Acknowledgements
Prologue: Saladin Nation
1: The Abode of Islam
2: The Frightened Sea
3: Prey For the Sword
4: Tasting Our Might
5: Giving Lie To The Devil
6: Wolves and Lions
7: Let Them Be Our Eulogists
Afterword: Buried Horsemen
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Paul M. Cobb is Professor of Islamic History at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is the author of numerous books and studies,
including a translation of the Arabic memoirs of a Muslim
eyewitness to the Crusades published as The Book of Contemplation:
Islam and the Crusades (2008). A recognized authority on relations
between Islam and the West during the Middle Ages, he has travelled
widely throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. He divides
his
time between teaching in Philadelphia and farming in his home town
of Amherst, Massachusetts.
its emphasis as an "Islamic history" of the Crusades means that it
is a useful addition to the marketplace.
*Al-Ahram*
What Cobb creates is a broad geographic and chronological context
for the Crusades
*Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year 2014*
The 2014 book that most decisively forced me to rethink my
understanding of the past
*Theodore K. Rabb, TLS*
refreshing and illuminating ... a fascinating account
*BBC History Magazine*
The Race for Paradise increases our understanding of the past, as
well as of the world we live in.
*The Writer's Drawer*
As Paul Cobb demonstrates in his splendidly detailed and timely
narrative, Islamic 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 Muslic
recollections of the Crusades.
[A] lively and scholarly book
*Peter Jackson, The Tablet*
[A] welcome contribution to the subject.
*Svenska Dagbladet*
it is an important, paradigm-shifting work nonetheless. Future
scholars owe Cobb their thanks.
*Dan Jones, Sunday Times*
He [Cobb] tells that history very well.
*Robert Irwin, Literary Review*
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*
Lively and enjoyable reading, Paul Cobb's The 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*
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*
[H]ighly original and above all a pleasure to read - a superb
overview for the general and the specialised reader alike that sets
the Crusades within the larger framework of Islamic history.
*Konrad Hirschler, SOAS, University of London*
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