The Race For Paradise By Professor Paul Cobb

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Recommended: Islam and Christianity religious conflicts

Professor Paul Cobb’s The Race for Paradise is a very unique portrayal of history—it appeals to academic specialists and casual readers with detail and original sources with numerous endnotes that contain references with comments that are fit for anyone wanting to broaden their knowledge on some of the aspects that this book touches upon. All the while constructing an engaging and a rather interesting narrative story that informs the reader how Muslim societies saw, reacted to, and adapted to the European crusades. His story is very broad and covers many key points in Islamic history, beginning with Muslim-Christian conflicts well before the, what is known to be, first crusade around 1095-1101. On page six of The Race for Paradise, Cobb states …show more content…

Before the first chapter of The Race for Paradise, Cobb lists many characters who were evident and were of great importance during this era of history. Two people from the list, Al-Bakri, a geographer from al-Andalus who was notable for his coverage of Rome, and Harun ibn Yahya, an Arab who was possibly Christian, gave great observations on Rome and Latin Christianity which Cobb found to be a great place to begin an Islamic history of the Crusades (Cobb, page xvi and xviii). A majority of these conflicts and history that Cobb talks about in the first section of the book have ties to society and cultural norms, such as religious view, politics, law, etc. One great invasion that is very prominent in the text is the invasion of the Franks on Muslim territory. The Franks, which was “quickly adopted as a blanket term for all the Christian peoples of continental Europe” (Cobb, page 16), and Muslims embraced a concept of holy war and a classical concept of jihad, a war on the struggle against nonbelievers, was formulated. “Jihad was but one of the reactions that Muslims had toward the Franks. But given its prevalence in the medieval Islamic sources—understanding this concept and its history in the years leading up to the era of the Crusades is important.” states Cobb (Cobb, page

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