The Race for Paradise
An Islamic History of the Crusades
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
In 1099, when the first Frankish invaders arrived before the walls of Jerusalem, they had carved out a Christian European presence in the Islamic world that endured for centuries, bolstered by subsequent waves of new crusaders and pilgrims. The story of how this group of warriors, driven by faith, greed, and wanderlust, created new Christian-ruled states in parts of the Middle East is one of the best-known in history. Yet it is offers not even half of the story, for it is based almost exclusively on Western sources and overlooks entirely the perspective of the crusaded. How did medieval Muslims perceive what happened?
In The Race for Paradise, Paul M. Cobb offers a new history of the confrontations between Muslims and Franks we now call the "Crusades," one that emphasizes the diversity of Muslim experiences of the European holy war. There is more to the story than Jerusalem, the Templars, Saladin, and the Assassins. Cobb considers the Arab perspective on all shores of the Muslim Mediterranean, from Spain to Syria. In the process, he shows that this is not a straightforward story of warriors and kings clashing in the Holy Land, but a more complicated tale of border-crossers and turncoats; of embassies and merchants; of scholars and spies, all of them seeking to manage a new threat from the barbarian fringes of their ordered world. When seen from the perspective of medieval Muslims, the Crusades emerge as something altogether different from the high-flying rhetoric of the European chronicles: as a cultural encounter to ponder, a diplomatic chess-game to be mastered, a commercial opportunity to be seized, and as so often happened, a political challenge to be exploited by ambitious rulers making canny use of the language of jihad.
An engrossing synthesis of history and scholarship, The Race for Paradise fills a significant historical gap, considering in a new light the events that distinctively shaped Muslim experiences of Europeans until the close of the Middle Ages.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Crusades "should be understood in the context of the Islamic world, treated as an active part of the dynamic relationship between medieval Islamic states and societies from Spain to Iran," writes Cobb, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Middle East Center. Cobb says that there's a dearth of material available to Western readers that presents the perspectives of the Crusades' victims, and he sees his book as a corrective. The dominance of Eurocentric histories of the Crusades is, for Muslims, just one aspect of a much longer history of foreign meddling, and Cobb brings this history alive in a way that will interest both casual readers and experts alike. Focusing on diplomatic and commercial history as much as military history, Cobb concludes that "most Muslims at the time probably never interacted with Franks; of those who did, the vast majority did not do so as combatants but as townspeople, neighbors, and... traders." The Middle East at the time was a "newly divided and fragmented world... where only those with enough might or enough cunning could be expected to last. In such a setting, expelling the Franks could never be a priority." Cobb's multidisciplinary approach illuminates the experience of invaded societies in their chaotic and climactic contacts with the Other. Maps & illus.
