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The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades
In 1099, when the first Frankish invaders arrived before the walls of Jerusalem, they had carved out a Christian European presence in the Islamic world that endured for centuries, bolstered by subsequent waves of new crusaders and pilgrims. The story of how this group of warriors, driven by faith, greed, and wanderlust, created new Christian-ruled states in parts of the Middle East is one of the best-known in history. Yet it is offers not even half of the story, for it is based almost exclusively on Western sources and overlooks entirely the perspective of the crusaded. How did medieval Muslims perceive what happened?
In The Race for Paradise , Paul M. Cobb offers a new history of the confrontations between Muslims and Franks we now call the "Crusades," one that emphasizes the diversity of Muslim experiences of the European holy war. There is more to the story than Jerusalem, the Templars, Saladin, and the Assassins. Cobb considers the Arab perspective on all shores of the Muslim Mediterranean, from Spain to Syria. In the process, he shows that this is not a straightforward story of warriors and kings clashing in the Holy Land, but a more complicated tale of border-crossers and turncoats; of embassies and merchants; of scholars and spies, all of them seeking to manage a 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 as a cultural encounter to ponder, a diplomatic chess-game to be mastered, a commercial opportunity to be
seized, and as so often happened, a political challenge to be exploited by ambitious rulers making canny use of the language of jihad .
An engrossing synthesis of history and scholarship, The Race for Paradise fills a significant historical gap, considering in a new light the events that distinctively shaped Muslim experiences of Europeans until the close of the Middle Ages.
In The Race for Paradise , Paul M. Cobb offers a new history of the confrontations between Muslims and Franks we now call the "Crusades," one that emphasizes the diversity of Muslim experiences of the European holy war. There is more to the story than Jerusalem, the Templars, Saladin, and the Assassins. Cobb considers the Arab perspective on all shores of the Muslim Mediterranean, from Spain to Syria. In the process, he shows that this is not a straightforward story of warriors and kings clashing in the Holy Land, but a more complicated tale of border-crossers and turncoats; of embassies and merchants; of scholars and spies, all of them seeking to manage a 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 as a cultural encounter to ponder, a diplomatic chess-game to be mastered, a commercial opportunity to be
seized, and as so often happened, a political challenge to be exploited by ambitious rulers making canny use of the language of jihad .
An engrossing synthesis of history and scholarship, The Race for Paradise fills a significant historical gap, considering in a new light the events that distinctively shaped Muslim experiences of Europeans until the close of the Middle Ages.
366 pages, Hardcover
First published July 3, 2014
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February 23, 2015
Historians, students and interested readers have been waiting a long time for a succinct, informative and coherent account of the crusades from the Islamic perspective. While it is too early to say whether Paul M. Cobb has indeed delivered the definitive account, his new book The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (2014) offers a lively and accessible treatment of the history of the crusades as seen and experienced by those whom he (perhaps a little awkwardly) calls "the crusaded". Drawing on the most recent research in the field, some of which will even come as a welcome revelation to specialist readers working on the crusades from the "traditional", Western perspective, Cobb crafts a lucid narrative which encompasses all the major players and events in a period of nearly four hundred years of conflict stretching from Spain to central Asia. He deliberately - and quite rightly - opts not to focus exclusively on the ongoing war between Christians and Muslims in the Near East from the late eleventh century to the late thirteenth, but instead extends his focus across the entire Mediterranean to Sicily, north Africa, and Spain, in order to incorporate the numerous campaigns in those regions that were imbued with a crusading flavour.
While Cobb's account is for the most part quite clear and readable, peppered liberally with vivid excerpts from medieval chronicles which illustrate how contemporary or near-contemporary writers conceptualised these events, there are some notable holes in the story, as well as hints of structural imbalance. For example, Cobb offers very little discussion or analysis of the Catalan-Pisan crusade against the Balearics in 1113-1115, or of Jaime I of Aragón's own, more successful, expedition against the islands more than a century later. It is also a little disorienting to be catapulted back through time to campaigns against Muslims in twelfth-century Sicily and thirteenth-century Spain after having been led for the previous couple of chapters through the explosive triumphs of the Mamluks and their Ottoman successors right up until the sixteenth century. But these are minor criticisms, and should not detract from the strengths of what is undoubtedly one of the most original works on the crusades to appear in recent years.
I would argue that the real strength of this book, whatever its shortcomings, is the freshness of the perspective it provides. Cobb achieves this freshness by adopting subtle (as well as some less subtle) strategies in order to situate his audience, explicitly identified as non-specialists, within an Islamic and eastern conceptual framework from the outset. The opening chapter, exploiting Muslim geographical accounts and al-Idrisi's famous world map (produced in 1154, supposedly for King Roger II of Sicily), deftly plucks readers from the traditional, West-East context adumbrated at the head of almost every general history of the crusades and cleverly inverts our point of view, encouraging us to imagine how medieval Muslims thought of Christendom long before the expedition which captured Jerusalem in 1099 was ever dreamed of. Cobb maintains this perspective through various other calculated narrative techniques. The crusades, for example, are referred to as "Frankish invasions" more often than not; the crusaders, likewise, are dubbed "the Franks" (echoing the Arabic al-ifranj) far more often than they are called "the crusaders" or "the Christians". For the most part Cobb draws on Islamic rather than Christian sources, a methodological choice which allows him to tilt his angle on the story even more sharply, even if it results in a (deliberate?) obfuscation of the crusaders' motivations and their own context. This aspect of the book in fact highlights one of its most important lessons, something which western historians of the crusades have long been aware of, but still seem generally reluctant to learn: no satisfactory history of crusading, whatever one understands by that term, will ever be written until due attention, interpretation and analysis is granted to sources written by those on all sides of the story. A multitude of voices in Arabic, Latin, Greek, French, Occitan, German, Armenian, Syriac and other medieval languages has left us a rich tapestry of source material on the complex and fascinating conflicts, alliances, exchanges, betrayals and intercultural relations that took place in the course of what we now call "the crusades". Paul Cobb has engagingly shone the torch on the path to a scholarly future in which this multitude might be fully appreciated. The Race for Paradise is a useful corrective to traditional narratives of the crusades, which Cobb sees as falling broadly into the categories of either triumphalism or "lachrymose" victimisation. As with all correctives, it perhaps attempts to knock the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, but it is certainly a welcome and thoughtful contribution to crusades scholarship. It should be read by everyone interested in the crusades, specialists and non-specialists alike.
While Cobb's account is for the most part quite clear and readable, peppered liberally with vivid excerpts from medieval chronicles which illustrate how contemporary or near-contemporary writers conceptualised these events, there are some notable holes in the story, as well as hints of structural imbalance. For example, Cobb offers very little discussion or analysis of the Catalan-Pisan crusade against the Balearics in 1113-1115, or of Jaime I of Aragón's own, more successful, expedition against the islands more than a century later. It is also a little disorienting to be catapulted back through time to campaigns against Muslims in twelfth-century Sicily and thirteenth-century Spain after having been led for the previous couple of chapters through the explosive triumphs of the Mamluks and their Ottoman successors right up until the sixteenth century. But these are minor criticisms, and should not detract from the strengths of what is undoubtedly one of the most original works on the crusades to appear in recent years.
I would argue that the real strength of this book, whatever its shortcomings, is the freshness of the perspective it provides. Cobb achieves this freshness by adopting subtle (as well as some less subtle) strategies in order to situate his audience, explicitly identified as non-specialists, within an Islamic and eastern conceptual framework from the outset. The opening chapter, exploiting Muslim geographical accounts and al-Idrisi's famous world map (produced in 1154, supposedly for King Roger II of Sicily), deftly plucks readers from the traditional, West-East context adumbrated at the head of almost every general history of the crusades and cleverly inverts our point of view, encouraging us to imagine how medieval Muslims thought of Christendom long before the expedition which captured Jerusalem in 1099 was ever dreamed of. Cobb maintains this perspective through various other calculated narrative techniques. The crusades, for example, are referred to as "Frankish invasions" more often than not; the crusaders, likewise, are dubbed "the Franks" (echoing the Arabic al-ifranj) far more often than they are called "the crusaders" or "the Christians". For the most part Cobb draws on Islamic rather than Christian sources, a methodological choice which allows him to tilt his angle on the story even more sharply, even if it results in a (deliberate?) obfuscation of the crusaders' motivations and their own context. This aspect of the book in fact highlights one of its most important lessons, something which western historians of the crusades have long been aware of, but still seem generally reluctant to learn: no satisfactory history of crusading, whatever one understands by that term, will ever be written until due attention, interpretation and analysis is granted to sources written by those on all sides of the story. A multitude of voices in Arabic, Latin, Greek, French, Occitan, German, Armenian, Syriac and other medieval languages has left us a rich tapestry of source material on the complex and fascinating conflicts, alliances, exchanges, betrayals and intercultural relations that took place in the course of what we now call "the crusades". Paul Cobb has engagingly shone the torch on the path to a scholarly future in which this multitude might be fully appreciated. The Race for Paradise is a useful corrective to traditional narratives of the crusades, which Cobb sees as falling broadly into the categories of either triumphalism or "lachrymose" victimisation. As with all correctives, it perhaps attempts to knock the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, but it is certainly a welcome and thoughtful contribution to crusades scholarship. It should be read by everyone interested in the crusades, specialists and non-specialists alike.
