Paul Cobb is a great Middle Eastern historian and author and has written several books showing his literary and knowledge The experiences of Muslims to this first wave of colonialism into Muslim lands and how it still reverberates to this day in the borderlands between Islam and Christdom. Muslims faces a long constant threat and harassment from the Franks all along the Medittearrean world is a piracy and invasion often over-looked and ignored by Western historians.
Cobb shows how basically the medieval Islamic world was much ore cosmopolitan and diverse as well as urban and this basically drew the attention of the Franks who were a few generations away from Viking pillaging of their expansive ancestors. from Syria to Spain to Sicily to Libya the Franks were on the offensive seeking to establish networks of coastal centers to use as bases to penetrate further into Islamic lands and essentially capture the holy lands for the pope and Catholic churches. 
Cobb also speculates that kings of varying degrees played out this new aggressive threat on their borders and rue and exported tis mass of barbarism to keep their own lands protected and held in check while playing out this band against foreign enemies. This was perhaps the first diplomatic warfare played like a chess game between the powers of Christianity and Islamic caliphates and this book called "Race To paradise" captures the political challenges that empires had to play with this Frankish growth which was the Islamic state of its day. cobb enshrines the Islamic narratives of the Crusades and holy warfare initiated for three centuries on expanding Europeans before the discovery of the new world allowed them easier lands of conquest and resource extraction that made Europeans so much more richer than the rest of the world in a short time period. 
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