God's Crucible : Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215

In this panoramic history of Islamic culture in early Europe, a PulitzerPrize-winning historian reexamines what we once thought we knew. This marvelous book offers a magisterial - and splendidly readable - guide to the history of the cultures of the Mediterranean world, as Rome declined and Islam exploded out of Arabia, showing how Europe and Christianity were shaped through the conflict with the Muslims of al-Andalus. - Anthony Appiah, author of Cosmopolitanism