Encyclopaedia of Islam in the Middle East

This series of books seeks to examine the establishment and development of Islam in the countries comprising the Near and Middle East Asia. It provides a collection of important histories to give a fuller account of the society, culture and politics of the period. The reference work Provides broad coverage of the history of Islam in the region and in particular examines issues of politics and patronage from across the Islamic world. Neither Islam nor the Arab have been treated over-generously by Western authors. Yet their importance hardly needs emphasizing at a time when even a cursory glance at a newspaper reveals how much the future of the Western world is bound up with that of the Near East—the cradle of both Islam and Arabism. Though the day-to-day impact of the Near East is very far-reaching, far greater significance attaches to Islam in general and to Islamic (or Arabian) civilization in particular. Western civilization— from philosophy and mathematics to medicine and agriculture—owes so much to that civilization that unless we have some knowledge of the latter we must fail to comprehend the former.