November 29, 2023
so. lets start with the objective. cobb is an engaging writer, with a clear facility in this topic, and his arabic is largely very good. he can't help not being a native speaker and therefore not being able to pronounce some letters. i also found the scope of this book tremendously fascinating, because it seeks to wholly and completely contextualize the crusades as a western audience understand it through the lens of people living within 'the abode of islam'. on these merits alone, this book merits 5 stars, but rating is subjective and ill be honest that this rating is a reflection of my experience reading the book rather than a reflection of its success in navigating the topic.
i grew up fundie muslim--i think this is really important context for my reaction. i have done, i think, a relatively admirable job of dismantling that. so it was with some, uh, alarm? i guess? to realize that i still carried many propogandist beliefs about the medieval muslim world, and especially about salah-ud-din's role in the crusades. the book is really unrelenting--the western crusaders ('franks'), are not presented as sympathetic or misguided, but conversely neither are the muslims absolved of the atrocities they commit against civilians in an effort to reclaim places conquered from them. it isn't hard to swallow that military leaders on either side of this war of conquest and re-conquest are not one dimensional shining paragons of virtue with purely religious intent. what was difficult to swallow was the way civilians, again and again, who simply wanted to live, trade, and worship, were constantly sacrificed on the altar of an invented religious conflict in order to secure wealth via land and trade. im, if not religious, then at least v spiritually committed to my religion, and it has very strict guidelines about what things you may go to war for and how that war is to be conducted and reading about leaders--both political and religious--whipping up entire populations into a blood frenzy to justify the pursuit of power and wealth genuinely made me deranged.
youre probably thinking, 'babygirl war is hell we know this.' i do know this. i did also swallow and accept a lot of propaganda about just wars that spare the lives of innocents. i also came away from this thinking, wow. religion in government is so bad. i know this. we know this. if you're in america youre seeing how religion in government is ruining the lives of millions right now. but again, i realized i still harbored some buried piece of propagandist belief that there was a time when islam's juridical framework was employed justly. lol. lmfao if you will.
STILL! this is in my opinion, especially knowing the rarity of english-language books about hte crusades written by a scholar who specializes in arabic, is a tremendous achievement and if you want a more well rounded understanding of one of the most fucked up conflicts and one that cited as a root or a foundation for politics in the middle east today, i recommend this. five stars for scholarship. three stars for emotional damage.
oh wait. as a post script: its really interesting to see which events different scholars choose to prioritize and why. having just read several books that touched on the era of the crusades from the west (but were not about it), that several large figures took only a few sentences was fascinating. richard the lionheart, Thee Crusader in much of the western cultural imagination, is essentially rendered into a footnote, though the west always alternately pairs him with or pits him against saladin as a foil. this is not a criticism. its just a demonstration of how reading only one sort of scholarship will yield an incredibly distorted view of events.
i grew up fundie muslim--i think this is really important context for my reaction. i have done, i think, a relatively admirable job of dismantling that. so it was with some, uh, alarm? i guess? to realize that i still carried many propogandist beliefs about the medieval muslim world, and especially about salah-ud-din's role in the crusades. the book is really unrelenting--the western crusaders ('franks'), are not presented as sympathetic or misguided, but conversely neither are the muslims absolved of the atrocities they commit against civilians in an effort to reclaim places conquered from them. it isn't hard to swallow that military leaders on either side of this war of conquest and re-conquest are not one dimensional shining paragons of virtue with purely religious intent. what was difficult to swallow was the way civilians, again and again, who simply wanted to live, trade, and worship, were constantly sacrificed on the altar of an invented religious conflict in order to secure wealth via land and trade. im, if not religious, then at least v spiritually committed to my religion, and it has very strict guidelines about what things you may go to war for and how that war is to be conducted and reading about leaders--both political and religious--whipping up entire populations into a blood frenzy to justify the pursuit of power and wealth genuinely made me deranged.
youre probably thinking, 'babygirl war is hell we know this.' i do know this. i did also swallow and accept a lot of propaganda about just wars that spare the lives of innocents. i also came away from this thinking, wow. religion in government is so bad. i know this. we know this. if you're in america youre seeing how religion in government is ruining the lives of millions right now. but again, i realized i still harbored some buried piece of propagandist belief that there was a time when islam's juridical framework was employed justly. lol. lmfao if you will.
STILL! this is in my opinion, especially knowing the rarity of english-language books about hte crusades written by a scholar who specializes in arabic, is a tremendous achievement and if you want a more well rounded understanding of one of the most fucked up conflicts and one that cited as a root or a foundation for politics in the middle east today, i recommend this. five stars for scholarship. three stars for emotional damage.
oh wait. as a post script: its really interesting to see which events different scholars choose to prioritize and why. having just read several books that touched on the era of the crusades from the west (but were not about it), that several large figures took only a few sentences was fascinating. richard the lionheart, Thee Crusader in much of the western cultural imagination, is essentially rendered into a footnote, though the west always alternately pairs him with or pits him against saladin as a foil. this is not a criticism. its just a demonstration of how reading only one sort of scholarship will yield an incredibly distorted view of events.
December 9, 2015
Cobb's prose is clear and easy reading, which suggests that this is a book suitable for the amateur; what he writes about, however, is a dense name-porridge with a lot of military derring-do, which suggests that it's really for academics or true Crusade buffs. If the book was an artwork, it would be a series of maps showing the boundaries of the territory in question, which changed hands umpteen times during the period. Next to each map would be a large screen flashing the words "IT'S COMPLICATED." There's lots of description of battles and sieges, far less court-intrigue type politics, and almost nothing else at all.
As a professional historian, then, Cobb has done a great job. You couldn't possibly read this and come away still thinking that the 'Crusades' were a clash of Christianity and Islam. But I doubt whether the average reader will get too much out of it other than that, which, given that our notional reader is picking up a book called 'An Islamic History of the Crusades,' she probably already knows. It took me about 18 months to read. It's less than 300 pages long. The chapter titles don't describe what's in the chapters. Why do historians insist on doing this? Just tell us what's in the chapters. It makes everyone's lives much easier.
That said, I trust him entirely, and he can write sentences. I'd very much like to read him on the less high-military-politics aspects of the period.
As a professional historian, then, Cobb has done a great job. You couldn't possibly read this and come away still thinking that the 'Crusades' were a clash of Christianity and Islam. But I doubt whether the average reader will get too much out of it other than that, which, given that our notional reader is picking up a book called 'An Islamic History of the Crusades,' she probably already knows. It took me about 18 months to read. It's less than 300 pages long. The chapter titles don't describe what's in the chapters. Why do historians insist on doing this? Just tell us what's in the chapters. It makes everyone's lives much easier.
That said, I trust him entirely, and he can write sentences. I'd very much like to read him on the less high-military-politics aspects of the period.
October 27, 2022
For medieval Muslims before the Crusades, the peoples who lived way down north in Christian Europe were distant and dubious participants in the game of civilization, though acknowledged participants nonetheless.
The Race for Paradise is an excellent introductory text to the Muslim perspective of the Crusades and the “Franks” that fought them.
The Bigger Picture
To them, the invasion of the Levant associated with the First Crusade was simply one outburst of European aggression that began decades earlier, in the eleventh century, in Spain and Sicily.
The major point I took from The Race for Paradise was continuity. Sort of. It felt like there were two parallel concepts here:
(1) The Islamic World was under assault in Sicily and al-Andalus/Spain well before the Crusades began (the narrative kicks off from about 1050), and the conflicts ran well beyond those Crusades.
(2) While the assaults were "global", the Islamic responses were local, and for all the success in the Levant (and later South East Europe), disunity led to defeat in Sicily and Spain.
After all, there was alot going on in an Islamic World that stretched into Central Asia and was far bigger, richer and more diverse than Christian Europe:
The long and sometimes tumultuous migration of the Oghuz Turks and the Saljuq clan across much of the Islamic world was the most important engine of change in Islamdom since the career of Prophet Muhammad himself.
Cobb makes the interesting choice to use "Franks" as a general descriptor of the crusaders in all locations. While there are a reasonable amount references by nationality, it gives perspective about how the constellation of the often-warring Muslim states are subject to catch all terms like "Saracens." I feel this choice subverts how we generally understand the Crusades from a Western perspective, i.e. a barely united group often backstabbing each other. From the Muslim perspective there was a continuity of enemies.
For the Muslims themselves, their response to the Crusades all through the Mediterranean was localised and fragmented at times, and often self-interested, such as with the Almoravids and Almohads. The decision by local rulers that "Better to pasture camels than to herd swine" when inviting those dynasties across the Straits of Gibraltar did not quite pay off:
As for al-Mu'tamid of Seville, who had been personally responsible for bringing the Almoravids to al-Andalus in the first place, he too was forced to surrender his city and was exiled to Morocco, where he no doubt spent the rest of his life musing over the merits of pasturing camels.
The Deeper Picture
The narrative part of the Crusades in the Levant is fine, and Cobb is very keen to let you know that Saladin wasn't that hot stuff, relatively speaking. Baybars, Zengi and a few other Muslim rulers are given more prominent places in the narrative than popular Western sources may allow, with extended coverage until the expulsion of the Crusaders from the Levant, before going up to the fall of Constantinople. That is a slightly arbitrary stopping point as The Race for Paradise covers earlier Balkan incursions that continued at a high tempo well beyond that timeframe. However, it carries the point well enough that it was not all about Jerusalem.
I would say the recounting of events is a little dry, but the book isn’t just about “one damn thing after another”. The "setting the scene" before the main narrative and perceptions Muslim travellers had of the West, are fresh and interesting information:
In short, as we saw in al-Bakri's account of Latin Christianity, the Franks were the victim of the classic strategy by which one people defines itself against another, attributing to them qualities that were the very antithesis of qualities Muslims claimed for themselves.
In another section, the extended break down of what a jihad was, relative to a Crusade, was particularly valuable. What a jihad meant then isn't necessarily what it might mean now, but it is still useful to compare what a jihad was (and wasn’t) versus a crusade, and allow the reader to avoid visualising the Muslim counter responses as mirroring the initial Crusades.
Commercial and cultural interactions also feature, concentrating in the Muslim perspective - while Genoa and Venice feature heavily, it’s not about their trading activities, rather how the Muslim world sometimes conflicted, sometimes aided, those merchant republics.
The Race for Paradise provides insight into what it felt like to be subject to the Crusaders, without treating the Muslim world as without agency. This book offers neither triumphal nor lachrymose narratives, as Cobb notes. Rather it is about how different groups interacted and saw each other, without moral judgement as to the superiority of one over the other, with the slight caveat the Franks tended a bit more to the war crimes.
The Race for Paradise is an excellent introductory text to the Muslim perspective of the Crusades and the “Franks” that fought them.
