The Great Arab Conquests How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Kennedy, Hugh. Published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 2007. First Edition. 8vo up to 9½” tall.,. 421pp. with maps, illustrations, bibliography, index. Blue boards, mapped endpapers. In fine condition with very light shelf wear to jacket.
Today’s Arab world was created at breathtaking speed. In just over one hundred years following the death of Mohammed in 632, Arabs had subjugated a territory with an east-west expanse greater than the Roman Empire, and they did it in about one-half the time. By the mid-eighth century, Arab armies had conquered the thousand-year-old Persian Empire, reduced the Byzantine Empire to little more than a city-state based around Constantinople, and destroyed the Visigoth kingdom of Spain. The cultural and linguistic effects of this early Islamic expansion reverberate today. This is the first popular English-language account in many years of this astonishing remaking of the political and religious map of the world.
