New York University professor Davis Lewis show how the Muslims, who forged a world for themselves out of the decay of the Roman and Persian empires, repeatedly challenged the Christians of Europe, pushing at their homelands' borders and receiving aggressive resistance in return.
The Muslims created Al Andalus, Islamic Spain; Charlemagne created a cohesive Christian Europe; and even today the world lives with the consequences.
Lewis is a prodigious scholar, and his book is compelling not for its story but because of the need of the present to understand the past.
Buy God's Crucible: Islam and the making of Europe, 570-1215, by David Lewis (W. W. Norton, 2008)
