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Synopsis
In 1099, when the first crusaders arrived triumphant and bloody before the walls of Jerusalem, they carved out a Christian European presence in the Islamic world that remained for centuries, bolstered by subsequent waves of new crusades and pilgrimages. But how did medieval Muslims understand these events? What does an Islamic history of the Crusades look like? The answers may surprise you.
In The Race for Paradise, we see medieval Muslims managing this new and long-lived Crusader threat not simply as victims or as victors, but as everything in-between, on all shores of the Muslim Mediterranean, from Spain to Syria. This is not just a straightforward tale of warriors and kings clashing in the Holy Land - of military confrontations and enigmatic heroes such as the great sultan Saladin. What emerges is a more complicated story of border-crossers and turncoats; of embassies
and merchants; of scholars and spies, all of them seeking to manage this new threat from the barbarian fringes of their ordered world.
When seen from the perspective of medieval Muslims, the Crusades emerge as something altogether different from the high-flying rhetoric of the European chronicles: as a diplomatic chess-game to be mastered, a commercial opportunity to be seized, a cultural encounter shaping Muslim experiences of Europeans until the close of the Middle Ages - and, as so often happened, a political challenge to be exploited by ambitious rulers making canny use of the language of jihad. New & Used
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What Reviewers Are Saying
A gripping tale energetically told. * Speculum * Its emphasis as an "Islamic history" of the Crusades means that it is a useful addition to the marketplace. * Al-Ahram * What Cobb creates is a broad geographic and chronological context for the Crusades * Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year 2014 * The 2014 book that most decisively forced me to rethink my understanding of the past * Theodore K. Rabb, TLS * refreshing and illuminating ... a fascinating account * BBC History Magazine * The Race for Paradise increases our understanding of the past, as well as of the world we live in. * The Writer's Drawer * As Paul Cobb demonstrates in his splendidly detailed and timely narrative, Islamic authors and writers in Arabic showed a keen interest in the medieval Christian interlopers into the Muslim world, in political events and in the ideology of jihad that these conflicts revived. Cobb provides a useful corrective to ill-informed assumptions about medieval Islam and later Muslic recollections of the Crusades. [A] lively and scholarly book * Peter Jackson, The Tablet * [A] welcome contribution to the subject. * Svenska Dagbladet * it is an important, paradigm-shifting work nonetheless. Future scholars owe Cobb their thanks. * Dan Jones, Sunday Times * He [Cobb] tells that history very well. * Robert Irwin, Literary Review * This is an excellent book - lucid, insightful and informative. Cobb brings a fresh perspective to contact between Muslims and Christians during the medieval period, energetically transporting us across Islamic lands from Cordova to Baghdad, via Palermo, Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus. Sharply-chosen anecdotes cleverly illuminate life beyond the confines of holy war to give a broad and rewarding understanding of the true context and multi-faceted nature of this complex
and highly important relationship. * Jonathan Phillips, author of Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades * Lively and enjoyable reading, Paul Cobb's The Race for Paradise also offers new insights into the well-worn territory of Crusades history, particularly by showing how the Crusades were part of a broader penetration of Latin Christian powers into the Mediterranean world in the second half of the eleventh century. * Hugh Kennedy, SOAS, University of London * Paul Cobb's The Race for Paradise proves why medieval European history is not the only domain for Crusades study. With a fluid style and superb knowledge of sources, Cobb masterfully enshrines the Islamic narratives, reflecting several genres of scholarship, as fundamentally informative for Crusader history, and that the latter ought to be seen also as reflective of dynamics within the Islamic world. Indispensable for anyone interested in understanding the
Crusades and the Muslim World at that time." * Suleiman A. Mourad, Smith College * [H]ighly original and above all a pleasure to read - a superb overview for the general and the specialised reader alike that sets the Crusades within the larger framework of Islamic history. * Konrad Hirschler, SOAS, University of London *
and highly important relationship
Crusades and the Muslim World at that time." * Suleiman A. Mourad, Smith College * [H]ighly original and above all a pleasure to read - a superb overview for the general and the specialised reader alike that sets the Crusades within the larger framework of Islamic history. * Konrad Hirschler, SOAS, University of London *