Many observers stereotype Islam and its scripture as inherently extreme or violent-a narrative that has overshadowed the truth of its roots. In this masterfully told account, preeminent Middle East expert Juan Cole takes us back to Islam's-and the Prophet Muhammad's-origin story. Cole shows how Muhammad came of age in an era of unparalleled violence. The eastern Roman Empire and the Sasanian Empire of Iran fought savagely throughout the Near East and Asia Minor. Muhammad's profound distress at the carnage of his times led him to envision an alternative movement, one firmly grounded in peace. The religion Muhammad founded, Islam, spread widely during his lifetime, relying on soft power instead of military might, and sought armistices even when militarily attacked. Cole sheds light on this forgotten history, reminding us that in the Qur'an, the legacy of that spiritual message endures. A vibrant history that brings to life the fascinating and complex world of the Prophet, Muhammad is the story of how peace is the rule and not the exception for one of the world's most practiced religions.

    Virtually everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, takes for granted that the prophet of Islam lived and led in seventh-century Arabia.But this widely accepted story begins to crumble on close examination, as Robert Spencer shows in his eye-opening new book.In his blockbuster bestseller The Truth about Muhammad, Spencer revealed the shocking contents of the earliest Islamic biographical material about the prophet of Islam. Now, in Did Muhammad Exist? , he uncovers that material’s surprisingly shaky historical foundations. Spencer meticulously examines historical records, archaeological findings, and pioneering new scholarship to reconstruct what we can know about Muhammad, the Qur’an, and the early days of Islam. The evidence he presents challenges the most fundamental assumptions about Islam’s origins. Did Muhammad Exist? reveals: How the earliest biographical material about Muhammad dates from at least 125 years after his reported death How six decades passed before the Arabian conquerors—or the people they conquered—even mentioned Muhammad, the Qur’an, or Islam The startling evidence that the Qur’an was constructed from existing materials—including pre-Islamic Christian texts How even Muslim scholars acknowledge that countless reports of Muhammad’s deeds were fabricated Why a famous mosque inscription may refer not to Muhammad but, astonishingly, to Jesus How the oldest records referring to a man named Muhammad bear little resemblance to the now-standard Islamic account of the life of the prophet The many indications that Arabian leaders fashioned Islam for political reasons Far from an anti-Islamic polemic, Did Muhammad Exist? is a sober but unflinching look at the origins of one of the world’s major religions. While Judaism and Christianity have been subjected to searching historical criticism for more than two centuries, Islam has never received the same treatment on any significant scale.The real story of Muhammad and early Islam has long remained in the shadows. Robert Spencer brings it into the light at long last.

    Why did the medieval Church bless William of Normandy's invasion of Christian England in 1066 and authorize cultural genocide in Provence? How could a Christian army sack Christian Constantinople in 1204? This title unravels the story of the Christian military expeditions that have perturbed European history.

    This book takes up the question of what these changes mean—of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

    He argues that these modes of thinking obstruct us from understanding Islam, distorting it, diminishing it, and rendering it incoherent.What Is Islam? formulates a new conceptual language for analyzing Islam. It presents a new paradigm of how Muslims have historically understood divine revelation—one that enables us to understand how and why Muslims through history have embraced values such as exploration, ambiguity, aestheticization, polyvalence, and relativism, as well as practices such as figural art, music, and even wine drinking as Islamic. It also puts forward a new understanding of the historical constitution of Islamic law and its relationship to philosophical ethics and political theory.A book that is certain to provoke debate and significantly alter our understanding of Islam, What Is Islam? reveals how Muslims have historically conceived of and lived with Islam as norms and truths that are at once contradictory yet coherent.

    She then focuses on those Arab societies that played a key role in elaborating the dominant Islamic discourses about women and gender: Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded; Iraq during the classical age, when the prescriptive core of legal and religious discourse on women was formulated; and Egypt during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when exposure to Western societies led to dramatic social change and to the emergence of new discourses on women. Throughout, Ahmed not only considers the Islamic texts in which central ideologies about women and gender developed or were debated but also places this discourse in its social and historical context. Her book is thus a fascinating survey of Islamic debates and ideologies about women and the historical circumstances of their position in society, the first such discussion using the analytic tools of contemporary gender studies.

    They argue that crucial evidence (or a telling lack of evidence) at digs in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon suggests that many of the most famous stories in the Bible—the wanderings of the patriarchs, the Exodus from Egypt, Joshua’s conquest of Canaan, and David and Solomon’s vast empire—reflect the world of the later authors rather than actual historical facts. Challenging the fundamentalist readings of the scriptures and marshaling the latest archaeological evidence to support its new vision of ancient Israel, The Bible Unearthed offers a fascinating and controversial perspective on when and why the Bible was written and why it possesses such great spiritual and emotional power today.

