The World of Islam. Faith, People, Culture Book

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The world of ISLAM. Faith, people, culture.
490 illustrations, 160 in colour, 330 photographs drawings and maps.
A concise, illustrated … Read more The world of ISLAM. Faith, people, culture.
490 illustrations, 160 in colour, 330 photographs drawings and maps.
A concise, illustrated history of Islam which considers all aspects of its remarkably rich civilisation.
The central area and period of Islamic greatness - the Middle East and North Africa from the advent of Islam in the seventh century to the aftermath of the Mongol conquests in the thirteenth - produced a culture of extraordinary depth, variety and richness. Art, social life, trade, mysticism, literature, music, science and warfare all developed uniquely Islamic forms; all are fully considered and lavishly illustrated. Islam spread far outside its core space and time; Spain, Iran, Ottoman Turkey and Monghul India all developed their own striking variations of basic Islamic institutions and artefacts. Then, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Islam came into close contact with the advancing West; and the two cultures are still struggling to come to terms with eachother. All these themes are fully developed in the book; a comprehensive coverage which is further enhanced by 160 pages of illustrations, more than half of them in color.




Lavishly illustrated with examples drawn from the extraordinarily rich and varied canon of of Islamic art, this authoritative and wide-ranging volume explores every aspect of Islam – its social life, trade, mysticism, literature, music, science and warfare – at a time when Western interest in the Islamic world is growing as never before.




A magnificent repository of love and learning approaching its subject with such generosity and proportion that one feels the whole of Islamic art and learning has to be encapsulated within its covers.
Scholarly and densely informative, beautifully and generously illustrated, a valuable and accessible work of general reference.
Richard Ettinghausen, Oleg Grabar, Fritz Meier, Charles Pellat, A. Shiloah, A. I. Sabra, Edmund Bosworth, Emilio García Gómez, Roger M. Savory, Norman Itzkowitz, S. A. A. Rizvi, Elie Kedorie.
By Bernard Lewis.

About the Author
Bernard Lewis is a British-American historian, public intellectual, and political commentator. Lewis' expertise is in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West. He is also noted in academic circles for his works on the history of the Ottoman Empire. n 1990, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Lewis for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities


Published by Thames and Hudson London.
Publication date:21 April 1992 See less