The Bigger Picture
To them, the invasion of the Levant associated with the First Crusade was simply one outburst of European aggression that began decades earlier, in the eleventh century, in Spain and Sicily.
The major point I took from The Race for Paradise was continuity. Sort of. It felt like there were two parallel concepts here:
(1) The Islamic World was under assault in Sicily and al-Andalus/Spain well before the Crusades began (the narrative kicks off from about 1050), and the conflicts ran well beyond those Crusades.
(2) While the assaults were "global", the Islamic responses were local, and for all the success in the Levant (and later South East Europe), disunity led to defeat in Sicily and Spain.
After all, there was alot going on in an Islamic World that stretched into Central Asia and was far bigger, richer and more diverse than Christian Europe:
The long and sometimes tumultuous migration of the Oghuz Turks and the Saljuq clan across much of the Islamic world was the most important engine of change in Islamdom since the career of Prophet Muhammad himself.
Cobb makes the interesting choice to use "Franks" as a general descriptor of the crusaders in all locations. While there are a reasonable amount references by nationality, it gives perspective about how the constellation of the often-warring Muslim states are subject to catch all terms like "Saracens." I feel this choice subverts how we generally understand the Crusades from a Western perspective, i.e. a barely united group often backstabbing each other. From the Muslim perspective there was a continuity of enemies.
For the Muslims themselves, their response to the Crusades all through the Mediterranean was localised and fragmented at times, and often self-interested, such as with the Almoravids and Almohads. The decision by local rulers that "Better to pasture camels than to herd swine" when inviting those dynasties across the Straits of Gibraltar did not quite pay off:
As for al-Mu'tamid of Seville, who had been personally responsible for bringing the Almoravids to al-Andalus in the first place, he too was forced to surrender his city and was exiled to Morocco, where he no doubt spent the rest of his life musing over the merits of pasturing camels.
The Deeper Picture
The narrative part of the Crusades in the Levant is fine, and Cobb is very keen to let you know that Saladin wasn't that hot stuff, relatively speaking. Baybars, Zengi and a few other Muslim rulers are given more prominent places in the narrative than popular Western sources may allow, with extended coverage until the expulsion of the Crusaders from the Levant, before going up to the fall of Constantinople. That is a slightly arbitrary stopping point as The Race for Paradise covers earlier Balkan incursions that continued at a high tempo well beyond that timeframe. However, it carries the point well enough that it was not all about Jerusalem.
I would say the recounting of events is a little dry, but the book isn’t just about “one damn thing after another”. The "setting the scene" before the main narrative and perceptions Muslim travellers had of the West, are fresh and interesting information:
In short, as we saw in al-Bakri's account of Latin Christianity, the Franks were the victim of the classic strategy by which one people defines itself against another, attributing to them qualities that were the very antithesis of qualities Muslims claimed for themselves.
In another section, the extended break down of what a jihad was, relative to a Crusade, was particularly valuable. What a jihad meant then isn't necessarily what it might mean now, but it is still useful to compare what a jihad was (and wasn’t) versus a crusade, and allow the reader to avoid visualising the Muslim counter responses as mirroring the initial Crusades.
Commercial and cultural interactions also feature, concentrating in the Muslim perspective - while Genoa and Venice feature heavily, it’s not about their trading activities, rather how the Muslim world sometimes conflicted, sometimes aided, those merchant republics.
The Race for Paradise provides insight into what it felt like to be subject to the Crusaders, without treating the Muslim world as without agency. This book offers neither triumphal nor lachrymose narratives, as Cobb notes. Rather it is about how different groups interacted and saw each other, without moral judgement as to the superiority of one over the other, with the slight caveat the Franks tended a bit more to the war crimes.
March 14, 2018
A book told using mainly Islamic sources and attempting to place the crusades in context of a greater Muslim world. A must read that's only fault is the name soup problem. There is just too many names and so many back and forth exchanges. But despite this it manages to convey what it was trying to do and that is explain the complex nature of the Muslim world at the time of the crusades and how it was most definitely not a black and white holy war on either side. It explains very well why the crusaders were successful without pooh poohing their accomplishments and places the events themselves in relation to the rest of the abode of Islam. It explains the complex background of in-fighting, revolts, civil wars and constant struggles between the Franks/Seljuic Turks/Abbasid Caliphate/Fatimid Caliphate and local rulers and religious sects.
My only other negative is that it dismisses and marginalizes the byzantine aspect of the conflict but this is a minor thing. I highly recommend this book, but I also will note its some dense stuff at times. I will in all likelihood buy this book and reread it more than once to get the most out of it.
My only other negative is that it dismisses and marginalizes the byzantine aspect of the conflict but this is a minor thing. I highly recommend this book, but I also will note its some dense stuff at times. I will in all likelihood buy this book and reread it more than once to get the most out of it.
November 11, 2024
Well written but dense history book, despite it being less than three hundred pages. I’ll probably refer back to sections of this book for stories about specific Muslim dynasties during the crusades.
I struggled to keep track of names, but there’s a glossary to help the reader. I wonder if the information might have been conveyed more easily had the book been organized by different regions (Al-Andalus, Sicily, Anatolia, the levant, and so on) rather than chronologically.
I struggled to keep track of names, but there’s a glossary to help the reader. I wonder if the information might have been conveyed more easily had the book been organized by different regions (Al-Andalus, Sicily, Anatolia, the levant, and so on) rather than chronologically.
November 13, 2025
Any book on the Crusades that starts with a very clear admonition that it wasn’t a special historical phenomenon gets my vote. The Crusades were absolutely a natural – if dramatic – development of conflict in the medieval Mediterranean. To understand them, you have to go back and assess the cultural and military dramas unfolding on a much smaller scale. Digging into why one guy hated his neighbour and who he allied with in order to stick it to the other bastard has more to tell us about Crusading than any papal bull. Religious analysis will get you almost nowhere.
Cobb absolutely understands this. To me (not that I’ve read everything in the field) he is quite a unique voice in Western Crusade writing, as he doesn’t want to tell a grand narrative about ‘fighting against the odds’ and European scheming. He wants to quite plainly and in an un-Romantic way lay things out and leave you to make of it what you will.
I love that idea. Trust your readers! Give them the tools, make sure your citations and references will let them pursue any topic of particular interest, and leave.
Sure, there’s a place for much more involved and dramatic writing. Excellent prose can elevate a non-fiction just as much as a fiction book. But it’s not required. Cobb’s style of writing might not fire the imagination of a reader who’s looking to be whisked off their feet by a grand story, but hey. Pick up a book with dragons on the cover or something.
Cobb starts this book with a high level but thorough overview of the state of what he terms ‘Islamdom’ at around 1050AD.
Early on, he throws in a maxim which he uses to try and frame how dar al-Islam works (or is meant to work):
There is no ruler without an army;
and there is no army without revenues;
and there are no revenues without cultivation;
and there is no cultivation without equity and good governance.
He returns to this idea of the Circle of Equity and Islamic concepts of governance regularly throughout, so it forms a sort of jumping off point for his characterisation of many of the Muslim caliphates, Kingdoms, and statelets he goes on to survey.
Mind you, you do need to go to the notes at the back of the book to find out who said this quote, it’s only given in an English version, and he doesn’t give a time period other than that this is from an ‘early text’ so like. Fuck my drag.
But this really is a great starting point for the way he wants to draw a distinction between how Christendom and Islamdom operated at the time. It’s also beat for beat my Total War strategy, but that’s just science. If you don’t build roads as your first thing in each settlement, you just don’t know ball.
Cobb does a good job showing how little the centres of Christian and Muslim power knew about each other, what they did know, and what particular biases might shape what they could even imagine. It’s very important, for example, that he makes it clear that a Caliph is not a Pope, and that the Islamic legal system wasn’t officially governed by the whims of powerful kings, but a sophisticated network of religious scholars.
It’s well worth making it clear how comparatively large, rich, developed, and complicated the Islamic world really was at the time.
This kind of treatment sets up the later chapters, because there’s no lazy assertion that the Muslims kind of patiently waited for each Crusade ‘event’ to kick off. The traditional view of the Islamic world being a passive, feminised, decadent, brutal world of internal power struggles and puppet rulers is honestly so very boring so it’s important that Cobb doesn’t assume you know better – he SHOWS you why you should know better.
This means that the early chapters are definitely pitched for an audience without a huge amount of existing knowledge about medieval Islamic culture, which is absolutely fine. Cobb keeps up a quick, unsentimental pace. He’ll give you little exemplars and asides every now and again but he is covering a huge amount – geographically, historically, sociologically, politically, religiously – so he’s gotta go fast.
One of Cobb’s first big theses is that Muslim observers saw the first Crusade as only part of a growing wave of Frankish aggression throughout the 11th century. At a time of internal division – the Umayyad caliphate in Al-Andalus splitting into the Taifa kingdoms, Sunni–Shi’a (Shi’i for Cobb) tensions between Syria and Egypt – the Westerners were seen as taking advantage of the situation. In some ways calling it the ‘first Crusade’ is like calling the Battle of the Somme ‘the First World War’. The war was kind of already going on by that point, bab.
Importantly, Cobb highlights that the Franks’ reasons for war are generally taken at face value by contemporary Muslim sources. They talk about Christians ‘waging jihad’, for example. This is obviously doubly interesting when compared to modern analysis of the Crusades, which has moved away from seeing them as ‘holy wars’ in and of themselves and tends to highlight the obvious material and political gain to be had instead. Many modern historians write about medieval figures as though they all had a wink wink nudge nudge enlightened atheism hidden behind the public veneer of church-going.
While the Crusades – especially the fourth, the Albigensian, and the northern varieties – are inarguably deeply politically motivated, though, it pays to consider what people at the time were saying.
They weren’t lying when they said they thought God wanted them to do this. The Muslims weren’t lying when they said the Crusaders fought with the fervour of holy warriors. It’s important that we understand that religiosity permeated society to such a degree that it was possible to make evil, evil decisions and carry out genocidal acts while thinking about both the money you were going to get out of it AND God in equal measure. You can’t understand the Crusades without trying to understand what religion meant to the people at the time, and that requires adopting a mindset that is very alien to most people today.
