HIS 256 The Islamic World to 1683

Roger Collins, a leading historian, investigates a time in Spanish history known for its multi-religious society - when Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in apparent harmony - revealing a fuller, more complex picture of this fascinating period.  Presents new ideas and interpretations of a fascinating yet much misunderstood period of Spanish and Islamic history A broad and complex treatment of the tenure of the Umayyad dynasty in Spain Debunks myths and investigates the historiography of existing scholarship of the period

Al-Andalus, the Iberian Islamic civilization centred on Cordoba in the tenth and eleventh centuries, has been a 'lost' civilization in several respects. Its history suppressed or denied for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was regarded as a kind of 'historical parenthesis' with no lasting influence. Over the past twenty-five years, however, the history and archaeology of the Islamic period in the Iberian peninsula has undergone a complete transformation. Lost Civilization presents an introduction to this debate as it has played out in archaeology, taking a comparative civilizations approach that puts the formation of al-Andalus in context.

Hailed by critics as an essential book, God's Crucible is a bold new interpretation of Islamic Spain and the birth of Europe from one of our greatest historians. David Levering Lewis's narrative, filled with accounts of some of the greatest battles in world history, reveals how cosmopolitan Muslim al-Andalus flourished while proto-Europe floundered in opposition. At the beginning of the eighth century, the Arabs brought a momentous revolution in power, religion, and culture to Dark Ages Europe.

This concise depiction of the Islamic world features developments from the time of Muhammad and the rise of Islam in the seventh century to the complex political map of today. It clearly outlines and explains the major periods of Islam's phenomenal development and growth world-wide by focusing on the religious, cultural, and political achievements of the great Islamic Empires, including the golden age of the Abbasids in Baghdad, the Turkish Ottomans, and the Mughals of India. The book also features a chapter on medieval Muslim Spain.

Scholars, journalists, and even politicians uphold Muslim-ruled medieval Spain--"al-Andalus"--as a multicultural paradise, a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony. There is only one problem with this widely accepted account: it is a myth. In this groundbreaking book, Northwestern University scholar Darío Fernández-Morera tells the full story of Islamic Spain. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise shines light on hidden history by drawing on an abundance of primary sources that scholars have ignored, as well as archaeological evidence only recently unearthed.

In a world troubled by religious strife and division, Chris Lowney's vividly written new book offers a hopeful historical reminder: Muslims, Christians, and Jews once lived together in Spain, creating a centuries-long flowering of commerce, culture, art, and architecture. Written with a narrative drive reminiscent of Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, this new work takes us back to a medieval Iberia that prefigured the Renaissance.

Did Muslims and Jews in the Middle Ages cohabit in a peaceful "interfaith utopia"? Or were Jews under Muslim rule persecuted, much as they were in Christian lands? Rejecting both polemically charged ideas as myths, Mark Cohen offers a systematic comparison of Jewish life in medieval Islam and Christendom--and the first in-depth explanation of why medieval Islamic-Jewish relations, though not utopic, were less confrontational and violent than those between Christians and Jews in the West.