The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades - Couverture rigide

Cobb, Professor Of Islamic History Paul M

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0199358117 ISBN 13 : 9780199358113

Editeur : Oxford University Press, USA, 2014

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

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 heros 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.

Revue de presse :

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)

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Oxford University Press, USA
• Date d'édition: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0199358117
• ISBN 13: 9780199358113
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 366