Muslim History

Islam has been one of the most powerful religious, social, and political forces in history. Over the last 1,400 years, from origins in Arabia, a succession of Muslim polities, and later empires expanded to control territories and peoples that ultimately stretched from southern France to East Africa and South East Asia. Yet many of the contributions of Muslim thinkers, scientists, and theologians, not to mention rulers, statesmen, and soldiers, have been occluded. This book rescues from oblivion and neglect some of these personalities and institutions. 

This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the work takes listeners from the origins of Islam to the eve of the nineteenth century, and an epilogue continues the story to the present day. Michael Cook thus provides a broad history of a civilization remarkable for both its unity and diversity.

In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president - Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood - and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, tells how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region.

The term Moor is a historical rather than an ethnic name. It is an invention of European Christians for the Islamic inhabitants of Maghreb (North Africa), Andalusia (Spain), Sicily and Malta, and was sometimes use to designate all Muslims. It is derived from Mauri, the Latin name for the Berbers who lived in the Roman province of Mauretania, which ranged across modern Algeria and Morocco. Saracen was another European term used to designate Muslims, though it usually referred to the Arabic peoples of the Middle East and derives from an ancient name for the Arabs, Sarakenoi.

Scholars, journalists, and politicians uphold Muslim-ruled medieval Spain - "al-Andalus" - as a multicultural paradise, a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in harmony. There is only one problem with this widely accepted account: It is a myth. In this groundbreaking book, Northwestern University scholar Darío Fernández-Morera tells the full story of Islamic Spain. As professors, politicians, and pundits continue to celebrate Islamic Spain for its "multiculturalism" and "diversity", Fernández-Morera sets the record straight.

How did Muslims across time and place define the line between themselves and their neighbors? Youshaa Patel explores why the Prophet Muhammad first advised his followers to emulate Christians and Jews, but then allegedly reversed course, urging them to "be different!" He details how subsequent generations of Muslim scholars canonized the Prophet's admonition into an influential doctrine against imitation that enjoined ordinary believers to embody and display their religious difference in public life.

In this remarkable book, which is partly a memoir and partly an exploration of the various deliberate and inadvertent acts that have contributed to the othering of the 180 million Muslims in India, Saeed Naqvi looks at how the divisions between Muslims and Hindus began in the modern era.

The kitchen is often the heart of South Asian homes. Muslim South Asian kitchens, in particular, are the engines of an entire culture. The alchemy that takes place within them affects nations and economies, politics and history, and of course human relationships. There is proof of it in Desi Delicacies, Claire Chambers’ anthology of essays, stories and recipes supplied by some of the region’s most well-loved writers, historians and chefs.

Nobody expected the liberation of India and birth of Pakistan to be so bloody - it was supposed to be an answer to the dreams of Muslims and Hindus who had been ruled by the British for centuries. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi's protégé and the political leader of India, believed that Indians were an inherently nonviolent, peaceful people. Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a secular lawyer, not a firebrand.

Modern Britain has seen an insidious rise in Islamophobia on both the right and the left. From misleading media stories like the Trojan Horse Affair in Birmingham's schools to the hatred directed at Muslim politicians and public figures during the Gaza conflict, this prejudice has gone frighteningly unchecked. In Muslims Don't Matter, Conservative peer, campaigner and podcaster Sayeeda Warsi unapologetically challenges the consensus, argues passionately that bigotry should never pass the dinner table test and urges Britain to change course.

On October 3, 1807, Thomas Jefferson was contacted by an unknown traveler urgently pleading for a private "interview" with the president, promising to disclose "a matter of momentous importance". By the next day, Jefferson held in his hands two astonishing manuscripts whose history has been lost for over two centuries. Authored by Muslims fleeing captivity in rural Kentucky, these documents delivered to the president in 1807 were penned by literate African slaves, and written entirely in Arabic.

Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the US.

You think you know about Islam. But, did you know that Islam teaches that Muslims must wage war to impose Islamic law on non-Muslim states, or that American Muslim groups are engaged in a huge cover-up of Islamic doctrine? These and other "politically incorrect" facts are revealed by Robert Spencer in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades).

With the engaging style of a true storyteller, Ghee Bowman reveals for the first time the astonishing story of the Indian contingent–the Muslim soldiers who fought in the pivotal Battle of Dunkirk–from their arrival in France on 26 December 1939 to their return to an India on the verge of Partition.

In the post-9/11 West, there is no shortage of strident voices telling us that Islam is a threat to the security, values, way of life, and even existence of the United States and Europe. In this fearless, original, and surprising book, Anne Norton demolishes the notion that there is a "clash of civilizations" between the West and Islam. What is really in question, she argues, is the West's commitment to its own ideals: to democracy and the Enlightenment trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling "the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language," as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic.

Muslims who come to Christ face momentous spiritual, psychological and social obstacles that drive many to abandon their faith. Often conversion and discipleship are framed by individualistic Western models that do not acknowledge the communal cultural forces that constrain and shape new believers. Effective discipleship requires a more relational, holistic process of Christian identity development and spiritual formation in community.

Exploring the birth period of Islam, this biography focuses on one of the most prominent and respected Muslim women in history: Khadija, the wife of the Prophet Muhammad.

Servants of Allah presents a history of African Muslims, following them from West Africa to the Americas. Although many assume that what Muslim faith they brought with them to the Americas was quickly absorbed into the new Christian milieu, as Sylviane A. Diouf demonstrates in this meticulously researched, groundbreaking volume, Islam flourished during slavery on a large scale.

Why are Muslim men portrayed as inherently violent? Does the veil violate women's rights? Is Islam stopping Muslims from integrating? Across western societies, Muslims are more misunderstood than any other minority. But what does it mean to believe in Islam today, to have forged your beliefs and identity in the shadow of 9/11 and the War on Terror? Exploding stereotypes from both inside and outside the faith, The Muslim Problem shows that while we may think we know all about Islam we are often wrong about even the most basic facts.