This book’s full title is The Voice, The Word, The Books, The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians and Muslims. This is one of the few books that admit that Islam was spread by conquering armies. First it the armies was led by Mohammed and then later his Islamic followers. The conversion to Islam was not the effect of being conquered, but it was a consequence of it.
What I found interesting in the book that I had not read before was the fact the conquest by Islamic armies Arabized people. First there was Arabic acculturation and then conversion to Islam. It took a while. From Spain to China, in the abode of Islam there was not a majority for the Islamic religion until the mid-10th century.
However, Arabization did not occur everywhere. In Iran the local Daric-Farsi culture refused to yield to Arabization. However, their written script became written in Arabic script. The same thing happened with the Ottomans. Their vernacular was written in the Arabic Script initially. However, when the Turks made Islam their state religion, they changed their script to a Latin script.
There is a review of this book at Princeton University Press. On this site you can also review the table of contents and the Introduction to the book. There are also some reviews at Good Reads. There is also a short interesting review at the Publishers Weekly.
You can read about the author, professor Francis Edward Peters here. He is also on Wikipedia. There is a short except from the film From Moses to Muhammad with F. E. Peters.
Also, an index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. Follow me on Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment