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History of Christendom-Islam clashes examined during Chancellor’s Lecture Series
David Levering Lewis
Relations between Christians and Muslims in the post-9/11 world have come full circle and are similar to the troubled ties forged centuries ago, said a Pulitzer Prize-winning author at the first Chancellor’s Lecture Series installment of 2009.
“We are again living through experiences that are similar,” said David Levering Lewis, the Julius Silver University Professor and professor of history at New York University, on Jan. 14 in Ingram Hall at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music.
“For a historian, thinking about the present means thinking about the past in the present,” writes Lewis in the preface to his newest book, God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215.
The book, which Lewis calls a “counter narrative,” was called a “provocative reappraisal of the conflict between Islam and Christendom” by the California Literary Review.
“If there is a point to a book like this,” said Lewis, “it is to show that the problems perceived to be culture or religion have little to do with culture or religion and have everything to do with politics.”
The key moments in the history of these two cultures, according to Lewis, came in 711 C.E. when Muslims conquered the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula (now Spain) and in 732 C.E. when the Frankish forces stopped the Muslims from going any further north into what is now France in the Battle of Poitiers.
Lewis raised the question of what Europe might have been like had the Muslims prevailed at Poitiers, and concludes that it might have been better off compared to the Carolingian Order created by the victorious Franks.
“The Carolingian Order,” says Lewis, “was religiously intolerant, intellectually impoverished, socially calcified and economically primitive. … Abd al-Raman’s Muslim Iberia was at least four centuries more advanced than Western Christendom.”
The continual military oppression from the Carolingians led to the eventual collapse of the Muslim Iberia’s Golden Age, says Lewis, and the resulting rise of Muslim fundamentalism eventually paved the way for the Crusades and conflicts we are still experiencing today.
A video of Lewis’ lecture will be available on www.vanderbilt.edu/news.
Chancellor’s Lecture Series, which serves to bring to Vanderbilt and the wider Nashville community intellectuals who are shaping the world today. For more information about the Chancellor’s Lecture Series, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/chancellor/cls.
Contact: Missy Pankake, (615) 322-NEWS
Missy.pankake@vanderbilt.edu