Few readers are aware how much Europe owes to its Islamic heritage; this book aims to restore the central place of Muslim culture in the continent’s history, while exploring the endless complexities that this vexed relationship creates. At a time when Islam is so narrowly identified with terrorism and migration in Europe, Crucible of Lightis a welcome and necessary corrective.

The contested but fruitful relationship between Islam and Europe begins in 711AD with the Moorish invasion of Spain and continues to the present. Crucible of Light tells the story of the conquest and reconquest of Spain over an epic 800 year period; the meteoric rise of Arabo-Norman Sicily; the Ottoman renaissance of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries; and the ebb and flow of Balkan history and the fate of contested islands like Cyprus and Malta, with their very different outcomes.