    Soon after the World Trade Center towers fell, leaving ashes floating over journalist Lee Smith’s Brooklyn neighborhood, he left for Cairo to find out “why the Arabs hate us.” He spent eight years reporting from Cairo, Beirut, and Jerusalem and discovered that the anger and disorder in the Middle East are not caused by a clash of civilizations between East and West, as is so often contended. Instead, he found a clash among Arab civilizations that led him to reassess America’s efforts to bring a “freedom agenda” to the Arab world. In The Strong Horse, Lee Smith offers paradigm-shifting insight into how the Arab world works and what America’s role should be in that world today.The Strong Horse combines evocative reporting with brilliant analysis that gracefully overturns many of the myths held about the region. Perhaps the most important myth that hobbles policy in the Middle East is the idea that the turmoil there is the legacy of Western interference. In fact, Smith shows, violence has been the only currency of power in the region for centuries. Another myth is that dictators are the main cause of widespread oppression in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Yet Smith finds that much of the repression that stagnates Arab society happens at the level of the family where rigorous redlines of social and religious behavior are enforced. What’s more, in a region seething with minorities, with no liberal tradition, no reverence for individual rights, and no tolerance for difference, authoritarian regimes exist because the alternative, as has been seen most recently in Lebanon and Iraq, is endless sectarian violence. In The Strong Horse, Smith reveals the Arab world to be defined by a tribal culture where support goes to “the strong horse.” Technology and democracy will not transform the Arab world, Smith convincingly demonstrates. Rather, Arab peoples and governments naturally align themselves with the strongest power, even when that power is the United States or Israel. Smith’s groundbreaking book redefines America’s role in the Middle East as “benevolent strong horse” and offers an important corrective to our understanding of the Arab world.

    He begins with a stunning account of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, then turns to the main zones of conflict: Spain, from which the descendants of the Moors were eventually expelled; the Middle East, where Crusaders and Muslims clashed for years; and the Balkans, where distant memories spurred atrocities even into the twentieth century. Throughout, Wheatcroft delves beneath stereotypes, looking incisively at how images, ideas, language, and technology (from the printing press to the Internet), as well as politics, religion, and conquest, have allowed each side to demonize the other, revive old grievances, and fuel across centuries a seemingly unquenchable enmity. Finally, Wheatcroft tells how this fraught history led to our present maelstrom. We cannot, he argues, come to terms with today’s perplexing animosities without confronting this dark past.

    Alone Of All Her Sex: The Myth And The Cult Of The Virgin Mary, by Warner, Marina

    In The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, he paints a portrait of a country that is fiercely proud of its Persian heritage, mystified by its outsider status, and scornful of the idea that the United States can dictate how it should interact with the community of nations.With wit, style, and an unusual ability to get past the typical sound bite on Iran, Majd reveals the paradoxes inherent in the Iranian character which have baffled Americans for more than thirty years. Meeting with sartorially challenged government officials in the presidential palace; smoking opium with an addicted cleric, his family, and friends; drinking fine whiskey at parties in fashionable North Tehran; and gingerly self-flagellating in a celebration of Ashura, Majd takes readers on a rare tour of Iran and shares insights shaped by his complex heritage. He considers Iran as a Muslim country, as a Shiite country, and, perhaps above all, as a Persian one. Majd shows that as Shiites marked by an inferiority complex, and Persians marked by a superiority complex, Iranians are fiercely devoted to protecting their rights, a factor that has contributed to their intransigence over their nuclear programs. He points to the importance of the Persian view of privacy, arguing that the stability of the current regime owes much to the freedom Iranians have to behave as they wish behind “Persian walls.” And with wry affection, Majd describes the Persian concept of ta’arouf, an exaggerated form of polite self-deprecation that may explain some of Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s more bizarre public moments. With unforgettable portraits of Iranians, from government figures to women cab drivers to reform-minded Ayatollahs, Majd brings to life a country that is deeply religious yet highly cosmopolitan, authoritarian yet with democratic and reformist traditions—an Iran that is a more nuanced nemesis to the United States than it is typically portrayed to be.

    It developed into one of the most powerful corporations in the medieval world which lasted for nearly two centuries until its suppression in 1312. Despite the loss of its central archive in the sixteenth century, the Order left many records of its existence as the spearhead of crusading activity in Palestine and Syria, as the administrator of a great network of preceptories and lands in the Latin west, and as a banker and ship-owner. Because of the dramatic nature of its abolition, it has retained its grip on the imagination and consequently there has developed an entirely fictional 'after-history' in which its secret presence has been evoked to explain mysteries which range from masonic conspiracy to the survival of the Turin Shroud. This book offers a concise and up-to-date introduction to the reality and the myth of this extraordinary institution.

    Ross Dunn here recounts the great traveler's remarkable career, interpreting it within the cultural and social context of Islamic society and giving the reader both a biography of an extraordinary personality and a study of the hemispheric dimensions of human interchange in medieval times.

    (the most fearful defeat suffered by a Roman army since Cannae in 216 B.C.) and Marignano (1515 A.D.), the last of the triumphs of the medieval horseman. It was extensively revised and edited by John H. Beeler in 1953 to incorporate many new facts uncovered since the late nineteenth century.

    In his latest book, he offers a brilliant survey of the relationship between the Islamic and Christian worlds from the seventh to the sixteenth centuries. He shows how, despite long periods of coexistence and overlap, religious misunderstanding between “the peoples of the book” has been present since their earliest encounters. He argues that though there were fruitful trading and cultural interactions between Islam and Christianity during the period when Arabs controlled most of the Mediterranean world, neither side was remotely interested in the actual religion of the other. Christians portrayed Muslims as bloodthirsty pagans and Muhammad as a false prophet while Islam viewed Christianity as a jumble of sects and conflicting stories. Fletcher’s lucidity, scholarship, and gift for compression make this one of the most elegant and clear-sighted contributions to its subject for many years. It will appeal to readers of Karen Armstrong’s bestselling Islam: A Short History and to all readers looking for a better understanding of the Islamic world’s relationship to the West.