Books on the Islamic Golden Age

The best straight political narrative is Hugh Kennedy's The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, but it's dry as hell.

Hugh Kennedy is probably the msot prolific writer on the Abbasids in English, and usually a good read too. His main one is Hugh Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs: the rise an fall of Islam's greatest dynasty. It's called something else in America - When Baghdad ruled Islam, I think.

Three others:
Amira Bennison, The Great Caliphs: the Golden Age of the Abbasid Empire. I read that a few years ago, and I thought it was interesting.
Muhammed Ahsan, Social Life under the Abbasids. Old, and a bit dry.
al Masud, The Meadows of Gold. Translated works from the Abbasid era, poetry, some history, some biography.

This is a great book:

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary

jsberry said:

This is a great book:

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary

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I would strongly discourage reading this book. It essentially presents Islamic history through the eyes of "modern Muslims", which really just means the particular perspective of the author. Its goal is not factual education nor truly understanding the past, and it's terribly distorted and incorrect in many places.

It's hard to find good general histories that focus on what you're looking for. Vernon Egger's A History of the Muslim World to 1405: The Making of a Civilization isn't bad. There are several monographs though - one I would recommend is Richard Bulliet's Islam, the View From the Edge which focuses on the development of Islamic urban culture and the diversification of the religion in the centuries after the Prophet.

One good general history is Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples, but as the title suggests its goal is not to outline Islamic history as a whole, but just the Arab section of it. Its timespan goes all the way from pre-Islam to modern times.

Chamboozer said:

I would strongly discourage reading this book. It essentially presents Islamic history through the eyes of "modern Muslims", which really just means the particular perspective of the author. Its goal is not factual education nor truly understanding the past, and it's terribly distorted and incorrect in many places.

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Well, I liked it, but I would appreciate the insight of a non-Turk in Istambul. What is it wrong about?

jsberry said:

Well, I liked it, but I would appreciate the insight of a non-Turk in Istambul. What is it wrong about?

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I can only comment on the first half of the book since that's the only part I read, but it basically struck me as high-school style history. It's all about creating an interesting story rather than just describing what actually happened, and the facts are distorted to make them fit. It's got all the stereotypes and cliches that modern historians are trying their hardest to break down: heroic early caliphs, decadent Umayyads, evil Crusaders and Mongols bringing down Islamic civilization. He tries really, really hard to make it parallel Roman history. It's a story very much driven by emotion, by telling Islamic history as an epic tale of the rise and fall of a civilization rather than just as... history. As real people live through it.

My favorite part of the book was when he got to the Ottomans and started his description of the palace system by saying something like, "The Ottoman state organization was extremely complicated and I can't claim to be able to talk about it in much detail", then proceeding to get almost his entire description wrong. Well, at least he was honest about his inability.

The main point of that book, as explained by the author, is not so much telling how history happened as explaining how the Muslim world perceives history to have happened, hence the title A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.

Druplesnubb said:

The main point of that book, as explained by the author, is not so much telling how history happened as explaining how the Muslim world perceives history to have happened, hence the title A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes.

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Which is exactly why I don't recommend reading it to learn about actual Islamic history.

If you can find this in an adequate translation (perhaps this?), I'd recommend it.

Of course, it is not about the IGA, but of it.