cover image The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades

The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades

Paul Cobb. Oxford Univ, $29.95 (360p) ISBN 978-0-19-935811-3

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. [em](July) [/em]