Gods Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 by David Levering
Lewis (Norton, 473 pp.)
Edward Gibbon did not enjoy his time at Oxford. Years after escaping the
university, grim memories of its port-sozzled Anglicanism prompted him to
float a celebrated counter-factual. Writing about the battle of Poitiers, the great
victory won by the Franks over the Arabs in 732, he pondered what the
consequences might have been had the jihad into Europe succeeded.
Perhaps, he mused sardonically, the interpretation of the Koran would
now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to
a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.
Today, as the citys councillors ponder whether to permit the Islamic call to
prayer to sound across the dreaming spires, Gibbons fantasy seems altogether
less fantastical. Historians, their antennae twitching, have been duly quick to
capitalise. David Levering Lewis, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose previous
work focussed on the 19th and 20th Centuries, is one among many who, since
September 11th, have been drawn to re-examine the primal encounter between
Islam and the West. The result is Gods Crucible: a book which argues that the
consequence of the Frankish victory at Poitiers was a catastrophe: one that
made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance,
cultural particularism, and perpetual war. Not, perhaps, the most balanced
judgement on the achievements of medieval Europe but then again, Lewis
does not really seem very interested in balance. Instead, rather like Gibbon
himself, what he really enjoys is a good sneer but delivered in a tone of
sanctimony that is all his own.
The central concern of Gods Crucible, so Lewis assures us, is the critical yet
sympathetic exploration of lives exemplifying uniquely or in some
combination courage or integrity, intellect or calculation in the face of
injustice, religious exclusion, and organized plunder. All well and good, no
doubt; but how bizarre it is, then, that his narrative should be slewed so
grotesquely in favour of conquerors who were themselves nothing if not
sanguinary, exploitative, and avaricious for loot. In this, of course, the
warlords of the Umayyad Caliphate were hardly different from their Roman
and Sassanian predecessors, let alone the Franks: for empire-building, in the
world of late antiquity, was necessarily a brutal business. Nevertheless, it does
seem perverse for Lewis a historian who, in a previous incarnation, wrote a
book in praise of attempts to oppose the 19th Century European scramble for
Africa to side so blatantly, in Gods Crucible, with the invaders. After all, to
argue that the Franks would have been better off being conquered by the
shock-troops of a superior civilisation, bermenschen who could then have
provided the backward natives with a working knowledge of Aristotle and
baths, is rather to parrot the justifications of more recent missions civilisatrices.
Which is not to say that it is undeserving of consideration. Indeed, as
Gibbons counter-factual suggests, the notion has been one to tickle historians
palettes ever since the Enlightenment although Lewis, who has his
predecessor shivering at the thought of a Muslim Oxford, typically
misrepresents this. Certainly, to claim, as he does, that his interpretation is
either bold or new is seriously to over-egg things for it is hardly
ground-breaking to point out that Charlemagnes empire was less developed
than the Caliphate. What is extraordinary in Lewiss book, however and all
the more so coming from a historian of 19th Century imperialism is the
consistent refusal to acknowledge that the deformities of the more
impoverished society were devastatingly worsened by the impact of the richer.
Most egregious of all, in this context, is its discussion of slavery: for no one
would guess, from reading Lewis, that the trade in Europe existed primarily
to satisfy the insatiable demand for human livestock from the great cities of
the Caliphate. Indeed, so busy is he rhapsodising about the fountains of alAndalus that he does not even mention the contemporaneous agonies of Italy,
where up to 12,000 captives might be transported across the seas in a single
flotilla, and its leaders could openly dread the desanguination of
Christendom. An oversight, in short, that is equivalent to writing a book on
the modern African slave trade, and never mentioning the role of Europeans.
True, Lewis does succeed in fashioning a thrilling and colourful narrative out
of the dynastic policies of the two rival powers, al-Andalus and Francia with
the Battle of Poiters itself a particular highlight. From a Pulitzer Prize winner,
however, the reader is surely entitled to expect more. From the claim that
Crassus was officially elevated to a Triumvirate by the Roman Senate to the
designation of the 10th Century Ottonian emperors as Hohenstaufens, his
howlers have a literally millennial range. Even his prose, though perfectly
capable of attaining a flamboyant immediacy, is prone to strange aneurisms.
Malapropisms Hellenistic for Hellenic, Asia Minor for Asia dot the
pages, to say nothing of mixed metaphors. The French nation and the
papacy, the future house of Europes post and lintel, were entities in utero as
the Muslim dawn broke over the peninsula. There is something similar on
almost every page.
The frustration is, of course, that none of this should have mattered: for
Lewiss heart is clearly in the right place. His determination to praise Muslims
at the expense of Franks is prompted, no doubt, by a generous self-
identification with the underdog. The problem is, however, that Lewis is no
longer writing about Africa in the 19th Century or America in the 20th, but an
infinitely remoter and stranger period: a period when the underdogs were
white Europeans. Start wishing defeat on a people, and even a liberal is liable
to find himself in bed with surprising people. Had Charles Martel not been
victorious at Poiters we should in all probability have been converted to
Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies the heroism and which opens up
the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would
have conquered the world..
So declared Adolf Hitler.
