Showing results for "By the Book" in History

Few books in history have been as poorly understood as the Qur'an. In this audiobook, the distinguished historian of religion Bruce Lawrence shows precisely how the Qur'an is Islam. He describes the origins of the faith and assesses its influence on today's societies and politics. Above all, he emphasizes that the Qur'an is a sacred book of signs that has no single message. It is a book that demands interpretation and one that can be properly understood only through its history.

In 2013, just two years after the popular overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian military ousted the country's first democratically elected president - Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood - and subsequently led a brutal repression of the Islamist group. These bloody events echoed an older political rift: the splitting of nationalists and Islamists during the rule of Egyptian president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Fawaz Gerges, one of the world's leading authorities on the Middle East, tells how the clash between pan-Arab nationalism and pan-Islamism has shaped the history of the region.

America’s leading religious scholar and public intellectual introduces lay readers to the Qur’an with a measured, powerful reading of the ancient text Garry Wills has spent a lifetime thinking and writing about Christianity. In What the Qur’an Meant, Wills invites readers to join him as he...

Muhammad is the Prophet; the messenger of God. But for the vast majority of people outside the Islamic faith; he remains a mystery; and myths and misconceptions about him abound. Born in a time of moral despondency and despair; Muhammad spent his entire life trying to transcend human pettiness...

Understanding Islam's sacred text is integral to understanding your Muslim neighbor. Cross-cultural missionary and scholar Matthew Aaron Bennett blends the insights of Islamic believers, secular Qur'an scholars, and missionaries to Muslims, making The Qur'an and the Christian like no other resource for Christian ministry to Muslims. Combining these perspectives in one guide better equips Christians to communicate the biblical gospel to friends and neighbors who are adherents to Islam—both in and out of majority-Muslim cultures.

In 1683, an Ottoman army that stretched from horizon to horizon set out to seize the "Golden Apple," as Turks referred to Vienna. The ensuing siege pitted battle-hardened Janissaries wielding seventeenth-century grenades against Habsburg armies, widely feared for their savagery. The walls of...

In the seventh and eighth centuries AD, armies inspired by the new religion of Islam burst out of Arabia to subjugate the Levant, southwest Asia, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula. These Arab conquests followed immediately after the Prophet Mohammed's death in 632. By this time, against all the odds, he had managed to unite the feuding tribes of Arabia at the point of his sword. The Muslim conquests lasted until 750, by which time several generations of marauding Arab armies had carved out an Islamic empire which, in size and population, rivalled that of Rome at its zenith.