A List of Books on Islamic History

Do You want to read  Books on Islamic History and you are confused ?Here is a list of famous books on Islamic history and a little intro of the Book to help  you  decide the Book you  may Want to Read . 

Advertisements

Just Click on the title of the Book to get the Book for your Reading. Jazak allahu khairan.

Destiny Disrupted

Author: Tamim Ansary

In Destiny Disrupted, Tamim Ansary tells the rich story of world history as the Islamic world saw it, from the time of Mohammed to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and beyond. He clarifies why our civilizations grew up oblivious to each other, what happened when they intersected, and how the Islamic world was affected by its slow recognition that Europe—a place it long perceived as primitive and disorganized—had somehow hijacked destiny.

History of Makkah

Author:Safiur Rahman Mubarakpuri By Darussalam Publications

This book mentions the different aspects of Makkah, and recorded the most important historical events that have direct effect on the establishment and sacredness of Makkah as well as its religious weight.
This Book also highlights the sites that are highly important whenever Makhah is mentioned like the Black Stone, Zamzam Well, and others.
A great part of the book has been dedicated to in speaking about the Holy Ka’bah and the Holy Mosque updating the extensions and the improvements, that have taken place from the time of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) to the Saudi era.
At the end of the book there is a complete guide about Hajj and its rites.

The Sealed Nectar: Biography of the Noble Prophet

Author : Sheikh Safi-ur-Rahman al-Mubarkpuri.

It was honored by the World Muslim League as first prize winner book. Whoever wants to know the whole life style of the Prophet in detail must read this book.

It is a complete authoritative book on the life of Prophet Muhammad (S) by Sheikh Safi-ur-Rahman al-Mubarkpuri. a book that deals with the spiritual life and lessons of the Prophet,This is the top recommendation and an all time best seller.Originally written in Arabic and Urdu, the Arabic version was awarded first prize by the Muslim World League at the first Islamic Conference, following an open competition for a book on the life of Prophet Mohammed in 1979.

No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam

Author: Reza Aslan

Beginning with a vivid account of the social and religious milieu in which the Prophet Muhammad forged his message, Aslan paints a portrait of the first Muslim community as a radical experiment in religious pluralism and social egalitarianism. He demonstrates how, after the Prophet’s death, his successors attempted to interpret his message for future generations–an overwhelming task that fractured the Muslim community into competing sects.

Finally, Aslan examines how, in the shadow of European colonialism, Muslims developed conflicting strategies to reconcile traditional Islamic values with the realities of the modern world, thus launching what Aslan terms the Islamic Reformation. Timely and persuasive, No god but God is an elegantly written account of a magnificent yet misunderstood faith.

Islam: A Thousand Years of Faith and Power

In its first thousand years – from the revelations given to Muhammad in the 7th century to the great Islamic empires of the 16th -Islamic civilization flourished. While Europeans suffered through the Dark Ages, Muslims in such cities as Jerusalem, Damascus, Alexandria, Fez, Tunis, Cairo and Baghdad made remarkable advances in philosophy, science, medicine, literature and art. This work explores the first millennium of Islamic culture, seeking to shatter stereotypes and enlighten readers about the events and achievements that have shaped contemporary Islamic civilization.

The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Islamic Surveys)

The Crusades is a masterly and welcome contribution to the historiography of the Crusades. Hillenbrand has set an enviable standard of scholarship from which teachers and students of the Crusades, the medieval Middle East, and medieval Europe will long benefit. It is a major contribution !The book is profusely illustrated and the illustrations are on the whole well chosen. This is ground-breaking work, and its value lies not only in the detailed reportage, but also in the way Carole Hillenbrand gives western historians a guide to source material, either unknown to them or available only in partial translation, and introduces her readers to the mindset of medieval Muslims, providing an entirely different angle from which to look at the crusading movement. By putting modern ideas into context the book will enable readers in both the western and Islamic worlds to understand better events which to some extent are shaping the present. The Crusades from a Western viewpoint have produced a very rich and abundant bibliography for more than a century. On the other hand, very few studies on the Muslim response to the Crusade have appeared. For the first time the subject is tackled here globally and an attempt is made to explain, through a deep analysis of the Arabic sources, the motives and aims of the Muslims ! This work – which shows very clearly the impact which the Crusades have had in Islamic territory up until our own time – is a remarkable contribution to the history of relations between east and west. Hillenbrand’s admirable book, the first comprehensive attempt to pull together the relevant Muslim texts on these wars, lets the sources speak for themselves, and provides intriguing insights into the deeply rooted problems which face us today ! she has done a masterful job, providing us with a whole new way to examine the traditional western material on the Crusades. A magisterial and path-breaking study in its own right ! a veritable treasure trove of material heretofore unavailable to the non-Arabist !

