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Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Book Notes I just finished Daniel L. Lewis's exasperating God's Crucible. Clearly a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Europe's origins and Islam's role in it, but it is a trial. What starts out as a fascinating narrative soon devolves into a hard slog thanks to the author's annoying habit of infusing his own anachronistic presuppositions into the history. The central argument of the book, and a valid one I think, is that Europe might have advanced more rapidly in its development had the Franks not checked the advance of Muslim armies into Europe at the Pyrenees. Lewis' hero, Abd al-Rahman, the first self-styled Amir of Andalusian Spain, was the sole survivor of the Syrian Umayyads, once proud rulers of Islam in the East, overthrown at last by the Abbasids. The boy made one narrow escape from assassination after another until he reached Spain where he rapidly rose to become the sophisticated ruler of al-Andalus, the parts of the Iberian Peninsula and Septimania under Muslim rule. Lewis is at his best here. His love for the culture of Andalusian Spain and his appreciation for the sophistication of Arab culture is contagious and I found his overview of the rise of Islam thoroughly engrossing. But it's fairly plain that Muhammad brought the new faith of Islam into a civilization that was already ancient, prosperous and sophisticated. And this certainly is a factor in the speed with which it spread. The same simply cannot be assumed about Europe, the very idea of which simply did not exist, even as the young Charlemagne earned his spurs fighting back the armies of pagan Saxons, Slavs and the many petty dukes ruling in the regions that would become France. The land mass that would become Europe was a cauldron of barbarous fights for survival as isolated pockets of learning desperately fought to keep what little learning existed afloat. There was no economy to speak of, no single currency, and no established rule of law apart from that enforced at the end of a sword. But Lewis cannot restrain repeatedly expressing his sneering contempt for this proto-society as he highlights the stark differences between Dark Age Europe and al-Andalus. For all of his vaunted academic credentials, Lewis' writing style often leaves much to be desired. In his New York Times review of the book, Eric Ormsby rightfully points out: It gets worse. On page 165 for example, Lewis ludicrously refers to the English monk and historian, the Venerable Bede, as 'the Einstein of the Dark Ages', an analogy so clueless this reader could only put the book down for a moment and shake his head. What exactly Einstein and Bede have in common is never made plain, but I soldiered onward. Almost two hundred pages later Lewis describes the rise of the monk Gerbert, who we are told learned a great deal during his sojourn in Barcelona, particularly, so the author tells us, in mathematics and astronomy. He writes of this future Pope Sylvester II: "In 980, the priest published his revolutionary four-page textbook on the new mathematics. It was a pivotal moment in the intellectual history of the West, reminiscent of the four physics papers published by Albert Einstein in 1909." 1909? For all his merits as an historian of al-Andalus, clearly the author is as unfamiliar with the life and work of Einstein (whose 'miracle year' was 1905) as he is with the 'mumbo jumbo' of church Latin which he repeatedly condemns. The usual ignorance of medieval scholarship is also on display throughout the book. Thomas Aquinas is once again dismissed as an over cautious scholar only interested in accepting what was 'theologically safe' from the works of Maimonides and Ibn Rushd. Lewis fails to point out that, far from being acceptable to the Christian theologians of the time, Aquinas' careful synthesis was condemned as harshly as Maimonides and Ibn Rushd were by their own communities. His detestation of Christianity's role in Europe simply blinds him to the possibility that these intellectuals were three peas in a pod, not two. At the close of the book Lewis repeats the standard cliches about the authoritarian Pope Innocent III and his stipulations, that Jews and Muslims dwelling in Christendom should be set apart with distinctive garb. This was a hideous practice...earlier instituted in al-Andalus by Abd al-Rahman. Europe certainly benefited from the mores it learned from al-Andalus, the enlightened and the not-so-enlightened. As I said, worth reading, but with caution over the author's political correctness. Labels: Europe, history of science, Islam 7 comments Copyright 2010 by Farrellmedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