Cobb makes the excellent observation that Muslim commentary which highlights the strength of the Christians is often paired with a criticism (implicit or explicit) of the relative religiosity of the Muslim rulers. This is pulled through the book as a consistent theme, in that from the Islamic perspective the Christian invasions were seen as punishment from God for their own failings, rather than actions taken by other full and complete people.
Cobb’s analysis shows this same flattening of the ‘enemy’ into a faceless entity of divine punishment is not unique to Western mindsets. For example, in Muslim chronicles Ibn al-Thumna is blamed for the loss of Sicily to the Normans. Cobb describes him as the perfect ‘fall guy’. His hard-drinking led to his mistreatment of his wife, which led to a falling out with his wife’s brother, a fellow petty ruler. The subsequent war between the two was going poorly for al-Thumna, who hired Norman mercenaries to bolster his forces. Like vultures, the mercenaries got fat on the carcass of the island and finally, nearly 30 years later, could call themselves the rulers of Sicily.
This is very fun because if you read any Western history, they will tell you how Robert Guiscard the Norman earned his last name, ‘the fox,’ with his shrewd ruthlessness, conquering Sicily and half of Italy besides out of pure wily skill. The rulers he crushed are not really part of the Western story – they’re set-dressing in a narrative of Norman-specialism, those fated warriors.
The juxtaposition is crazy. It’s also delicious to get to see the same story from a completely different angle. Not everyone has a vested interest in the Normans. For Muslims chroniclers, Robert is just some guy. That’s refreshing!
The Islamic sources don’t care at all that some Pope had beef with the Holy Roman Empire and wanted to assert his personal moral authority and made some great deals with a restless noble class etc. As Cobb writes:
‘The Franks had always been aggressive quasi-barbarians. The finer points of how they justified this aggression were thus of no interest.’
All that mattered was that the barbarian invasions began to succeed, and what this meant for dar-al Islam.
It’s a great start, but Cobb quickly runs out of steam. You can imagine why. A history of the Crusades – all of ‘em – in less than 300 pages? You’d have to be a scholar and writer of quite literally unimaginable skill to pull it off. The fact that Cobb has so much in the early part of the book that does hit and does feel satisfying is a feat to be praised.
Unfortunately, after the strong start he moves to interminable high-level reviews of conflict. For example, he charges through the story of how Sicily fell in about 10 pages, then jumps through the back and forth warring in Spain in a similarly truncated fashion.
It’s even worse when we get past the third Crusade or so. Whole decades go by in a couple of paragraphs. He starts flip-flopping on the timelines to make sure he’s mentioned a couple of key things before charging onto the next. It’s messy and poorly structured, which doesn’t help.
My main issue is that in the end, the way he has gone about these speedy reviews of conflict means Cobb doesn’t stick to the promise of the title of the book. He’s good at talking about Islamic ideas and religious movements in his sharp, quick way, making things accessible and getting through a lot in a short amount of time, but it’s a terrible way to try and cover the narrative of wars.
For these he actually relatively rarely refers to Muslim chronicles, still less quotes from them. He’s just giving cliff notes. It’s definitely about Muslim people and places, although his chronology and when and where certain conflicts come up gets a little scrambled. But it’s not really an ‘Islamic’ history of the fighting.
It gets frustrating after a while because if this is a book on the Islamic history and viewpoint on these conflicts, and you’re not actually using much literature or closely analysing/presenting the texts making up that history, then who’s driving the bus?
The narratives for the traditional Crusades are much the same. High-level, relying on many European sources, he follows along the story in the order that cities, rulers, and complications appeared from the European perspective. So for the first Crusade he tells us about Anatolia and the Danishmendids and THEN Antioch and THEN Aleppo and Damascus. It doesn’t feel Islam-centric. It feels like a slightly more detailed summary of the first Crusade Wikipedia page.
If a particular narrative strand isn’t useful for what he wants to say, he just won’t expand on it. For example, Duqaq of Damascus’ atabeg Tughtakin comes up a lot, as he was quite involved in the fight against the new Crusader kingdoms. Meanwhile Ridwan of Aleppo, Duqaq’s brother, has an atabeg who… Cobb doesn’t name. All he says is:
‘In Damascus, Duqaq was assisted by one of Tutush’s inner circle, an old officer named Tughtakin, who was appointed atabeg. In Aleppo, Prince Ridwan too technically had an atabeg, but he was less of an influence – indeed he was often a foe.’
Janah ad-Dawla, the unnamed atabeg, was a fascinating figure. The story of Ridwan battling this old bastard for control of Aleppo and then eventually probably having him assassinated by Shi’a extremists is not only sick as fuck but also, one would think, very important to an Islamic history? Especially as the murder tied into politically and religious tensions that had almost certainly been part of the death of Ridwan’s uncle, the Malikshah, which precipitated the breakdown of the caliphate and led to Syria being so isolated and split by internal conflict that it allowed the first Crusade to succeed.
Cobb comes back to this several chapters later in a crisp two paragraph summary that… still doesn’t name ad-Dawla.
It’s kind of disappointing that the opening of the book had this clear vision of turning the narrative around only to keep the traditional narrative trucking anyway.
I should probably have felt suspicious and not expected too much, but you can’t blame a girl for trying.
There were red flags that indicated that this was not truly an Islamic history. Cobb uses Western years rather than the Islamic system. He also gives all (and I mean ALL) quotes only in an English translation. And truthfully I should have known better when I saw the bibliography was called ‘Bibliographic sketch’ and was only 4 pages long.
In the end it comes back to the same old question. If I wanted to get a good summary of XYZ conflict, I could get a book on that conflict. I could probably find one with more analysis and depth. If I wanted the same old approach to discussing Crusade history, I’d read the dozens of others on my shelf. I could definitely find something with more flair or narrative voice.
Generally this book is mostly just disappointing in that it could have been so much more, and had a good idea that it just couldn’t deliver on. However, there are a couple of throwaway lines that I have to take umbrage with because I’m just kind of like that as a person and quite hateful deep down.
Firstly, he describes Tripoli as ‘schizophrenic’ which like. That’s a city, girl. Use your brain to understand why that’s weird. Let’s stop doing this!
Secondly and most importantly, one passage that stuck in my craw a little was:
‘…neither Islam nor Latin Christianity is inherently violent, and both were and are far too internally diversified as systems of thought to be essentialist in this way.’
I’m making a face. I don’t know how to describe the face or the emotion it conveys, so I’m just telling you – I’m making it.
The thing is Cobb is kind of right here but he’s also kind of wrong in a way that is hard to swallow.
In this section specifically he is talking about the idea of holy war – Crusade and jihad – and so it would be charitable to assume that he is specifically talking about violence in terms of war. He’s, of course, correct that both religions are not inherently war-religions.
He is also correct to point out the many diverse belief systems within both Christianity and Islam. A Mexican Catholic will share incredibly few beliefs with a South African evangelical or a Cornish Quaker. A Wahhabi Sunni Muslim would find it difficult to agree on much with an Ismail’i sufi.
However, we have to draw a line somewhere. They may be different, but the Catholic and the Quarker are still Christian. What do all of these diverse expressions of belief have in common? There are some foundational elements, whether that’s belief that the bible or Quran or lists of hadiths or traditions passed from some system of authority. There is something that unifies Christian belief into ‘Christianity’ and Muslim belief into ‘Islam’, and some essentialisms can be made. You need caveats and there is always room for nuance, but you have to be able to talk about them as both religions and bodies of thought.
Sadly, I think one of the main essentialist points you can make is that both religions, barring unique subgroups, are inherently violent. But they’re not inherently violent in a ‘pick up ya swords let’s do a war’ way. They’re violent in an oppression of women way.
(Boohoo oh no it’s feminism again.)
Whether the foundational tenet of belief is holy scripture(s) or the traditional systems and beliefs passed down, the relegation of women to a kind of subordinate lower class of person is hard-baked into both religions. The fundamental and kind of unarguable conclusion is that the belief systems of which these points are part of are – as a rule – misogynistic. They devalue women.
Now the defenders will say that these ideas, whether literal or taken as allegorical figures of speech, don’t devalue women. They say that the subordinate place of women is not lesser, it’s just different. God decrees a societal place for us all, and women happen to be in the place where they’re kind of inherently worse at everything and should be treated as such. No devaluation here!
That’s obviously stupid so let’s agree that women being second-class to men is inherently part of both religions, whether you think ‘first the worst second the best’ or not.
This might not be cool hacking and slashing violence, and some might even argue with calling it violence! You could say that it’s simply a cultural thing and the word ‘violence’ too loaded.
However, at the end of the day the dehumanisation and disenfranchisement of women that is specifically enshrined at the heart of both Christian and Islamic scripture has been directly responsible for literally thousands of years of death, rape, and social, political, and economic VIOLENCE.
It’s actually some of the worst violence imaginable because it’s so ingrained and so fundamental that it’s now just an accepted structure of life in nominally Christian and Muslim countries.
To put a long story short, I can’t really read a sentence where a male author says that these religions are not inherently violent without making a face. Because if you’re a woman you know it’s not really true and it’s never been true. It’s just likely that he doesn’t even understand the scale of structural violence inherent, openly and subliminally, because it’s so common, so fundamental, that some people don’t even see it.
In the end, The Race for Paradise feels like a book that knows exactly what it wants to be but can’t quite get there.
Cobb’s intentions are clearly in the right place. He sets out to tell a story of the Crusades that decentres the usual European heroes and asks readers to think about how Muslims understood the centuries-long struggle on their own terms. His framing of the Crusades as part of a wider Mediterranean pattern of politics, trade, and conflict is refreshing, and his early chapters have a clarity of vision.
Unfortunately, the very scale of what Cobb sets out to do is what undermines him. You simply can’t cover half a millennium of politics, culture, and theology across the entire Islamic world in under 300 pages without cutting corners. The energy and ambition that fuel the first chapters eventually give way to breathless summary and structural muddle. Cobb’s project deserved more space, or perhaps a series rather than a single volume. As it stands, this book is a decent effort that gestures toward a better, fairer way of writing Crusades history, but it never quite escapes the limitations of its own form.
