The Muslim world is tremendously rich and diverse, yet few Westerners are familiar with the writings and teachings of a culture that in recent months has come to the forefront of world events. In their insightful new anthology The Middle East and Islamic World Reader, historians Marvin E. Gettleman and Stuart Schaar have assembled a broad selection of documents and contemporary scholarship to give a view of the history of the peoples from the core Islamic lands, from the Golden Age of Islam to today.

With carefully framed essays beginning each chapter and brief introductory notes accompanying over seventy readings, the anthology reveals the multifaceted societies and political systems of the Islamic world. Selections range from theological texts illuminating the differences between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, to diplomatic exchanges and state papers, to memoirs and literary works, to manifestos of Islamic radicals. The anthology spans the distance from Tunisia to India through writings by such key figures as the early Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, Turkish founding father Kemal Ataturk, Israeli statesman David Ben-Gurion, and the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini. The readings chart the effects of the Islamic world's interactions with outsiders — from the invasions of Central Asian nomads and Crusading Europeans in the Middle Ages, to European colonization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — as well as its own internal evolution, through accounts of peasants, urban workers, and the experience of Muslim women.

Wide-ranging and thought-provoking, The Middle East and Islamic World Reader is a fascinating historical survey of complexsocieties that — now more than ever — are crucial for us to understand.