504 Includes bibliographical references ( pages 285-321) and
index
505 0 Prologue: Damascus Crossroads -- The abode of Islam -- The
frightened sea -- Prey of the sword -- Against the enemies
of God -- Testing our might -- The fallen tent -- From
every deep valley -- Wolves and lions -- Let them be our
rulogists -- Epilogue: Buried horsemen
520 "In The Race for Paradise, Paul M. Cobb offers an accurate
and accessible representation of the Islamic experience of
the Crusades during the Middle Ages. Cobb overturns
previous claims and presents new arguments, such as the
idea that the Frankish invasions of the Near East were
something of a side-show to the broader internal conflict
between Sunnis and Shi'ites in the region. The Race for
Paradise moves along two fronts as Cobb stresses that, for
medieval Muslims, the contemporaneous Latin Christian
expansion throughout the Mediterranean was seen as closely
linked to events in the Levant. As a consequence of this
expanded geographical range, the book takes a broader
chronological range to encompass the campaigns of Spanish
kings north of the Ebro and the Norman conquest of Sicily
(beginning in 1060), well before Pope Urban II's famous
call to the First Crusade in 1095. Finally, The Race for
Paradise brilliantly combats the trend to portray the
history of the Crusades, particularly the Islamic
experience, in simplistic or binary terms. Muslims did not
solely experience the Crusades as fanatical warriors or as
helpless victims, Cobb writes; as with any other human
experience of similar magnitude, the Crusades were
experienced in a great variety of ways, ranging from
heroic martyrdom, to collaboration, to utter indifference"
--|cProvided by publisher