Author : Ryan J. Lynch
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 42,5 MB
Release : 2020
Category : History
ISBN : 1838604391
An account of the one of the most important works describing the Arab-Muslim conquests of the Middle East in the seventh and eighth centuries and the subsequent Muslim occupation of the area
Author : Dani, Ahmad Hasan
Publisher : UNESCO Publishing
Page : 526 pages
File Size : 17,13 MB
Release : 1992-12-31
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9231027190
Volume 1 of this UNESCO multi-volume series traces the history of man in this vast region from the Palaeolithic beginnings to circa 700 BC, when the foundations of the Achaemenian Empire were laid. The earliest history of man is evidenced and the food producing areas of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and the Indus Valley explored. The Bronze Age and the first signs of urbanization from the Indus to the Oxus are described as is the development of the nomadic pastoral tribes, such as the Aryans, whose history can be seen in proper perspective through archaeological evidence now available. A comprehensive first instalment for any enthusiast interested in the history and development of Asia.
Author : Ahmad b. Yahya al-Baladhuri
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 597 pages
File Size : 33,24 MB
Release : 2022-11-17
Category : History
ISBN : 0755637410
Ahmad bin Yahuya al-Baladhuri's History of the Arab Invasions is perhaps the most important single source for the history of the great Arab conquests of the Middle East in the sixth and early seventh centuries. The author, who died in 892, was a historian working at court of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad. He had access to a wide variety of earlier writings on the conquests and has preserved accounts that are not found anywhere else. But the book is much more than a series of accounts of battles. Baladhuri was very interested in the origins of the Islamic state and its institutions. His work contains a wealth of information about government, land-holding and economic developments. It is, in short, a key text for anyone interested in the formation of the Islamic world. In this new modern translation, fully annotated with a scholarly apparatus and commentary on the places, events and individuals mentioned, a key source on the Arab conquests is made available in English. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of Islamic Studies and Middle East history.
Author : Hugh Kennedy
Publisher : Da Capo Press
Page : 466 pages
File Size : 49,46 MB
Release : 2007-12-10
Category : History
ISBN : 0306817284
Today's Arab world was created at breathtaking speed. In just over one hundred years following the death of Mohammed in 632, Arabs had subjugated a territory with an east-west expanse greater than the Roman Empire, and they did it in about one-half the time. By the mid-eighth century, Arab armies had conquered the thousand-year-old Persian Empire, reduced the Byzantine Empire to little more than a city-state based around Constantinople, and destroyed the Visigoth kingdom of Spain. The cultural and linguistic effects of this early Islamic expansion reverberate today. This is the first popular English-language account in many years of this astonishing remaking of the political and religious map of the world. Hugh Kennedy's sweeping narrative reveals how the Arab armies conquered almost everything in their path, and brings to light the unique characteristics of Islamic rule. One of the few academic historians with a genuine talent for story telling, Kennedy offers a compelling mix of larger-than-life characters, fierce battles, and the great clash of civilizations and religions.
Author : Roger Collins
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 263 pages
File Size : 19,20 MB
Release : 1995-02-17
Category : History
ISBN : 0631194053
This book, now available in paperback, is a challenging and controversial account of the history of Spain in the eighth century. In it Roger Collins assesses the political and cultural impact on Spain of the first hundred years of Arab rule, focusing upon aspects of continuity and discontinuity with Visigoth Spain.
Author : Robert G. Hoyland
Publisher : Ancient Warfare and Civilizati
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 28,99 MB
Release : 2015
Category : History
ISBN : 0199916365
In just over a hundred years--from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate in 750--the followers of the Prophet swept across the whole of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. Their armies threatened states as far afield as the Franks in Western Europe and the Tang Empire in China. The conquered territory was larger than the Roman Empire at its greatest expansion, and it was claimed for the Arabs in roughly half the time. How this collection of Arabian tribes was able to engulf so many empires, states, and armies in such a short period of time is a question that has perplexed historians for centuries. Most recent popular accounts have been based almost solely on the early Muslim sources, which were composed centuries later for the purpose of demonstrating that God had chosen the Arabs as his vehicle for spreading Islam throughout the world. In this ground-breaking new history, distinguished Middle East expert Robert G. Hoyland assimilates not only the rich biographical and geographical information of the early Muslim sources but also the many non-Arabic sources, contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous with the conquests. The story of the conquests traditionally begins with the revelation of Islam to Muhammad. In God's Path, however, begins with a broad picture of the Late Antique world prior to the Prophet's arrival, a world dominated by the two superpowers of Byzantium and Sasanian Persia, "the two eyes of the world." In between these empires, in western (Saudi) Arabia, emerged a distinct Arab identity, which helped weld its members into a formidable fighting force. The Arabs are the principal actors in this drama yet, as Hoyland shows, the peoples along the edges of Byzantium and Persia--the Khazars, Bulgars, Avars, and Turks--also played important roles in the remaking of the old world order. The new faith propagated by Muhammad and his successors made it possible for many of the conquered peoples to join the Arabs in creating the first Islamic Empire. Well-paced and accessible, In God's Path presents a pioneering new narrative of one the great transformational periods in all of history.