Price-84.95 $.

You can buy it Here

Islam through Western Eye : From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism

This book gives  a thorough going analysis of how the anti-Islamic discourse both evolved and subsequently shaped the West’s understanding of Islam and Muslims for the past thousand years. I wanted to quote the final page of the book; a call to action for the formulation of a new paradigm:

This task involves shifting the broader problem of East-West relations from the traditional view of intercultural rivalry to one of intracultural contest.

…By opening up space for the civilization of Islam in the idea of Western culture, we are suddenly faced with a compelling new model of relations between the two – one of continuous interaction of cultures locked in relations for one thousand years – in which it is hard to say where one ends and the other begins.

Price Only $28 ,You can get it Here

The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (Princeton Classics)

The Muqaddimah, often translated as “Introduction” or “Prolegomenon,” is the most important Islamic history of the premodern world. Written by the great fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldûn (d. 1406), this monumental work established the foundations of several fields of knowledge, including the philosophy of history, sociology, ethnography, and economics.

This volume makes available a seminal work of Islam and medieval and ancient history to twenty-first century audiences.

The Devils Deception

Author :Ibn Jawzi

It gives you an early history of the Shia and Khawarij. The Mirage in Iran continues with the Shia. More on the Khawarij can be found in ‘The Khawarij and Jihad’ by Abu Hamza, he touches on the GIA and Algeria.

This translation of Tablees Iblees provides important analysis in developing self-awareness and critical thinking to ward off many deceptions of the devil, which have plagued mankind from the time of Adam.The Devil’s Deception by imam Ibn Al-Jawzi is a  complete English translation of Talbis Iblis. It’s a very famous book in urdu  but only recently got translated into English.

This book is the sixth instalment from Dar as-Sunnah of the illustrious Imam, Abu’l-Faraj Ibn Jawzi. Being a complete translation of his well-known and prized work, Ibn Jawzi enumerates within it, many of the mechanisms and modus operandi used by the devil in deceiving and leading mankind away from the Straight Path.

After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

Author:Lesley Hazleton

This is the foundation story of the Shia-Sunni split in Islam, a magnificent tale of power, intrigue, assassination, and passionate faith. Starting in Arabia in the year 632 and reaching its terrible breaking point fifty years later in Iraq, it still shapes modern headlines from Iran’s Islamic Revolution to the Iraq civil war.

The succession crisis set Muhammad’s son-in-law, the philosopher-warrior Ali, in opposition to the controversial Aisha, Muhammad’s favorite wife. She would defy all expectations by leading an army against Ali, urging on her warriors in the thick of battle. The ultimate breaking point came when soldiers of the first Sunni dynasty massacred seventy-two warriors led by Ali’s son, Hussein, at Karbala in Iraq, forging the Shia-Sunni split in blood. Hussein’s ordeal would quickly become the Passion story at the core of Shia Islam, and history would be transformed into sacred history.

Balancing past and present, Lesley Hazleton shows how this story is alive in Middle Eastern hearts and minds today, as though it had just happened. Even as she tells what happened in the seventh century, she never lets the reader lose sight of where those events have left us, and why they matter so much now as the struggle for dominance in the Muslim world plays out in the cities and mountains of Iraq and Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

 Islam: A Short History

Author:Karen Armstrong

No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular imagination as an extreme faith that promotes terrorism, authoritarian government, female oppression, and civil war. In a vital revision of this narrow view of Islam and a distillation of years of thinking and writing about the subject, Karen Armstrong’s short history demonstrates that the world’s fastest-growing faith is a much more complex phenomenon than its modern fundamentalist strain might suggest

Readers seeking a quick but thoughtful introduction to Islam will want to peruse Armstrong’s latest offering. In her hallmark stylish and accessible prose, the author of A History of God takes readers from the sixth-century days of the Prophet Muhammad to the present.

Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, and Artists

Author: Michael Hamilton Morgan

Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the major role played by the early Muslim world in influencing modern society, Lost History fills an important void. Written by an award-winning author and former diplomat with extensive experience in the Muslim world, it provides new insight not only into Islam’s historic achievements but also the ancient resentments that fuel today’s bitter conflicts.

