Islam: A Short History [B0218]

2002 PB. 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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "One of the books I read with my non-fiction book club. Armstrong was able to help me understand Islam a lot better in only 191 pages."; "This is a compact and insightful history of Islam. Karen Armstrong is a clear and concise writer, and I enjoyed her analysis of how peaceful Mohammed himself was, and how respectful of women. She explains the background of 9/11 and the stance of modern Muslim states. I won't remember details but I did get an overall feel for the workings of Islamic history."