A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity
Michael Cook, a longtime Princeton historian of early Islamic history, surveys roughly a thousand years of political, religious, and cultural development across the lands shaped by Islam. The book begins with pre-Islamic Arabia and the career of the Prophet Muhammad, then follows the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, the rise of the Turkic and Mongol empires, and the formation of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal states. Cook gives close attention to how religious authority, law, and scholarship developed alongside imperial power, and how regional cultures in North Africa, Iran, Central Asia, and South Asia adapted Islam to their own settings. The narrative ends as European expansion begins to reshape the global balance in the early modern period. Drawing on decades of specialist research, Cook synthesizes Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Indian material into one continuous account.
What you might want to know about A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A single-volume history of the Muslim world from the rise of Islam in seventh-century Arabia to the early modern era.
Yes. Cowen listed it alongside Annie Jacobsen as one of his two top picks on his Best Non-Fiction of 2024 list on Marginal Revolution, writing that it is at the very least a good book and possibly a great one.
No; Cook is a leading scholar of early Islam, but the book is written as a single-volume narrative for general readers willing to follow a long, dense history.
A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity was written by Michael Cook, published in 2024 by Princeton University Press.
A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity is 960 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity takes most readers 14 to 21 hours to finish.
A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
