Islam: A Thousand Years of Faith and Power

Historians Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair provide a comprehensive and accessible overview of the origin of this extraordinary religion, culture, and belief system that often has been misunderstood in the West. In its first thousand years, while Europe suffered through the Dark Ages, Islamic civilization flourished in a string of glittering cities such as Cordoba, Fez, Cairo, Istanbul, Baghdad, and Samarqand. Muslims expanded the boundaries of human knowledge in literature, art, science, and medicine. Bloom and Blair tell the remarkable story of Islam's rise to world prominence, from its revelation to Muhammed and its extraordinary spread within a century of the Prophet's death, through its golden age of empire and the forging of a rich new culture, to the changes it experienced after the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century.… (more)