Author : Efraim Karsh
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 36,37 MB
Release : 2007-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0300122632
From the first Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the last great Muslim empire, the story of the Middle East has been the story of the rise and fall of universal empires and, no less important, of imperialist dreams. So argues Efraim Karsh in this highly provocative book. Rejecting the conventional Western interpretation of Middle Eastern history as an offshoot of global power politics, Karsh contends that the region's experience is the culmination of long-existing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior, and that foremost among these is Islam's millenarian imperial tradition. The author explores the history of Islam's imperialism and the persistence of the Ottoman imperialist dream that outlasted World War I to haunt Islamic and Middle Eastern politics to the present day. September 11 can be seen as simply the latest expression of this dream, and such attacks have little to do with U.S. international behavior or policy in the Middle East, says Karsh. The House of Islam's war for world mastery is traditional, indeed venerable, and it is a quest that is far from over.
Author : Tom Holland
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 614 pages
File Size : 47,38 MB
Release : 2012-05-15
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0385531362
The acclaimed author of Rubicon and other superb works of popular history now produces a thrillingly panoramic (and incredibly timely) account of the rise of Islam. No less significant than the collapse of the Roman Republic or the Persian invasion of Greece, the evolution of the Arab empire is one of the supreme narratives of ancient history, a story dazzlingly rich in drama, character, and achievement. Just like the Romans, the Arabs came from nowhere to carve out a stupefyingly vast dominion—except that they achieved their conquests not over the course of centuries as the Romans did but in a matter of decades. Just like the Greeks during the Persian wars, they overcame seemingly insuperable odds to emerge triumphant against the greatest empire of the day—not by standing on the defensive, however, but by hurling themselves against all who lay in their path.
Author : Scott Anderson
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 19,17 MB
Release : 2017-05-02
Category : History
ISBN : 0525434445
From the bestselling author of Lawrence in Arabia, a piercing account of how the contemporary Arab world came to be riven by catastrophe since the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq. In 2011, a series of anti-government uprisings shook the Middle East and North Africa in what would become known as the Arab Spring. Few could predict that these convulsions, initially hailed in the West as a triumph of democracy, would give way to brutal civil war, the terrors of the Islamic State, and a global refugee crisis. But, as New York Times bestselling author Scott Anderson shows, the seeds of catastrophe had been sown long before. In this gripping account, Anderson examines the myriad complex causes of the region’s profound unraveling, tracing the ideological conflicts of the present to their origins in the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 and beyond. From this investigation emerges a rare view into a land in upheaval through the eyes of six individuals—the matriarch of a dissident Egyptian family; a Libyan Air Force cadet with divided loyalties; a Kurdish physician from a prominent warrior clan; a Syrian university student caught in civil war; an Iraqi activist for women’s rights; and an Iraqi day laborer-turned-ISIS fighter. A probing and insightful work of reportage, Fractured Lands offers a penetrating portrait of the contemporary Arab world and brings the stunning realities of an unprecedented geopolitical tragedy into crystalline focus.
Author : Paul Fregosi
Publisher : Prometheus Books
Page : 442 pages
File Size : 34,68 MB
Release : 2009-12-04
Category : History
ISBN : 1615921893
In a bright and brisk narrative, Paul Fregosi presents the engrossing factual account of the immense and little-known Islamic military invasions of Europe, and the major players who led them, beginning around 660 C.E. Photo insert.
