The Race for Paradise

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 chronicles: 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 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"--

Cobb has written an outstanding history of the Muslim experiences of the Crusades, based primarily on careful and thorough reading of the Muslim sources from the period....Perhaps the most important contribution that Cobb makes with this book is the breaking down of a number of commonly accepted conventions....Cobb has produced a book that will be an immensely useful resource for scholars and students working on the crusading period, as well as for interested laypersons, providing a valuable counterbalance to the plethora of histories of the Crusades written from the European perspective....[T]his book has the reviewer's highest recommendation.--Niall Christie, The Historian

Cobb skillfully tells a good story, weaving entertaining vignettes into a clear yet nuanced narrative...[A] gripping tale energetically told. This is that rare book, carefully written and painstakingly researched, that entertains and educates while offering the fruits of modern scholarship to a general audience. We need more of them.--Speculum

As Paul Cobb demonstrates in his splendidly detailed and timely narrative, lslamic authors and writers in Arabic showed a keen interest in the medieval Christian interlopers into the Muslim world, in political events and in the ideology of jihad that these conflicts revived. Cobb provides a useful corrective to ill-informed assumptions about medieval Islam and later Muslim recollections of the Crusades....Paul Cobb's case is elegantly and well made, a trenchant and welcome contribution to a discussion that is more than academic.--The Times Literary Supplement

Cobb brings this history alive in a way that will interest both casual readers and experts alike....[The] multidisciplinary approach illuminates the experience of invaded societies in their chaotic and climactic contacts with the Other.--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Writing in lively prose, Cobb...effortlessly weaves disparate events across the Islamic Mediterranean world into a seamless narrative of the Crusades....Cobb lucidly illustrates that, despite his book's title, most participants in the Crusades (on both sides) did not 'race for paradise.' Essential.--CHOICE

This is an excellent book--lucid, insightful and informative. Cobb brings a fresh perspective to contact between Muslims and Christians during the medieval period, energetically transporting us across Islamic lands from Cordova to Baghdad, via Palermo, Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus. Sharply-chosen anecdotes cleverly illuminate life beyond the confines of holy war to give a broad and rewarding understanding of the true context and multi-faceted nature of this complex and highly important relationship.--Jonathan Phillips, author of Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades

Thoroughly researched, highly original and above all a pleasure to read--a superb overview for the general and the specialized reader alike that sets the Crusades within the larger framework of Islamic history.--Konrad Hirschler, SOAS, University of London, author of The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands

Paul Cobb's The Race for Paradise proves why medieval European history is not the only domain for Crusades study. With a fluid style and superb knowledge of sources, Cobb masterfully enshrines the Islamic narratives, reflecting several genres of scholarship, as fundamentally informative for Crusader history, and that the latter ought to be seen also as reflective of dynamics within the Islamic world. Indispensable for anyone interested in understanding the Crusades and the Muslim World at that time.--Suleiman A. Mourad, Smith College

Lively and enjoyable reading, Paul Cobb's Race for Paradise also offers new insights into the well-worn territory of Crusades history, particularly by showing how the Crusades were part of a broader penetration of Latin Christian powers into the Mediterranean world in the second half of the eleventh century.--Hugh Kennedy, SOAS, University of London