If ever a historian swooned over Islam, it was David Levering Lewis. In God’s Crucible, Lewis explores the rise of Islam in opposition to Europe and considers the possibility that the pivotal Battle of Poitiers in 732 was hardly a victory, but rather the lost potential of a Islamicized Europe, one where learning, sophisticated economies, and religious toleration would have sped up progress by several hundred years. Lewis strives to prove this thesis through a detailed history that demonstrates how Iberian Islam developed and influenced the budding medieval West and how, through the victory at Poitiers, Europe missed out on what he considers true greatness.
“Islam rose when Rome fell,” and so begins a high speed, yet detailed recounting of the declining Empire. The Rome of Lewis’ history is a monster with a troubled past, hell-bent on perpetuating a never-ending war with its equally hubristic neighbor, Persia. Together they dominate the known world, relegating the rather uninteresting Arabian Peninsula to the sidelines of trade and proxy struggles. Everything changes in the mid-seventh century when messengers arrive in the empires’ capitals, warning of the imminent arrival of Islam. The familiar story plays out in lively fashion until the reeling Constantinople is all that stands in the way of Islam’s advance. Juxtaposed against the vivacious new empire is the badly declined West, a good two hundred years into barbarian domination. Beginning with reference to Belgian historian Henri Pirenne’s thesis of an Europe isolated by Arab domination of the Mediterranean, Lewis proceeds to outline the barbarian migrations into the Western Empire, paying especial attention to the Iberian Visigoths that are forerunners to the Islamic invasion of the peninsula. The same comes about in 711 as a disgruntled chieftain invites Muslim mercenaries over the straights of Gibraltar, whereupon they quickly subdue the peninsula for the Dar al-Islam.
Lewis looks upon the fallen West, its Roman institutions in shambles, and gives the very good impression that he envisions a land ripe for salvation at Muslim hands, an opportunity that it is not about to accept. Lewis unapologetically ascribes to the Brian Ward-Perkins school of Imperial decline and fall, viewing the careening descent of Rome as the death of a civilization. Europe by 476 has become a brutish land of hulking and feral barbarian warlords, its immigrant peoples best represented by the lawless and wild Saxons, “Allergic to civilization and immune to Christianity in their veneration of the gods of Walhalla.” In this harsh world, Clovis rises as king of his Frankish people, Salic Law in hand, breaking free of the old Roman mold to create a “European mindset.” But Lewis remains unforgiving, sniffing at the Merovingian dynasty, so lovingly detailed in Patrick J. Geary’s Before France and Germany, and pairing it down to “a succession of Chilperics, Dagoberts, Clothaires, and Sigiberts, as politically impotent in their final decades as they were symbolically indispensable.” Indispensable to their puppet-masters, perhaps, but not to Lewis. There is no mention of the complex and oft-violent hierarchy of episcopal politics that characterized Geary’s narrative; indeed, the church is left to flounder until the coming of Charles Martel and Charlemagne. The former Charles, Clovis’ descendant by politics and perhaps by blood, swiftly takes center stage just in time to intercept the first Muslim jihad into Francia. The first blow struck in Francia is actually turned away at Toulouse by a minor Frankish noble, Odo, but injured Muslim pride and a kind of Oriental Manifest Destiny assures a second invasion warranting pan-Frankish collaboration. Yet it is not famous Poitiers in 732, but Toulouse in 721 that saved Christendom, as it gave the nation-states the time required to become a military match for Islam. Nor is Poitiers the last battle for control of Francia: Odo gets a last hurrah in defeating the next assault sent to avenge Poitiers and thereafter the Franks engage in long defensive campaigns that result in the devastation of Gaul and the mutual bloodying of both powers. Yet Lewis doggedly adheres to his mantra that Islam can do no wrong by writing off the numerous Muslim defeats in France as the desultory bickering of neighbors, the real salvation of Europe being brought about solely by a distracting Berber uprising in Iberia and North Africa. By contrast, as the stupendous Carolingian crusade that Charlemange eventually leads into Iberia is similarly derailed by Saxon troubles back home, Lewis glibly asserts that it was Islamic martial prowess, not distraction, that turned back the first Christian counter-attack even before a proper war could be fought. To Lewis, all causation and agency is firmly in the Muslims’ hands.
