E-raamat: Worlds of Islam: A Global History

Brilliant, indispensable ... a rare book of balanced scholarship -- Simon Sebag Montefiore An elegant, erudite guide ... eclectic and unpredictable ... never los[ ing] sight of the bigger picture, it shows us how Islam took root, well beyond its heartlands in the Middle East in sub-Saharan Africa, central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines, China and Afro-Americans in the United States .... It is impossible to sum up the skilful manner in which the author navigates his way around 1,500 years of history across such a wide geographical expanse the historical vignettes are extremely diverse, giving greater evidence from parts of the Islamic world the West talks less about than the Middle East -- Francis Ghilčs * Arab Weekly * epic, authoritative and multilayered ... McDougall firmly rejects the Clash of Civilisations theory adopted more than 30 years ago by US post-Cold War warriors to depict Islam as an alien, backwards monolith. Instead, he stresses the plural in Worlds of Islams title ... a powerful education -- Andrew Lynch * Irish Times * A truly global work of history ... [ Worlds of Islam] makes a case for a historicist approach to Islam as a religion [ and] manages to show the scale of Islamic interactions with non-Muslims over the course of fourteen centuries without losing sight of what Islam meant to Muslims. Rather than denial or avoidance, [ McDougall] reaches for the historians tools of contextualization and comparison ... his approach is constantly analytical, questioning what facts signify -- Nile Green * Times Literary Supplement *