THE ARAB CONQUESTS
THE SPREAD OF ISLAM AND THE FIRST CALIPHATES
JUSTIN MAROZZI
Head of Zeus, 256pp, £18.99
Starting in the year 634 with the first recorded reference to the Arabs of Muhammad, Marozzi traces the development of Islam until 750 when its first great dynasty is overthrown. ‘There are heroes and traitors; scenes of gore and pathos, loss and triumph. The narration moves swiftly but gracefully from episode to episode,’ wrote Ian D Morris in his review for the Sunday Times. ‘Throughout there are sumptuous photos of art and architecture, but also shots of barren landscape, the deserts and mountains through which Arab armies trudged on their way to victory. Indeed, the book as a whole is a lovely artefact. This is the sort of popular history I would sit with as a youngster for hours, engrossed in the vivid detail. As an adult, though, I find myself wanting more.’
What the book lacks, Morris said, is ‘the deeper structures of economy and society whose tectonic movements carry all of us... For now
The Arab Conquests is thoroughly
good fun, but what you learn from it you may soon have to unlearn.’
Writing in the Times, Gerard Degroot found that Marozzi ‘occasionally deploys his imagination to reconstruct events, but otherwise obediently confines himself to what the evidence can prove... This book delivers drama through sublime writing, but mainly through marvellous images... Superbly reproduced photos are embedded in the text, instead of being crammed into a plate section. Images stir the imagination when mere words cannot.’
Spectator reviewer Anthony Sattin concluded that while the story of Islam’s ‘remarkable 120 years of expansion has been often and well told by writers from Edward Gibbon to Hugh Kennedy and Barnaby Rogerson, Marozzi’s beautifully illustrated volume sits well beside them as a shorter, lighter overview’.