The eventual withdrawal of the jihad marks the beginning of a power struggle that signals the rise of an Iberia independent of the Dar al-Islam where Lewis depicts the legendary convivencia that supposedly existed between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, a contrast with the violently intolerant Christian rulers whose mounting atrocities culminate in Charlemagne, who even goes so far as to invade Iberia in his abortive proto-crusade. After Charlemagne’s retreat, Europe strengthens itself – though Lewis ponders whether it would have been better to just capitulate – and Iberia goes on its utopian way of self-improvement. The Pyrenees become a boundary of intermittent and unending warfare between Muslims and the Christian mountain kingdoms. What follows is the Spanish Reconquista of Iberia, a time of “reciprocally reassuring ignorance and … an addiction to war as the substitute for the complexities of coexistence.” This assumes that “coexistence” – see “Islamic rule” – was preferable to Christian independence.
The doomed hero of God’s Crucible is not a man, but a nation: Andalusia, Islam in Europe, a caliphal state that is more than willing to share its cultural achievements if the Franks will but humble their overweening pride and submit to Islamic lordship. Within the hallowed urban halls, along the paved colonnades, and in the gentle shades of its imported palms the three monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) enjoy “interdependence that was to distinguish Islam in Iberia for several centuries. But for such a peaceful land of coexistence, one might wonder why the abortive Carolingian campaign of 770s stirred up “Unrest among the amir’s Christian populations.” This subtle contradiction is representative of a problem running throughout God’s Crucible.
Lewis permits himself a curious idealism regarding Islam, signaling his preference by calling the Christian calendar “presumptuous” – despite adhering to the Common Era designation that follows the exact same dating system – and almost religiously delivering his dates in pairs, first the Common Era and then the anno Hegirae (AH), dated from Islam’s founding exodus from Mecca. Much of the rhetoric is merely passing – Clovis and Charlemagne are cast in the “hulking” mold of their ancestral Odoacers, while the Muslim philosopher kings are descendants of astute businessmen – but Lewis goes to great broken-record lengths to prove his tolerance thesis, largely ignoring the fiscal tyranny of Islam, which results in a popular revolt when a Spanish ruler raises taxes. Indeed, Lewis takes great liberties with his assumptions, even claiming (without a footnote) that if one had taken a poll after an unusual Christian uprising in Spain, “all faiths would have shown an overwhelming disapproval.” What Lewis means is that he cannot fathom why Christians living under the yoke of Islam would ever dream of objecting.
To bolster his shaky claims, Lewis carefully juxtaposes Christian violence with Muslim tolerance, the latter allegedly made possible through the dhimmi system, a protection racket by which non-Muslim subjects faced extortion (the infamous jizya tax) and severe social constraints in exchange for religious freedom. Lewis cheerfully lists the strict proscriptions against religious expression, legal sanctions, and social restrictions, briskly passing over them all as “a considerable improvement” when compared to the way that Christians treated one another. Lewis expects his readers to believe that such restrictive living was preferable to that of Christian lands, yet vilifies the Christian Visigoths for committing nearly identical crimes against their indigenous Spanish Jews. It is indeed curious to note that, for all its supposed toleration, Islam oversaw speedy conversions across the empire (causing the rulers to worry about the loss of jizya income ), where just a generation before the people had been risking life and limb in avoiding conversion to merely a different form of Christianity. Ultimately, the rhetoric is shamelessly in favor of Islam: when the Muslims conquered half the known world and more besides, they simply brought unity and progressive society to a crumbling civilization. But when the Christians go a-crusading into Spain and Palestine, Lewis calls them “homicidal.”
Insofar as reading material is concerned, God’s Crucible is a brilliant book. Engaging, authoritatively delivered, and chatty, it makes strong claims with some reasonable arguments entering the picture even as Lewis wistfully imagines an Islamic world without Carolingia. Where it falls short in its central argument, it more than makes up the difference insofar as the condensation of seven hundred years of history is concerned. As for its more problematic declarations, few books on the subject are as likely to encourage further reading.
Image taken from Tower.com
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