التاريخ المقارن للمجتمعات الوسيطية ( المسيحية و الإسلام )

No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam.
It haunts the popular Western imagination as an extreme faith that
promotes authoritarian government, female oppression, civil war, and
terrorism. Karen Armstrong's short history offers a vital corrective to
this narrow view. The distillation of years of thinking and writing
about Islam, it demonstrates that the world's fastest-growing faith is a
much richer and more complex phenomenon than its modern fundamentalist
strain might suggest.

Islam: A Short History begins with the flight of Muhammad and his family
from Medina in the seventh century and the subsequent founding of the
first mosques. It recounts the origins of the split between Shii and
Sunni Muslims, and the emergence of Sufi mysticism; the spread of Islam
throughout North Africa, the Levant, and Asia; the shattering effect on
the Muslim world of the Crusades; the flowering of imperial Islam in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries into the world's greatest and
most sophisticated power; and the origins and impact of revolutionary
Islam. It concludes with an assessment of Islam today and its
challenges.

With this brilliant book, Karen Armstrong issues a forceful challenge to
those who hold the view that the West and Islam are civilizations set
on a collision course. It is also a model of authority, elegance, and
economy




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