Rise and Fall of the Arab Empire: And the Founding of Western Pre-eminence

Flooding out of poverty-stricken medieval Arabia, in a century of unprecedented conquest, tribesmen led by zealous successors of the Prophet Mohammed created the nation of Islam. This was an empire of faith, scholarship, science and the arts, and a lasting ethos from the Atlantic coasts of Morocco and Iberia to the great rivers of northern India and the borders of China. Murderous clan rivalry, however, fierce sectarianism, pervasive extravagance and corruption and inept statecraft led within decades to the break up of the empire. Successor states struggled under attack from outside and rebellion from within. All failed eventually under the burdens of dynastic rivalry and inability to reform, leading to the fall of the Arabs into 500 years of poverty and ignorance. In The Rise and Fall of the Arab Empire, Rodney Collomb presents a history of the Arabs, and how the Western world gradually overtook and began to control the Muslim one.