A must read for every thinking westerner

books:


	• Islam: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles) Karen Armstrong Modern Library, 2002 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 138 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

Fascinating Book

This was a great book for trying to understand a very complicated religion. I found it easy to read and very insightful.

Coming from my place of ignorance

This is, indeed, an elementary work, but as such, I found it enlightening. I gained a sense of the premises of the Koran and how Islam succeeded, within a century of its founding, to spread to North Africa and Spain. I hadn't known a thing about the Mongol invasions, or when Sufism arose, or how the Sunni's and Shia's actually diverged. It was interesting to read about the rise and fall of empires in the middle ages, and the strength of the Ottoman Empire into the 20th century. Reading this book was an engaging and eye-opening experience for me.

for more information click here

Good/Bad in "ALL," Religions PERIOD

Read the book and open your closed mind! Do NOT generalize about any culture or religion, as some of the 1 star reviewers have done. Those who generalize against any people or religion are nothing more than hypocritical BIGOTS! There is nothing complicated about it. If you look for the bad/good in any religion you will find it. What 1 star reviewers chose to focus on in this healingesque book, exposes their own misgiuded agenda.

A must read for every thinking westerner

Wow what a great book, that educates the reader on facts most westerners don't know concerning Islam. How many westerners know that Arab businessman named Muhammad is the Prophet Muhammad and that he saw himself not as a holy man but as a leader for the left behind and forgotten amongst him?

Or that Islam thru him, began because of how the Christians looked down on the Persians/Arabs, mocking them because they didn't have a holy leader like the Jews and Christians had? This alone should make people want to read the book.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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