ABSTRACT
European historians have consistently celebrated the defeat of the Arab-Berber army at Poitier (Tours) as a major turning point in Muslim-Christian confrontation-the moment of truth, when a seemingly unstoppable Muslim onslaught was stemmed by a group of valiant defenders of Christian civilization led by Charles “the Hammer.”5 The famous eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon aptly captured the common European perception of this fateful event in his influential book Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire [river]; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland: the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.6
