This is a review of God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, by David Levering Lewis. W.W. Norton. 2008
Islamic presence in Spain between the 7th and 14th centuries has long been considered a controversial topic. The ex-Spanish Prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, for example, added fire to the already intense discussions two years ago. He argued Muslims have never apologized for “conquering Spain and staying for eight centuries”.
Modern Conservative scholars such as Victor Davis Hanson, Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer suggested that Muslim rule in Spain were despots who subjected people of other faiths to heavy taxation and religious persecution. David Levering Lewis thinks otherwise. This New York University professor places the relationship between Muslim nations and and Europe at the center of his latest book. His book inspires one to re-think the Islamic contribution to Europe.
The biggest accomplishment of Lewis’s book lies in its attempt to challenge conventional thinking regarding the victory of Charles Martel, the leader of the Franks. He rebukes historians such as Edward Gibbons and Victor Davis Hanson for their simplistic views on the Battle of Poitiers:
“Today, Charles Martel’s defeat of ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn ‘Abd Allah al-Ghafiqi is buried deep in the collective memory of the West, a marker of an important happening seldom recalled with the hyperbole typical of an earlier, more cultural self-aggrandizing age…However, it probably occurs to few, if any of the contemporary descendants of the “Europenses” to credit the existence of the European Union to the Battle of Poitiers.”
Lewis does an excellent job of asking the question as to what served to create Europe as we know it. He believes that years of Western-dominated thinking on the war have made us blind to the idea that Martel’s victory may have actually hurt Europe of those days by paving the way for an intolerant feudal age. At present times, the re-education Lewis offers us is of vital importance.
For me, the most surprising discovery in Lewis’s book concerns how the struggle between two civilizations actually improved welfare of women. It’s an intriguing premise, since conflict usually means setbacks wherein women’s rights are concerned.
Lewis blames Pope Innocent III and Pope Urban II for ending the long history of co-existence between Arabs, Jews and Christians. He beautifully summarizes the impact of the Pope’s Fourth Lateran Council’s call for wars against unbelievers and heresy:
“Difference, immemorially accommodated for better and worse by Western Europe’s peoples as the way of the world, was institutionalized henceforth as unassailable “otherness”
Lewis’s condemnation of Catholic Church is practically confrontational. He made me wonder whether even the present-day Vatican has the credibility to initiate dialogue with different faiths. In his book, Lewis gives a glimpse of the world of Christendom whose defeat of the Islamic faith slowed down the development of technology, culture, and science. It’s a grim picture, to say the least.
This book makes one consider the possibility that bad luck is likely to befall Europe if it decides to turn away from its Muslim neighbors in Turkey and Morocco. These neighbors may just offer some solutions to the aging crisis of the Great Continent.
The book suffers from a dearth of Spanish and Arabic source materials and a surplus of academic language. Having said that, Lewis still stands well above many colleagues who have tackled similar subjects.
Above all else, God’s Crucible is full of useful information for advocates of inter-faith dialogue; it’s main message is that freedom of exchange of ideas, tolerance of dissidents, and respect for diversity are will make a society prosperous.
These are some quick comments on the review of David L. Lewis’s book, “God’s Crucible,” which I have not read, so my comments are based on the reviewer’s summary.
First, to correct what is probably a typographical error: Muslims were present in Spain from the 8th to the 15th centuries, i.e., 710/711 C.E. to 1492 C.E., not 7th to 14th centuries as stated in the review. The historical consequence is not so slight: Had the Muslim Berbers attempted to cross into Spain in the 7th century, they would have encountered a more vigorous Catholic Visigothic state that could have resisted them and possibly even prevented the development of an Islamic Spanish state. The Muslim invasion of Spain succeeded as rapidly as it did due in no small part to the preceding collapse of the Visigothic state into civil war.
Since I haven’t read David Lewis’s book, I’ll only say that, from 628 C.E. when the Muslim Arabs captured the port of Gaza, to 1683 C.E., when the Turks failed to take Vienna, “peaceful coexistence” between Muslim and Christian states around the Mediterranean was unlikely to begin with, since these states were always competing for control of both the eastern and western Mediterranean basins, and as long as any state, Muslim or Christian, was militarily insecure, it was bound to see the rival religion as the “Other.” The varying degrees of tolerance exercised by Muslim rulers in Spain was matched by the sectarian tolerance of the Norman rulers of Sicily starting in the 11th century C.E., and the degree of tolerance in both states was impacted by the military situation.
While it is true that the rise of the Papacy in the 11th century as a would-be sovereign temporal state, which coincided with the reassertion of Christian control of the western Mediterranean through campaigns by the French, Genoese, and Normans in the 10th and 11th centuries, probably did cement a common Catholic identity among western Christian governments, the Papacy did not by itself create the notion of Muslims as the “Other.” The idea of Muslims as the “Other” was bound to arise from the military conflicts arising from the Muslim conquest of Spain. The Papacy, from Urban II onward, merely took propagandistic advantage of already-existing military conflicts.
In the eastern Mediterranean, the Christian Roman/Byzantine government, which had been desperately fending off continuing Muslim military conquests from 628 onward, also saw Muslims as the “Other,” as the military situation dictated. Between roughly the 9th and 11th centuries C.E., when the Byzantines took the military initiative and regained control of at least a few of their lost territories, they could afford to regard more distant and therefore less threatening Muslim states with a certain dismissive tolerance, but Byzantines never tolerated Muslim subjects within Byzantine borders; it was conversion or expulsion. The Byzantines and Fatimids of Egypt showed a limited reciprocal amity precisely because they could not militarily threaten each other across the Mediterranean. When the Seljuk Turks, recent converts to Islam and intolerant of Christian pilgrims in Palestine, invaded Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean after 1071 C.E., the Turks became the “Other” for both Catholic and Orthodox Christians. The Islamic resurgence under the Turks led to the First Crusade and cemented Christian-Muslim hostility straight to the present day. Thus any talk of Muslim-Christian “coexistence,” that ignores the unending military conflicts around the Mediterrean is frivolous, at least to my mind.
Also, a note on Charles Martel: However mythologized is the Battle of Poitiers, Poitiers was in fact the final of several Frankish victories over Muslim invaders of western France. Muslims controlled the Rhone Valley and especially the pirate base at Frejus well into the 10th century, when they were finally expelled by the Duke of Provence. Muslims also sacked Rome in 846 C.E. and maintained some kind of raiding-base in southern Italy (Mt. Gargiliano?) until they were expelled from the latter by combined Lombard, Frankish, and Byzantine efforts in either the 9th or 10th centuries C.E. I mention the Rhone Valley and Italy to show that in fact Charles Martel did not either end the Muslim occupation of at least part of France or prevent continued Muslim assaults on Italy. It was only by the mid-11th century C.E., when the western Christian states had warded off or Christianized their various non-Christian enemies and also regained some control of the western Mediterranean, that any cultural “coexistence” was even theoretically possible, and by 1071 C.E. the Turks emerged as an Islamic military threat, and coexistence became unthinkable.
Sorry for the long post, but Lewis’s talk about cultural “coexistence” that ignores the nonstop military confrontation seems downright silly, and his blaming the Papacy and the Catholic Church seems to put the cart before the horse. But I will have to read Lewis’s book before condemning it too harshly.