Read my full review here: https://open.substack.com/pub/jesswal...
Cobb absolutely understands this. To me (not that I’ve read everything in the field) he is quite a unique voice in Western Crusade writing, as he doesn’t want to tell a grand narrative about ‘fighting against the odds’ and European scheming. He wants to quite plainly and in an un-Romantic way lay things out and leave you to make of it what you will.
I love that idea. Trust your readers! Give them the tools, make sure your citations and references will let them pursue any topic of particular interest, and leave.
Sure, there’s a place for much more involved and dramatic writing. Excellent prose can elevate a non-fiction just as much as a fiction book. But it’s not required. Cobb’s style of writing might not fire the imagination of a reader who’s looking to be whisked off their feet by a grand story, but hey. Pick up a book with dragons on the cover or something.
Cobb starts this book with a high level but thorough overview of the state of what he terms ‘Islamdom’ at around 1050AD.
Early on, he throws in a maxim which he uses to try and frame how dar al-Islam works (or is meant to work):
There is no ruler without an army;
and there is no army without revenues;
and there are no revenues without cultivation;
and there is no cultivation without equity and good governance.
He returns to this idea of the Circle of Equity and Islamic concepts of governance regularly throughout, so it forms a sort of jumping off point for his characterisation of many of the Muslim caliphates, Kingdoms, and statelets he goes on to survey.
Mind you, you do need to go to the notes at the back of the book to find out who said this quote, it’s only given in an English version, and he doesn’t give a time period other than that this is from an ‘early text’ so like. Fuck my drag.
But this really is a great starting point for the way he wants to draw a distinction between how Christendom and Islamdom operated at the time. It’s also beat for beat my Total War strategy, but that’s just science. If you don’t build roads as your first thing in each settlement, you just don’t know ball.
Cobb does a good job showing how little the centres of Christian and Muslim power knew about each other, what they did know, and what particular biases might shape what they could even imagine. It’s very important, for example, that he makes it clear that a Caliph is not a Pope, and that the Islamic legal system wasn’t officially governed by the whims of powerful kings, but a sophisticated network of religious scholars.
It’s well worth making it clear how comparatively large, rich, developed, and complicated the Islamic world really was at the time.
This kind of treatment sets up the later chapters, because there’s no lazy assertion that the Muslims kind of patiently waited for each Crusade ‘event’ to kick off. The traditional view of the Islamic world being a passive, feminised, decadent, brutal world of internal power struggles and puppet rulers is honestly so very boring so it’s important that Cobb doesn’t assume you know better – he SHOWS you why you should know better.
This means that the early chapters are definitely pitched for an audience without a huge amount of existing knowledge about medieval Islamic culture, which is absolutely fine. Cobb keeps up a quick, unsentimental pace. He’ll give you little exemplars and asides every now and again but he is covering a huge amount – geographically, historically, sociologically, politically, religiously – so he’s gotta go fast.
One of Cobb’s first big theses is that Muslim observers saw the first Crusade as only part of a growing wave of Frankish aggression throughout the 11th century. At a time of internal division – the Umayyad caliphate in Al-Andalus splitting into the Taifa kingdoms, Sunni–Shi’a (Shi’i for Cobb) tensions between Syria and Egypt – the Westerners were seen as taking advantage of the situation. In some ways calling it the ‘first Crusade’ is like calling the Battle of the Somme ‘the First World War’. The war was kind of already going on by that point, bab.
Importantly, Cobb highlights that the Franks’ reasons for war are generally taken at face value by contemporary Muslim sources. They talk about Christians ‘waging jihad’, for example. This is obviously doubly interesting when compared to modern analysis of the Crusades, which has moved away from seeing them as ‘holy wars’ in and of themselves and tends to highlight the obvious material and political gain to be had instead. Many modern historians write about medieval figures as though they all had a wink wink nudge nudge enlightened atheism hidden behind the public veneer of church-going.
While the Crusades – especially the fourth, the Albigensian, and the northern varieties – are inarguably deeply politically motivated, though, it pays to consider what people at the time were saying.
They weren’t lying when they said they thought God wanted them to do this. The Muslims weren’t lying when they said the Crusaders fought with the fervour of holy warriors. It’s important that we understand that religiosity permeated society to such a degree that it was possible to make evil, evil decisions and carry out genocidal acts while thinking about both the money you were going to get out of it AND God in equal measure. You can’t understand the Crusades without trying to understand what religion meant to the people at the time, and that requires adopting a mindset that is very alien to most people today.
Cobb makes the excellent observation that Muslim commentary which highlights the strength of the Christians is often paired with a criticism (implicit or explicit) of the relative religiosity of the Muslim rulers. This is pulled through the book as a consistent theme, in that from the Islamic perspective the Christian invasions were seen as punishment from God for their own failings, rather than actions taken by other full and complete people.
Cobb’s analysis shows this same flattening of the ‘enemy’ into a faceless entity of divine punishment is not unique to Western mindsets. For example, in Muslim chronicles Ibn al-Thumna is blamed for the loss of Sicily to the Normans. Cobb describes him as the perfect ‘fall guy’. His hard-drinking led to his mistreatment of his wife, which led to a falling out with his wife’s brother, a fellow petty ruler. The subsequent war between the two was going poorly for al-Thumna, who hired Norman mercenaries to bolster his forces. Like vultures, the mercenaries got fat on the carcass of the island and finally, nearly 30 years later, could call themselves the rulers of Sicily.
This is very fun because if you read any Western history, they will tell you how Robert Guiscard the Norman earned his last name, ‘the fox,’ with his shrewd ruthlessness, conquering Sicily and half of Italy besides out of pure wily skill. The rulers he crushed are not really part of the Western story – they’re set-dressing in a narrative of Norman-specialism, those fated warriors.
The juxtaposition is crazy. It’s also delicious to get to see the same story from a completely different angle. Not everyone has a vested interest in the Normans. For Muslims chroniclers, Robert is just some guy. That’s refreshing!
The Islamic sources don’t care at all that some Pope had beef with the Holy Roman Empire and wanted to assert his personal moral authority and made some great deals with a restless noble class etc. As Cobb writes:
‘The Franks had always been aggressive quasi-barbarians. The finer points of how they justified this aggression were thus of no interest.’
All that mattered was that the barbarian invasions began to succeed, and what this meant for dar-al Islam.
It’s a great start, but Cobb quickly runs out of steam. You can imagine why. A history of the Crusades – all of ‘em – in less than 300 pages? You’d have to be a scholar and writer of quite literally unimaginable skill to pull it off. The fact that Cobb has so much in the early part of the book that does hit and does feel satisfying is a feat to be praised.
Unfortunately, after the strong start he moves to interminable high-level reviews of conflict. For example, he charges through the story of how Sicily fell in about 10 pages, then jumps through the back and forth warring in Spain in a similarly truncated fashion.
It’s even worse when we get past the third Crusade or so. Whole decades go by in a couple of paragraphs. He starts flip-flopping on the timelines to make sure he’s mentioned a couple of key things before charging onto the next. It’s messy and poorly structured, which doesn’t help.
My main issue is that in the end, the way he has gone about these speedy reviews of conflict means Cobb doesn’t stick to the promise of the title of the book. He’s good at talking about Islamic ideas and religious movements in his sharp, quick way, making things accessible and getting through a lot in a short amount of time, but it’s a terrible way to try and cover the narrative of wars.
For these he actually relatively rarely refers to Muslim chronicles, still less quotes from them. He’s just giving cliff notes. It’s definitely about Muslim people and places, although his chronology and when and where certain conflicts come up gets a little scrambled. But it’s not really an ‘Islamic’ history of the fighting.
It gets frustrating after a while because if this is a book on the Islamic history and viewpoint on these conflicts, and you’re not actually using much literature or closely analysing/presenting the texts making up that history, then who’s driving the bus?
The narratives for the traditional Crusades are much the same. High-level, relying on many European sources, he follows along the story in the order that cities, rulers, and complications appeared from the European perspective. So for the first Crusade he tells us about Anatolia and the Danishmendids and THEN Antioch and THEN Aleppo and Damascus. It doesn’t feel Islam-centric. It feels like a slightly more detailed summary of the first Crusade Wikipedia page.
If a particular narrative strand isn’t useful for what he wants to say, he just won’t expand on it. For example, Duqaq of Damascus’ atabeg Tughtakin comes up a lot, as he was quite involved in the fight against the new Crusader kingdoms. Meanwhile Ridwan of Aleppo, Duqaq’s brother, has an atabeg who… Cobb doesn’t name. All he says is:
‘In Damascus, Duqaq was assisted by one of Tutush’s inner circle, an old officer named Tughtakin, who was appointed atabeg. In Aleppo, Prince Ridwan too technically had an atabeg, but he was less of an influence – indeed he was often a foe.’
Janah ad-Dawla, the unnamed atabeg, was a fascinating figure. The story of Ridwan battling this old bastard for control of Aleppo and then eventually probably having him assassinated by Shi’a extremists is not only sick as fuck but also, one would think, very important to an Islamic history? Especially as the murder tied into politically and religious tensions that had almost certainly been part of the death of Ridwan’s uncle, the Malikshah, which precipitated the breakdown of the caliphate and led to Syria being so isolated and split by internal conflict that it allowed the first Crusade to succeed.
Cobb comes back to this several chapters later in a crisp two paragraph summary that… still doesn’t name ad-Dawla.
It’s kind of disappointing that the opening of the book had this clear vision of turning the narrative around only to keep the traditional narrative trucking anyway.
I should probably have felt suspicious and not expected too much, but you can’t blame a girl for trying.
There were red flags that indicated that this was not truly an Islamic history. Cobb uses Western years rather than the Islamic system. He also gives all (and I mean ALL) quotes only in an English translation. And truthfully I should have known better when I saw the bibliography was called ‘Bibliographic sketch’ and was only 4 pages long.
