al-Andalus. Reading "God's Crucible" reminds us that another future was possible. But it also serves as a sober warning to those who would seek to reconstruct imagined utopias from the past: History has a way of overshadowing even the most enlightened of intentions and policies, particularly when they are pursued in a broader environment of unforgiving and unprincipled realpolitik.
It turns out things haven't changed all that much since Charlemagne and his Muslim adversaries first battled over the future of Europe, over 1,100 years ago.
Mark LeVine teaches history at the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of the forthcoming "Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Religion, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam."
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