Best-selling author and renowned religious scholar Karen Armstrong presents a concise and articulate history of Islam, the world's fastest-growing faith. Beginning with the Prophet Muhammad's flight from Medina and concluding with an examination of modern Islamic practices and concerns, Armstrong delivers an unbiased overview. She contends that no religion is more feared and misunderstood by the Western world as Islam, and firmly challenges the notion...

"...Senior fellow at the Cato Institute and opinion writer for The New York Times, both diagnoses "the crisis of Islam" in the modern world, and offers a way forward. Diving deeply into Islamic theology, and also sharing lessons from his own life story, he reveals how Muslims lost the universalism that made them a great civilization in their earlier centuries. He especially demonstrates how values often associated with Western Enlightenment - freedom,...

Beginning in seventh-century Mecca and Medina, A History of Islam in 21 Women takes us around the globe, through eleventh-century Yemen and Khorasan, and into sixteenth-century Spain, Istanbul and India. From there to nineteenth-century Persia and the African savannah, to twentieth-century Russia, Turkey, Egypt and Iraq, before arriving in present-day Europe and America. From the first believer, Khadija, and the other women who witnessed the formative...

This book will reshape the way we think about Islam's relationship with the West. What if Islam never existed? To some, it's a comforting thought: no clash of civilizations, no holy wars, no terrorists. Here, political scientist and expert on the Muslim world Graham E. Fuller guides us through history, geopolitics, and religion to investigate whether or not Islam is indeed the cause of some of today's most emotional and important international crises....

Based on extensive scholarship, an innovative biography of the central text of Islam Over a billion copies of the Qur`an exist, yet it remains an enigma. Its classical Arabic language resists simple translation, and its non-linear style of abstract musings defies categorization. Moreover, those who champion its sanctity and compete to claim its mantle offer widely diverging interpretations of its core message at times with explosive results. Building...

"In The Race for Paradise, Paul M. Cobb offers an accurate and accessible representation of the Islamic experience of the Crusades during the Middle Ages. Cobb overturns previous claims and presents new arguments, such as the idea that the Frankish invasions of the Near East were something of a side-show to the broader internal conflict between Sunnis and Shi'ites in the region. The Race for Paradise moves along two fronts as Cobb stresses that, for...