In the end it comes back to the same old question. If I wanted to get a good summary of XYZ conflict, I could get a book on that conflict. I could probably find one with more analysis and depth. If I wanted the same old approach to discussing Crusade history, I’d read the dozens of others on my shelf. I could definitely find something with more flair or narrative voice.
Generally this book is mostly just disappointing in that it could have been so much more, and had a good idea that it just couldn’t deliver on. However, there are a couple of throwaway lines that I have to take umbrage with because I’m just kind of like that as a person and quite hateful deep down.
Firstly, he describes Tripoli as ‘schizophrenic’ which like. That’s a city, girl. Use your brain to understand why that’s weird. Let’s stop doing this!
Secondly and most importantly, one passage that stuck in my craw a little was:
‘…neither Islam nor Latin Christianity is inherently violent, and both were and are far too internally diversified as systems of thought to be essentialist in this way.’
I’m making a face. I don’t know how to describe the face or the emotion it conveys, so I’m just telling you – I’m making it.
The thing is Cobb is kind of right here but he’s also kind of wrong in a way that is hard to swallow.
In this section specifically he is talking about the idea of holy war – Crusade and jihad – and so it would be charitable to assume that he is specifically talking about violence in terms of war. He’s, of course, correct that both religions are not inherently war-religions.
He is also correct to point out the many diverse belief systems within both Christianity and Islam. A Mexican Catholic will share incredibly few beliefs with a South African evangelical or a Cornish Quaker. A Wahhabi Sunni Muslim would find it difficult to agree on much with an Ismail’i sufi.
However, we have to draw a line somewhere. They may be different, but the Catholic and the Quarker are still Christian. What do all of these diverse expressions of belief have in common? There are some foundational elements, whether that’s belief that the bible or Quran or lists of hadiths or traditions passed from some system of authority. There is something that unifies Christian belief into ‘Christianity’ and Muslim belief into ‘Islam’, and some essentialisms can be made. You need caveats and there is always room for nuance, but you have to be able to talk about them as both religions and bodies of thought.
Sadly, I think one of the main essentialist points you can make is that both religions, barring unique subgroups, are inherently violent. But they’re not inherently violent in a ‘pick up ya swords let’s do a war’ way. They’re violent in an oppression of women way.
(Boohoo oh no it’s feminism again.)
Whether the foundational tenet of belief is holy scripture(s) or the traditional systems and beliefs passed down, the relegation of women to a kind of subordinate lower class of person is hard-baked into both religions. The fundamental and kind of unarguable conclusion is that the belief systems of which these points are part of are – as a rule – misogynistic. They devalue women.
Now the defenders will say that these ideas, whether literal or taken as allegorical figures of speech, don’t devalue women. They say that the subordinate place of women is not lesser, it’s just different. God decrees a societal place for us all, and women happen to be in the place where they’re kind of inherently worse at everything and should be treated as such. No devaluation here!
That’s obviously stupid so let’s agree that women being second-class to men is inherently part of both religions, whether you think ‘first the worst second the best’ or not.
This might not be cool hacking and slashing violence, and some might even argue with calling it violence! You could say that it’s simply a cultural thing and the word ‘violence’ too loaded.
However, at the end of the day the dehumanisation and disenfranchisement of women that is specifically enshrined at the heart of both Christian and Islamic scripture has been directly responsible for literally thousands of years of death, rape, and social, political, and economic VIOLENCE.
It’s actually some of the worst violence imaginable because it’s so ingrained and so fundamental that it’s now just an accepted structure of life in nominally Christian and Muslim countries.
To put a long story short, I can’t really read a sentence where a male author says that these religions are not inherently violent without making a face. Because if you’re a woman you know it’s not really true and it’s never been true. It’s just likely that he doesn’t even understand the scale of structural violence inherent, openly and subliminally, because it’s so common, so fundamental, that some people don’t even see it.
In the end, The Race for Paradise feels like a book that knows exactly what it wants to be but can’t quite get there.
Cobb’s intentions are clearly in the right place. He sets out to tell a story of the Crusades that decentres the usual European heroes and asks readers to think about how Muslims understood the centuries-long struggle on their own terms. His framing of the Crusades as part of a wider Mediterranean pattern of politics, trade, and conflict is refreshing, and his early chapters have a clarity of vision.
Unfortunately, the very scale of what Cobb sets out to do is what undermines him. You simply can’t cover half a millennium of politics, culture, and theology across the entire Islamic world in under 300 pages without cutting corners. The energy and ambition that fuel the first chapters eventually give way to breathless summary and structural muddle. Cobb’s project deserved more space, or perhaps a series rather than a single volume. As it stands, this book is a decent effort that gestures toward a better, fairer way of writing Crusades history, but it never quite escapes the limitations of its own form.
Read my full review here: https://open.substack.com/pub/jesswal...
September 10, 2014
A very readable and detailed narrative of the Crusades from the medieval Muslim perspective. It is highly recommended especially for non-specialists. One of the many positive aspects of this book is the integration of the broader Mediterranean context (from Iberia to the Levant) into a discussion of the Crusades and crusading. An elaborate discussion of the internal politics and divisions within the Muslim world during the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries will be much appreciated by the reader as Cobb connects this with the complex web of alliances made between Muslim princes and the Crusader kingdoms throughout the period in question. I highly commend the author for his strong reliance on primary Arabic sources in making his case. Alongside Amin Maalouf's "Crusades through Arab Eyes," this is easily the most significant book written in English that conveys the medieval Muslim perspective of the Crusades but, unlike the former, is more faithful to the language, content and worldview of its sources.
April 9, 2022
Paul M. Cobb, The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades, Oxford Univ Press USA 2016. https://www.wordupbooks.com/book/9780... (paperback), https://www.wordupbooks.com/book/9781... (MP3 CD, read by Cobb himself!)
I listened on "audible" to this jam-packed history of the Crusades that starts from the Muslim sources and perspectives, translated more fully and carefully than previous histories written by English speaking scholars-- Paul M. Cobb, a Byzantine and Arabic professor at University of Pennsylvania, synthesizes a vast array of sources, whole libraries of ancient histories that have rarely been used by "western " scholars because they can't read Arabic. The audio version is actually read by the author himself, so no weird mispronunciations or gaffes, and correct Arabic pronunciations are maintained throughout.
I loved the introductory and concluding chapters of this book. I am not really a lover of tactical military of even political history per se, so I did find myself a bit phasing out during long chapters describing blow-by-blows of how one series of battles between the Franks (the Arabic word for the christian invaders was of course "Ferenggi"!) and the Muslims in one area played out. The geographical range was exhilarating and useful.
The framing of the book is important: Cobb wants not just to complete the record of medieval history, and "tell the other side" of that history, but to encourage broadening our historical view generally to include more of the actual big world during this time, and especially demote the Crusades from their current status in the West (in particular) as some sort of "Culture Clash Origin" event - and to this end he points out how specific each of the arguments, meetings, battles really were, and how wrapped up in things other than religion of culture on both sides. This is of course really useful, since it ramps down modern rhetorical stances and gives us a chance to stop abusing history.
I personally would have liked more of a focus on social history, trade, diplomacy writ small, and the network of connections of interdependence between the "Franks" and the "Muslims." So I will be following up hints of this in other books. For someone who enjoys battle histories, and wants a bigger picture of the Crusades that is trying to avoid political slant while taking into account the modern world and its connection (or not) to medieval clashes and the empires and caliphates embroiled in them, this is a really good account. The relevance to current mideastern conversation and rhetoric around the significance of leaders like Saladin, Roger, and many other prominent figures on both sides who should be better known, is addressed frequently, and Cobb is interested in showing how modern clashes are extremely different from the clashes at the time, and how incorrect modern western interpretations of concepts like "jihad" and "caliph" and so forth really are. Overall a good read, but I want more social history personally.
I listened on "audible" to this jam-packed history of the Crusades that starts from the Muslim sources and perspectives, translated more fully and carefully than previous histories written by English speaking scholars-- Paul M. Cobb, a Byzantine and Arabic professor at University of Pennsylvania, synthesizes a vast array of sources, whole libraries of ancient histories that have rarely been used by "western " scholars because they can't read Arabic. The audio version is actually read by the author himself, so no weird mispronunciations or gaffes, and correct Arabic pronunciations are maintained throughout.
I loved the introductory and concluding chapters of this book. I am not really a lover of tactical military of even political history per se, so I did find myself a bit phasing out during long chapters describing blow-by-blows of how one series of battles between the Franks (the Arabic word for the christian invaders was of course "Ferenggi"!) and the Muslims in one area played out. The geographical range was exhilarating and useful.
The framing of the book is important: Cobb wants not just to complete the record of medieval history, and "tell the other side" of that history, but to encourage broadening our historical view generally to include more of the actual big world during this time, and especially demote the Crusades from their current status in the West (in particular) as some sort of "Culture Clash Origin" event - and to this end he points out how specific each of the arguments, meetings, battles really were, and how wrapped up in things other than religion of culture on both sides. This is of course really useful, since it ramps down modern rhetorical stances and gives us a chance to stop abusing history.
I personally would have liked more of a focus on social history, trade, diplomacy writ small, and the network of connections of interdependence between the "Franks" and the "Muslims." So I will be following up hints of this in other books. For someone who enjoys battle histories, and wants a bigger picture of the Crusades that is trying to avoid political slant while taking into account the modern world and its connection (or not) to medieval clashes and the empires and caliphates embroiled in them, this is a really good account. The relevance to current mideastern conversation and rhetoric around the significance of leaders like Saladin, Roger, and many other prominent figures on both sides who should be better known, is addressed frequently, and Cobb is interested in showing how modern clashes are extremely different from the clashes at the time, and how incorrect modern western interpretations of concepts like "jihad" and "caliph" and so forth really are. Overall a good read, but I want more social history personally.
