The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates
The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century
English | 2023 | ISBN: 0367366894 | 429 Pages | PDF True | 6 MB
English | 2023 | ISBN: 0367366894 | 429 Pages | PDF True | 6 MB
Beginning with the life of Muhammad and the birth of Islam, Hugh Kennedy goes on to explore the great Arab conquests of the seventh century and the golden age of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates when the world of Islam was politically and culturally far more developed than the West. The crisis of the tenth century put an end to the political unity of the Muslim world and saw the emergence of the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt and independent dynasties in the Eastern Islamic world. The book concludes with the advent of Seljuk Turkish rule in the mid-eleventh century. This new edition is fully updated to take into account recent research and there are two entirely new chapters covering the economic background during the period, and the north-east of Iran in the post Abbasid period. Based on extensive reading of the original Arabic sources, Kennedy breaks away from the Orientalist tradition of seeing early Islamic history as a series of ephemeral rulers and pointless battles by drawing attention to underlying long-term social and economic processes.