For Sasanid history see Josef Wiesehofer, Ancient Persia (2001). Ehsan Yarshater, ed., The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3 (pts. 1-2), The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods (1983), contains up-to-date articles on Iranian history just prior to Islam.
Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (1988), focuses on social developments and includes the histories of Islam in India, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and other parts of the world. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (1974), critiques traditional ways of studying the Islamic Middle East while offering an alternative interpretation. Bernard Lewis’s The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (1995) provides a lively narration from the time of Christ.
For a short and stimulating survey see Jonathan Berkey, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800 (2003). Richard W. Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge (1993), offers, in brief form, an approach that concentrates on the lives of converts to Islam and local religious notables.
Muslims regard the Quran as untranslatable because they consider the Arabic in which it is couched to be inseparable from God’s message. Most “interpretations” in English adhere reasonably closely to the Arabic text. For an insightful reading of parts of the Quran, see Michael Sells, Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations (1999).
Martin Lings, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, rev. ed. (1991), offers a readable biography reflecting Muslim viewpoints. Standard Western treatments include W. Montgomery Watt’s Muhammad at Mecca (1953) and Muhammad at Medina (1956; reprint, 1981); and the one-volume summary: Muhammad, Prophet and Statesman (1974). Michael A. Cook, Muhammad (1983), intelligently discusses historiographical problems and source difficulties. Karen Armstrong’s Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (1993) achieves a sympathetic balance.
For information on the new school of thought that rejects the traditional accounts of Muhammad’s life and of the origins of the Quran, see Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, Hagarism (1977); Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987); and Fred Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins (1998).
Wilfred Madelung’s The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (1997) gives an interpretation unusually sympathetic to Shi’ite viewpoints. G. R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate, a. d. 661-750 (1987), offers a more conventional and easily readable history of a crucial century.
For a general history that puts the first three centuries ofAbbasid rule into the context of the earlier periods, see Hugh N. Kennedy,
The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (1986). Harold Bowen, The Life and Times of Ali ibn Isa “The Good Vizier" (1928; reprint, 1975), supplements Kennedy’s narrative superbly with a detailed study of corrupt caliphal politics in the tumultuous early tenth century.
Articles in Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi, eds., Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries (1990), detail Christian responses to Islam. For a Zoroastrian perspective see Jamsheed K. Choksy, Conflict and Cooperation: Zoroastrian Subalterns and Muslim Elites in Medieval Iranian Society (1997). Jacob Lassner summarizes S. D. Goitein’s definitive multivolume study of the Jews of medieval Egypt in A Mediterranean Society: An Abridgement in One Volume (1999). On the process of conversion, see the work in quantitative history of Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (1979).
With the fragmentation of the Abbasid Caliphate beginning in the ninth century, studies of separate areas become more useful than general histories. Richard N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East (1975), skillfully evokes the complicated world of early Islamic Iran and the survival and revival of Persian national identity. Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages (1979) and From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (1995), questions standard ideas about Christians and Muslims in Spain from a geographical and technological standpoint. For North Africa, Charles-Andre Julien, History of North Africa: Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, from the Arab Conquest to 1830 (1970), summarizes a literature primarily written in French. This same French historiographical tradition is challenged and revised by Abdallah Laroui, The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay (1977). For a detailed primary source, see the English translation of the most important chronicle of early Islamic history, The History of al-Tabari, published in thirty-eight volumes under the general editorship of Ehsan Yarshater.
Roy P. Mottahedeh, Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society (1980); Richard W. Bulliet, The Patricians of Nishapur (1972); and Ira Marvin Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle
Ages (1984), discuss social history in tenth-century Iran, eleventh-century Iran, and fourteenth-century Syria, respectively. For urban geography see Paul Wheatley, The Places Where Men Pray Together (2001). Ahmad Y. al-Hassan and Donald R. Hill, Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History (1986), introduces a little-studied field. For a more crafts-oriented look see Hans E. Wulff, The Traditional Crafts of Persia: Their Development, Technology, and Influence on Eastern and Western Civilizations (1966). Jonathan Bloom’s Paper Before Print (2001) details the great impact of papermaking in many cultural areas.
Denise Spellberg, Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of Aisha bint Abi Bakr (1994), provides pathbreaking guidance on the methodology of women’s history. For a focus on women connected with a ruling dynasty, see Delia Cortese and Simonetta Calderini, Women and the Fatimids in the World of Islam (2006). Basim Musallam, Sex and Society in Islamic Civilization (1983), treats the social, medical, and legal history of birth control. On race and slavery see Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: A Historical Enquiry (1992).
Among the numerous introductory books on Islam as a religion, a reliable starting point is David Waines, An Introduction to Islam (1995). For more advanced work, Fazlur Rahman, Islam, 2nd ed. (1979), skillfully discusses some of the subject’s difficulties. Islamic law is well covered in Noel J. Coulson, A History of Islamic Law (1979). For Sufism see Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975).
Two religious texts available in translation are Abu Hamid al-Ghaz-ali, The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali, trans. W. MontgomeryWatt (1967; reprint, 1982), and Abu al-Najib al-Suhrawardi, A Sufi Rule for Novices, trans. Menahem Milson (1975).
For detailed and abundant maps see William C. Brice, ed., An Historical Atlas of Islam (1981). The most complete reference work for people working in Islamic studies is The Encyclopedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960-), now available in CD-ROM format. For encyclopedia-type articles on pre-Islamic topics see G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar, Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (1999). On Iran, see the excellent but still unfinished Encyclopedia Iranica, edited by Ehsan Yarshater.
World History
