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God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 Hardcover – 26 Feb 2008

by David Levering Lewis (Author)
3.3 out of 5 stars 7 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 512 pages
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (26 Feb. 2008)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0393064727
  • ISBN-13: 978-0393064728
  • Product Dimensions: 16.5 x 4.1 x 24.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 170,204 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

Review

A wonderfully interesting contribution. -- Amartya Sen

A wonderfully interesting contribution.--Amartya Sen

A magisterial work by one of America's greatest historians. --Reza Aslan, author of No god but God

A wonderfully interesting contribution. --Amartya Sen"

In God's Crucible, answers to many urgent questions, currently in the public discourse, can be deduced. --Eric Ormsby"

Lewis's treatment...is lucid, and his command of detail is encyclopedic....The book is erudite. --James B. Reston Jr." --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

About the Author

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.

Customer Reviews

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4.0 out of 5 starsQuite readable but with some serious flaws
By Strv 74 on 8 Sept. 2014
Format: Hardcover
This is an interesting book about the spread of Islam and the interaction between Islam and Europe. As a history it is well written with far more detail than for instance Tom Holland's "In the Shadow of the Sword". Professor Lewis has a detailed knowledge of the subject and it is quite clear that he is also impressed with some aspects of Islam during these centuries.

The Focus is on Islam in Spain and the various Christian kingdoms in France. There is nothing at all about Islam in Eastern Europe apart from some lines about various failed attacks against Constantinople. Considering that Europe ends at the Urals one has to wonder if Islam had no connection at all with Christians in the area of todays Caucasus and Ukraine.

Initially the book describes the life of Muhammad and Arab conquest of what came to be one of the largest empires we have seen. An odd thing in this is that there is absolutely nothing about the great plague the hit the Christian world (but not the Arab) in AD 542 and created some of the preconditions for the Arab advance.

After the introduction to how Islam conquered Spain the rest of the book takes place almost exclusively there. One would think that a thing like the crusades would be a very important factor in the interaction between Europe and the Islamic Empire but there is hardly anything on that.

We get a detailed description about Islamic Spain and also about western Europe. The very large differences between these two civilizations are described and it is quite clear that Professor Lewis is very much biased towards the Islamic one. He goes to great lengths to point out the superior cultural and scientific advanced made in Islamic Spain compared to what he describes as the almost barbaric Christian world.Read more ›
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5.0 out of 5 starscivilizations in parallel, alternating ascents and declines
By rob crawford TOP 1000 REVIEWER on 30 May 2011
Format: Hardcover
This is an absolutely delightful book that is at about the high undergraduate level. It evokes and partially analyses the explosive expansion of Arabic (then Arabo-Berber) Islam in the wake of the collapse of the Roman and Sassinid Empires to its eventual decline as a new Europe emerges. At its best, the book is a first-rate intellectual adventure into a dynamic civilization at its apogee, beginning in Syria and continuing in Spain; developments in a backward Europe are also covered in parallel, where a people is struggling to define itself as it emerges from a series of mortal threats. However, it is sometimes difficult to follow the thread of the narrative, as if the writer is not quite certain of what he is looking to do. In the end, the story is there, but the book is not really about what the subtitle promises, that is, how Islam contributed to the making of Europe, except perhaps as mobilizing it militarily and transmitting a corpus of fundamental philosophical ideas. It is also not an academic historical work, but more a popularization, hence not for specialists. (As such, it was perfect for me.)

The book begins not in 570 with the teachings of Mohammed, but during the Roman Republic, when Crassus' forces are annihilated by the Parthians, the most significant defeat that the Romans experienced in the east up to that time. In the author's view, this defeat set in motion a deadly conflict that would last the next 650 years or so, until the Byzantines and Sassinids were so exhausted that the Moslem jihadists were able to defeat or disable both empires. In the meantime, he also describes the implosion of the Western Roman Empire under the semi-barbaric Visigoths and later from pagan Saxons and Vikings.Read more ›
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1.0 out of 5 starsNot the work of a historian
By Pipistrel on 18 Jun. 2009
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
What a disappointment! The general thesis is right and important: classical Islam was an open and tolerant civilization and the cradle of the scientific revolution, and the Christian refusal to share the West with Muslims was and is the world's great loss. But Lewis has simply not done his homework. He has not studied primary sources at all, but has uncritically picked bits out of dozens of secondary sources. He is not a true historian but a populariser of other people's historical writing.
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1.0 out of 5 starsAvoid!
By gnostic on 11 Aug. 2009
Format: Hardcover
This book was real disappointment because there is a re-hash of old orientalists rubbish in the first few chapters. There wasn't enough sourcing and the information was unclear and muddled.
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