The definitive, authoritative history of the Near East from the time of Mohammed to the end of the Caliphates.

Based on original Arabic sources, the new edition of this well-established text has been comprehensively revised. The book covers the life of Muhammad and the birth of Islam, through the great days of the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates (8th-10th centuries), to the period of political fragmentation which followed it when Islam lost its core unity, never to be recovered.