Before the first chapter of The Race to Heaven, Cobb lists many characters who were evident and of great importance during this historical era. Two people from the list, Al-Bakri, a geographer from al-Andalus known for his coverage of Rome, and Harun ibn Yahya, a possibly Christian Arab, made great observations about Rome and Latin Christianity that Cobb found to be a great place to begin an Islamic history of the Crusades (Cobb, pages xvi and xviii). Most of these conflicts and the history that Cobb talks about in the first section of the book have ties to society and cultural norms, such as religious views, politics, law, etc. A major invasion that is very prominent in the text is the invasion of the Franks into Muslim territory. The Franks, which was “quickly adopted as a general term for all the Christian peoples of continental Europe” (Cobb, page 16), and the Muslims embraced a concept of holy war and a classical concept of jihad, a war of struggle against non- believers, has been formulated. “Jihad was just one of the reactions that Muslims had towards the Franks. But given its prevalence in medieval Islamic sources, it is important to understand this concept and its history in the years preceding the era of the Crusades.” states Cobb (Cobb, p