November 29, 2025
Krucjaty. Arabska perspektywa Paula M. Cobba to jedna z tych książek, które potrafią odwrócić naszą uwagę od dobrze znanych zachodnich narracji i skierować ją tam, gdzie przez stulecia z perspektywy europejskiego, czy też chrześcijańskiego czytelnika panowała cisza. Cobb oddaje bowiem głos społeczeństwom muzułmańskim, pokazując krucjaty nie jako romantyczny mit o rycerzach krzewiących prawdziwą wiarę, lecz jako brutalny proces polityczny i cywilizacyjny, który rozbijał imperia oraz destabilizował świat na wiele pokoleń.
Cobb konsekwentnie pokazuje, że z perspektywy arabskich kronikarzy krucjaty nie były moralną ofiarą na rzecz dobra, lecz agresją napędzaną interesami, złamanymi obietnicami i europejską niestabilnością. To, co w zachodniej historiografii często bywa ujednolicone, tutaj rozwarstwia się na złożoną siatkę konfliktów politycznych, gospodarczych i religijnych, w której muzułmanie od wieków dostrzegali przede wszystkim chaos, destrukcję i niezrozumiałą dla nich narrację „świętej wojny”, oczywiście przez pryzmat ich wartości oraz wiary.
Ogromną wartością tej książki jest praca Cobba z oryginalnymi źródłami arabskimi. Autor tłumaczy ich symbolikę, metaforykę, charakterystyczną kwiecistość języka oraz kulturowy kontekst, który w zachodnich ujęciach bywa zupełnie pomijany. Widać tu erudycję, ale i troskę o to, by współczesny czytelnik mógł wejść w świat myślenia, który dla chrześcijańskiego świata pozostaje często obcy. Narracja poprowadzona jest w krótkich, przejrzystych częściach, co ułatwia poruszanie się po temacie, który obejmuje nie tylko Ziemię Świętą, lecz także Sycylię, Hiszpanię i cały obszar Morza Śródziemnego.
Cobb nie unika ocen, choć jego deklarowana obiektywność bywa miejscami przechylona ku arabskiej perspektywie. Nie odebrałam tego jako wady, a raczej jako naturalny gest mający na celu wyrównanie szans na prezentację spojrzenia, które przez stulecia pozostawało marginalizowane. Zresztą właśnie w tym leży siła tej książki: w przypomnieniu, że historia krucjat to nie tylko europejski mit, ale historia ludzi, których świat ulegał zniszczeniu pod ciężarem cudzych idei i interesów.
Jeśli czegokolwiek mogłabym żałować w związku z lekturą, to jedynie długości tego tytułu. Niewiele ponad 400 stron na temat tak rozległy i wielowarstwowy to zaledwie szkic, ale jakże wartościowy. Cobb daje nam nie tylko narrację, lecz także narzędzia do jej odczytania, w tym mapy, przypisy, szkic bibliograficzny odsłaniający jego drogę badawczą i systematykę nazw własnych. Dla dociekliwych czytelników może stać się dzięki temu bramą do dalszych odkryć.
Książkę Krucjaty. Arabska perspektywa polecam wszystkim, którzy chcą spojrzeć na historię szerzej i bardziej odpowiedzialnie. Nie przez pryzmat zachodnich uproszczeń, lecz z wrażliwością na źródła, które przez wieki leżały poza głównym nurtem. To pozycja łącząca rzetelność pracy naukowej z narracyjną lekkością, pozostając przy tym książką, która zmienia sposób myślenia o jednym z najważniejszych konfliktów międzykulturowych w dziejach.
Cobb konsekwentnie pokazuje, że z perspektywy arabskich kronikarzy krucjaty nie były moralną ofiarą na rzecz dobra, lecz agresją napędzaną interesami, złamanymi obietnicami i europejską niestabilnością. To, co w zachodniej historiografii często bywa ujednolicone, tutaj rozwarstwia się na złożoną siatkę konfliktów politycznych, gospodarczych i religijnych, w której muzułmanie od wieków dostrzegali przede wszystkim chaos, destrukcję i niezrozumiałą dla nich narrację „świętej wojny”, oczywiście przez pryzmat ich wartości oraz wiary.
Ogromną wartością tej książki jest praca Cobba z oryginalnymi źródłami arabskimi. Autor tłumaczy ich symbolikę, metaforykę, charakterystyczną kwiecistość języka oraz kulturowy kontekst, który w zachodnich ujęciach bywa zupełnie pomijany. Widać tu erudycję, ale i troskę o to, by współczesny czytelnik mógł wejść w świat myślenia, który dla chrześcijańskiego świata pozostaje często obcy. Narracja poprowadzona jest w krótkich, przejrzystych częściach, co ułatwia poruszanie się po temacie, który obejmuje nie tylko Ziemię Świętą, lecz także Sycylię, Hiszpanię i cały obszar Morza Śródziemnego.
Cobb nie unika ocen, choć jego deklarowana obiektywność bywa miejscami przechylona ku arabskiej perspektywie. Nie odebrałam tego jako wady, a raczej jako naturalny gest mający na celu wyrównanie szans na prezentację spojrzenia, które przez stulecia pozostawało marginalizowane. Zresztą właśnie w tym leży siła tej książki: w przypomnieniu, że historia krucjat to nie tylko europejski mit, ale historia ludzi, których świat ulegał zniszczeniu pod ciężarem cudzych idei i interesów.
Jeśli czegokolwiek mogłabym żałować w związku z lekturą, to jedynie długości tego tytułu. Niewiele ponad 400 stron na temat tak rozległy i wielowarstwowy to zaledwie szkic, ale jakże wartościowy. Cobb daje nam nie tylko narrację, lecz także narzędzia do jej odczytania, w tym mapy, przypisy, szkic bibliograficzny odsłaniający jego drogę badawczą i systematykę nazw własnych. Dla dociekliwych czytelników może stać się dzięki temu bramą do dalszych odkryć.
Książkę Krucjaty. Arabska perspektywa polecam wszystkim, którzy chcą spojrzeć na historię szerzej i bardziej odpowiedzialnie. Nie przez pryzmat zachodnich uproszczeń, lecz z wrażliwością na źródła, które przez wieki leżały poza głównym nurtem. To pozycja łącząca rzetelność pracy naukowej z narracyjną lekkością, pozostając przy tym książką, która zmienia sposób myślenia o jednym z najważniejszych konfliktów międzykulturowych w dziejach.
October 11, 2019
An excellent book. I have read so many on the crusades, fact and fiction both but was waiting for an authoritative account from the Islamic side and this just did that. The Middle East was going through great political turmoil with the Byzantine Empire going through a prolonged death throe. The Seljuk Turks and he Turcomans were on the ascendant. The Author than examines the entire Islamic world ringing the Mediterranean. In Spain the Almoravid Empire was expanding, while in Sicily the Island was being ruled by two Muslim chieftains. And then in mid 19th Century Pope Urban II gave the call for the Crusade. The Christian world responded and he Norman nobility led the call. This is the period when Duke William conquered Britain, Sicily was conquered by Duke Rogers and renowned knights and Norman nobles led the assault on Jerusalem. They conquered the Littoral and part of the hinterland including Jerusalem and held their kingdoms and counties for nearly 200 years. the Muslim jihad was continuous and prolonged and the leaders were outstanding politicians and soldiers, chief among them being Nur al Din, Saladin and Baybars. They ultimately succeeded in reconquering Jerusalem. Baybars even defeated the Mongol onslaught. Thus while Islam regained the Middle East, it lost Spain and Sicily. The panoply of Kings and Sultans presented by the Author makes fascinating reading. The book concludes with the fall of Istanbul and Islam on the rise. A fascinating information is that at one stage the Mongol Khan wanted to convert to Christianity but was rebuffed. Ultimately the Mongol Empire in that area was destroyed in another sanguinary battle in the Levant. There are other such fascinating vignettes. The Authors authority and knowledge is evident.
August 17, 2018
This book offers fresh perspectives on medieval encounters, military and otherwise, between Muslims and Christians. Western readers will benefit from seeing the Crusades “from the other side of the fence” and viewing them in a larger context.
Middle Eastern readers too will find much that is useful in this work – not only to dispel simplistic stereotypes of “Crusaders” populating extremist philosophies, but also to introduce important Muslim and other Eastern chroniclers, historians and commentators seldom read today – among them Ibn al-Athir (The Perfect Work of History), al-Sulami (Book of Jihad), al-‘Azimi (History of Aleppo) and Ibn Shaddad (Rare and Excellent History of Saladin).
The author, a professor of Islamic History, is a skilled storyteller who illustrates his arguments with compelling anecdotes from Spain to Sicily to the Levant to Mesopotamia. He shows the Crusades were not an epochal clash of religions or civilizations, but rather a series of very particular battles between localities, cities and personalities – fought for reasons that have nothing to do with modern concerns.
“Medieval Muslims and Christians went to war for their own motives, not ours,” he says.
This is not to say we cannot understand the Middle Ages. Concerns of those times were very human. But societies, East and West, were organized differently – with local kings and nobles, antique economic structures and the like. This work captures the human stories – tragic, shocking, even uplifting – behind that period and broadens our understanding of a pivotal era.
(Posted on Amazon.com. A version of this review appeared in AramcoWorld, September 2017.)
Middle Eastern readers too will find much that is useful in this work – not only to dispel simplistic stereotypes of “Crusaders” populating extremist philosophies, but also to introduce important Muslim and other Eastern chroniclers, historians and commentators seldom read today – among them Ibn al-Athir (The Perfect Work of History), al-Sulami (Book of Jihad), al-‘Azimi (History of Aleppo) and Ibn Shaddad (Rare and Excellent History of Saladin).
The author, a professor of Islamic History, is a skilled storyteller who illustrates his arguments with compelling anecdotes from Spain to Sicily to the Levant to Mesopotamia. He shows the Crusades were not an epochal clash of religions or civilizations, but rather a series of very particular battles between localities, cities and personalities – fought for reasons that have nothing to do with modern concerns.
“Medieval Muslims and Christians went to war for their own motives, not ours,” he says.
This is not to say we cannot understand the Middle Ages. Concerns of those times were very human. But societies, East and West, were organized differently – with local kings and nobles, antique economic structures and the like. This work captures the human stories – tragic, shocking, even uplifting – behind that period and broadens our understanding of a pivotal era.
