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'God's Crucible' isn't up to the challenge
Lewis sets out to show that the failure of what he calls "the jihad east of the Pyrenees" is "one of the most significant losses in world history." He argues that the Frankish defeat of the Islamic invaders at Poitiers in 732 and the subsequent poetic glorification of Roland's sacrifice to cover Charlemagne's retreat from his own incursion into Spain were "pivotal moments in the creation of an economically retarded, balkanized and fratricidal Europe that, by defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, persecutory religious intolerance, cultural particularism and perpetual war ... 'winning' at Poitiers actually meant that the economic, scientific and cultural levels that Europeans attained in the 13th century could almost certainly have been achieved more than three centuries earlier had they been included in the Muslim world empire."In other words, the West would be better off if it had been incorporated into an all-conquering Islamic empire in the early Middle Ages. OK. Still, it's fair to wonder why, if that's true, the West ended up with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and the Scientific Revolution, and the Islamic world got chronic underdevelopment, a pervasive religious obscurantism, al-Qaida and the trust-fund states of the Arabian peninsula. It's also fair to point out that both the Muslim philosopher Averroes and the Jewish philosopher-physician Maimonides were sent fleeing by Islamic fundamentalists and not the Christian Reconquista. Moreover, the Carolingian incursion into Spain was a response to an invitation by Saracen grandees fearful of Abd al-Rahman's expanding hegemony. An impeccably democratic, humane scholar, Lewis has an understanding of the origins and failures of European civilization that far surpasses his knowledge of Islam. Posted by: ryuge 2008-02-10 |
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