Islam : from the Prophet Muhammad to the capture of Constantinople [2 volume set]

2 volumes : illustrations ; 24 cm. 1st UK edition. Contents: v. 1. Politics and war v. 2. Religion and society. Series: Documentary history of Western civilization. Preface The following pages contain a selection, in English translation, from the original sources for the history of Islam in the Middle Ages. The excerpts have been arranged in two volumes. The first is concerned with politics and war and consists, in part, of narratives of events and, in part, of theoretical and descriptive statements on these two themes. In the second volume attention is transferred from the state to society and is focused on the religious, cultural, and social life of the medieval Muslim world. With so vast a subject, comprehensive coverage is clearly impossible. In choosing passages for translation, I have tried to give representative examples of the different periods and regions with which the work is concerned and of the different kinds of evi- dence on which it is based. Some stress, however, has been laid on the central lands of Islam and on the central, formative period. It was my original intention to conform to the usual pattern and com-pile this book, in the main, from material already translated. I soon found myself obliged to abandon this plan. For one thing, reliance on the sources which by accident or caprice have become available in English would have produced a very unbalanced picture; for another, the existing translations vary unacceptably in quality and manner. It therefore seemed best to start afresh. All the passages in these two volumes have been newly translated by the editor, most of them for the first time into English. The majority are from Arabic; smaller num-bers are from Persian and Turkish, and two are from Hebrew. B.L.…