The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century

The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates is an accessible history of the Near East from c.600 to 1050 AD, the period in which Islamic society was formed.

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 poli...