The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In

Abstract

Readers might well be wary of books that proclaim how their subjects ‘changed the world we live in’ in their very titles. These, more and more it seems, tend to be books that one finds in bookstores alongside titles that happily announce that they are intended as guides for ‘idiots’. But readers should not worry about this book. Hugh Kennedy's history of the Arab Conquests is a smart book by a skilled historian about events that really did change the world we live in. Idiots need not apply. The Great Arab Conquests covers the various waves of Muslim military expansion after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD. These include conquests on all fronts, land and sea, from their furthest extent at Poitiers in the West (in 732) to the Talas River in the East (in 751). The book thus not only deals with the early Islamic conquests by the Rashidun or ‘Rightly-Guided’ caliphs, which consolidated Muslim rule from Egypt to western Iran, but also covers the campaigns directed further afield by the Umayyad dynasty across north Africa to Spain and southern France, north into the Caucasus, and eastward to the furthest reaches of Iran, to Sind and the Indus valley in the south-east and, in the north-east, beyond the Oxus into Central Asia.