Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West

by Raymond Ibrahim

None of this should take away from the relative importance of Tours. Whatever else was happening in the east, Charles’s victory heralded the end of Islam’s advance into Western Europe. Nor should its inspirational significance for posterity be overlooked. Even so, contemporary academics have dramatically downgraded the importance of Tours. After announcing that “the old drums-and-bugles approach will no longer do,” the authors of The Reader’s Companion to Military History say that “economics” and “changing attitudes… have altered our views of what once seemed to matter most.… The confrontation between Muslims and Christians at Poitiers-Tours in 732, once considered a watershed event, has been downgraded to a raid in force.”77 They argue that Muslims invaded France to plunder, not conquer it; and although European chroniclers stress the macro significance of Tours, modern naysayers argue that most of their Arab counterparts barely mentioned it, suggesting the battle was unimportant in Muslim eyes.