(Posted on Amazon.com. A version of this review appeared in AramcoWorld, September 2017.)
November 30, 2023
I will say first-off that as someone who has read several books on Arab/Muslim historians of the Crusades, from those that focus on selections from primary source material of contemporary historians to the masterful narrative by Amin Al-Maalouf, "The Crusades Through Arab Eyes", where the original source material is integrated seamlessly as if you are reading an engaging, page-turning novel, that I really do feel that the title of Cobb's book is very misleading. It really is not any kind of an Islamic history of the Crusades or even anything close to a Muslim history of the Crusades. There isn't really more material from Muslim sources than there is from European, and not much more than you would find in most popular writers on the Crusades in the last twenty-five years. It had areas of strength and weakness, where some narratives were well-wrought and others were hard to follow and absorb. I did like how much it went into the history of Sicily, Spain, and Constantinople, though, which is much rarer than one would think for a book on the Crusades, and was very interesting. I think that inclusion does make this book unique and worthwhile, though I always appreciate a history of the Crusades and I'm glad to add this to my collection.
August 29, 2025
Paul Cobb's "The Race for Paradise" is a brilliant and accessible history that tells the story of the Crusades from the Muslim point of view. It shifts the focus from the European knights we usually hear about to the diverse and powerful Islamic societies they encountered. Cobb brings this world to life, showing the politics, rivalries, and resilience of the people who called the Holy Land home.
One of the most interesting historical references for me was learning about the famous Muslim leader Saladin. The book goes beyond the legend and shows his clever political moves and the many challenges he faced in uniting different Muslim groups against their common enemy. It makes his final victory even more impressive.
This book is incredibly compelling and changed my perspective. But it also sparked a bigger thought about history itself. As you read, you get swept up in the narrative, but then you remember that historians are working with ancient chronicles and fragments of evidence. That step back makes you realize that some of the certainty we feel while reading is an illusion, and the solid story can feel, in the larger scheme of things, like a very educated and convincing piece of fiction. It's a thought-provoking read in more ways than one.
One of the most interesting historical references for me was learning about the famous Muslim leader Saladin. The book goes beyond the legend and shows his clever political moves and the many challenges he faced in uniting different Muslim groups against their common enemy. It makes his final victory even more impressive.
This book is incredibly compelling and changed my perspective. But it also sparked a bigger thought about history itself. As you read, you get swept up in the narrative, but then you remember that historians are working with ancient chronicles and fragments of evidence. That step back makes you realize that some of the certainty we feel while reading is an illusion, and the solid story can feel, in the larger scheme of things, like a very educated and convincing piece of fiction. It's a thought-provoking read in more ways than one.
January 1, 2025
Dr. Paul M. Cobb is a professor of Middle Eastern languages and cultures at the University of Pennsylvania and specializes in pre-modern Islamic history. He is widely published and his works include White Banners: Contention in ‘Abbasid Syria, 750-880 and Usama ibn Munqidh: Warrior-Poet of the Age of Crusades.
Dr. Cobb’s The Race for Paradise is a sprawling history Muslim and Western Christian military encounters from Spain to the Levant between 1000-1500 CE. The book is meant to provide an Islamic perspective of the Crusades so much of the early history begins with the early days of the Reconquista and the Norman conquest of Sicily. Only later do we get to Pope Urban’s call to retake the Holy Land. In writing such a sprawling narrative, Cobb does a superb job of connecting events across space and time in a cogent manner. One area that is lacking, partly by design, is a discussion of the politics of Western Europe that is driving one end of these conflicts, but if your goal is to learn more about the internal politics of the Islamic World during this period, this is an excellent place to start. It is a far superior work to Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades through Arab Eyes.
Dr. Cobb’s The Race for Paradise is a sprawling history Muslim and Western Christian military encounters from Spain to the Levant between 1000-1500 CE. The book is meant to provide an Islamic perspective of the Crusades so much of the early history begins with the early days of the Reconquista and the Norman conquest of Sicily. Only later do we get to Pope Urban’s call to retake the Holy Land. In writing such a sprawling narrative, Cobb does a superb job of connecting events across space and time in a cogent manner. One area that is lacking, partly by design, is a discussion of the politics of Western Europe that is driving one end of these conflicts, but if your goal is to learn more about the internal politics of the Islamic World during this period, this is an excellent place to start. It is a far superior work to Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades through Arab Eyes.
December 22, 2022
There is a lot of information packed in here and Cobb is clearly an excellent historian, but I found his organization a little difficult to work with. The Race for Paradise focuses on crusade and the relationship between Latin Christianity and Islam in three places: the levant, the Iberian peninsula, and Sicily. The narrative is relatively chronological, but continually backtracks in time when it switches location which can make it hard to follow who is doing what and where and why. The Race for Paradise also focuses fairly heavily on the minutiae of certain military conflicts, which is perhaps my least favorite part of history. I think I would have struggled with this a lot more of I hadn't already read several accounts of the time period covered.
And I suppose as a further note, I found where Cobb chose to leave off--the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople--to be somewhat strange, since the Byzantine Empire is relatively absent from the rest of the story and it played a rather different role in the crusade than Latin Christendom.
And I suppose as a further note, I found where Cobb chose to leave off--the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople--to be somewhat strange, since the Byzantine Empire is relatively absent from the rest of the story and it played a rather different role in the crusade than Latin Christendom.
November 22, 2020
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this relatively short overview of how Muslims and their scholars wrote about what we today call the Crusades. Cobb points out that to Arabs & Muslims the Crusades weren't only focused on the holy land but on other lands such as the Iberian peninsula and Sicily. He also points out that they started much earlier than the traditional narrative of Pope Urban II's the Council of Clermont of 1095 being the starting point of the Crusades and they lasted until much later than 1291 with the fall of Acre.
Importantly the Crusades weren't fought between the monoliths of Christendom and Islamdom but that Christendom and Islamdom were no monoliths at all. And there was as much in-fighting as there were alliances on both sides. Rulers, Sultans and Kings all used the narrative of Crusade or Jihad more for virtue signaling than for waging actual war againt each other.
If you are at all interested in the history of the Crusades or the history of our conceptions of the Crusades then this book is highly recommended.
Importantly the Crusades weren't fought between the monoliths of Christendom and Islamdom but that Christendom and Islamdom were no monoliths at all. And there was as much in-fighting as there were alliances on both sides. Rulers, Sultans and Kings all used the narrative of Crusade or Jihad more for virtue signaling than for waging actual war againt each other.
If you are at all interested in the history of the Crusades or the history of our conceptions of the Crusades then this book is highly recommended.
November 7, 2017
A decent account of Mediterranean Islamic history from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries, although I personally would have liked more detail--richer, deeper delvings into the working of the Islamic world. When I started, I wondered how Cobb would really manage an 'Islamic' history of the crusades--would it just be the typical narrative with a little more coverage of the opposing forces?--but this is very much an Islamic history of the crusades, in which Cobb places the Frankish expeditions into Syria into the broader context of Christian offensives in Sicily and Spain. So, definitely a success.
September 27, 2022
كف المؤرخ الغربي منذ عقود عن الرواية الرومانسية للحروب الصليبية، وتحول إلى التاريخ التحليلي أيًا كان المنهج الذي يتبعه، وثائق، بنائي، ماركسي، نفسي.... ولكنه دائمًا كان يعتمد على المصادر الغربية للحروب الصليبية، كما أعتمد أيضًا على عزل الحروب الصليبية عن السياق التاريخي العام للعالم حينئذ، ولكن المؤرخ الأمريكي باول كوب في عمله هذا يتجاوز هذين الفخين، فهو يقدم تاريخ الحروب الصليبية في إطار واسع يمتد حول البحر المتوسط ويمضي إلى أعماق أسيا وأوروبا البربرية، وينفتح على الروايات العربية والإسلامية حول حروب الصليب، مبينًا ذلك التفاعل الثقافي الخفي بين المتحاربين، الذي أنتهى إلى ظهور أوروبا الحديثة من جانب، ومن جانب آخر إلى تعميق الصراع بين الطرفين ليزرع جذوره في ثقافتيهما.
March 25, 2019
I'll admit, this one was a challenge - far too much of it felt like it was taken up by a "this happened and then this happened and then this happened" narrative approach. Yet each of the "this happened" stories is incredibly clear and crisp, and the overall impression the book gives you of this era of history as viewed by what most Westerners would consider "the other side" is formidable and memorable - Cobb does a great job of setting a contextual viewpoint and hewing to it throughout several hundred years of history.
June 6, 2025
If you love all facts about history, this is probably your cup of tea. I am not, hence the poor rating, which just reflects my lack of taste for books that contain tens of names, dates, and facts on each page. Really for academia, looks very well researched. I had to stop after about 100 pages. Credit to the author for the research.
December 19, 2024
Ня тое каб гэтая гісторыя была зусім мусульманскай, аўтар усё ж заходні, але галоўнае што апісаны падзеі з мусульманскага боку. Унутраная барацьб��, дынастыі, увесь звычайны заблытаны фарш гісторыі. Перэнэйскі паўвостраў, Сіцылія, Сырыя ды Эгіпет.
April 6, 2025
Very interesting book, that allows an European reader to understand the menatality and ways of thinking of the Arabic people. It's also not an pro-islamic wiev, shows good and bad sides of this culture and religion.
June 13, 2025
Super fascinating, and well written. That being said, probably too much was packed into the narrative...to the point that it became difficult to follow. Nevertheless, I learned so much about the history of the umma and the crusading era. Well presented, great scholarship.
February 18, 2018
Had to read for a college course. Very informative but hard to read.
September 8, 2018
OK
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 30, 2018
Excellent Islamic account of the crusades during the medieval times!
April 30, 2020
Riveting narratives and accounts of battles (could be a bit disturbing sometimes).
November 3, 2020
A tricky read for me. Has taken me ages. Not a last thing at night read. Had to spend alot of time looking back at maps but interesting to get a better picture of the crusades from the "other' side.
March 28, 2023
Good perspective.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 50 reviews