Michael Hamilton Morgan reveals how early Muslim advancements in science and culture lay the cornerstones of the European Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and modern Western society. As he chronicles the Golden Ages of Islam, beginning in 570 a.d. with the birth of Muhammad, and resonating today, he introduces scholars like Ibn Al-Haytham, Ibn Sina, Al-Tusi, Al-Khwarizmi, and Omar Khayyam, towering figures who revolutionized the mathematics, astronomy, and medicine of their time and paved the way for Newton, Copernicus, and many others. And he reminds us that inspired leaders from Muhammad to Suleiman the Magnificent and beyond championed religious tolerance, encouraged intellectual inquiry, and sponsored artistic, architectural, and literary works that still dazzle us with their brilliance. Lost History finally affords pioneering leaders with the proper credit and respect they so richly deserve.

The Spirit of Islam

By Syed Ameer Ali

Contents:

• Life and Ministry of the Prophet
• Mohammed the prophet
• Hegira
• prophet at Medina
• hostility of the Koreish and the Jews
• invasion of Medina; prophets clemency
• diffusion of the faith
• year of deputations
• fulfillment of the prophet’s work
• apostolical succession
• Spirit of Islam: ideal of Islam
• religious spirit of Islam
• idea of future life in Islam
• church militant of Islam
• status of women in Islam
• bondage in Islam
• political spirit of Islam
• political divisions and schisms of Islam
• literary and scientific sprit of Islam
• rationalistic and philosophical spirit of Islam
• idealistic and mystical spirit in Islam.

The Great Arab Conquests: How The Spread Of Islam Changed The World We Live In

Author:Hugh Kennedy

Today’s Arab world was created at breathtaking speed. In just over one hundred years following the death of Mohammed in 632, Arabs had subjugated a territory with an east-west expanse greater than the Roman Empire, and they did it in about one-half the time. By the mid-eighth century, Arab armies had conquered the thousand-year-old Persian Empire, reduced the Byzantine Empire to little more than a city-state based around Constantinople, and destroyed the Visigoth kingdom of Spain. The cultural and linguistic effects of this early Islamic expansion reverberate today.

This is the first popular English-language account in many years of this astonishing remaking of the political and religious map of the world. Hugh Kennedy’s sweeping narrative reveals how the Arab armies conquered almost everything in their path, and brings to light the unique characteristics of Islamic rule. One of the few academic historians with a genuine talent for story telling, Kennedy offers a compelling mix of larger-than-life characters, fierce battles, and the great clash of civilizations and religions.

Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilization from the Past

Author: Firas Alkhateeb

Islam has been one of the most powerful religious, social, and political forces in history. Over the last 1400 years, from origins in Arabia, a succession of Muslim polities and later empires expanded to control territories and peoples that ultimately stretched from southern France, to East Africa to South East Asia.

Yet many of the contributions of Muslim thinkers, scientists, and theologians, not to mention rulers, statesmen and soldiers, have been occluded. This book rescues from oblivion and neglect some of these personalities and institutions while offering the reader a new narrative of this lost Islamic history. The Umayyads, Abbasids, and Ottomans feature in the story, as do Muslim Spain, the savannah kingdoms of West Africa and the Mughal Empire, along with the later European colonization of Muslim lands and the development of modern nation-states in the Muslim world. Throughout, the impact of Islamic belief on scientific advancement, social structures, and cultural development is given due prominence, and the text is complemented by portraits of key personalities, inventions and little known historical nuggets. The history of Islam and of the world’s Muslims brings together diverse peoples, geographies, and states, all interwoven into one narrative that begins with Muhammad and continues to this day.Recommended by MuslimMatters

The Men of Madina

This book is the translation of Volume 7 of the Kitab at-Tabaqat al-Kabir of Ibn Sa’d which deals with the Companions, Tabi’un and the subsequent generations of the people of knowledge in Basra, Baghdad, Khurasan, Syria and Egypt.

This book is of particular interest because its pages demonstrate the attitude and action of the Companions and the Tabi’un when confronted by the most dangerous of trials – fitna, or civil war. This is extremely important in the modern age, in which fitna is commonplace, for we can learn a great deal from how the early Muslims dealt with it.

The Women of Madina

An abridged translation of Volume Eight of Ibn Sa’d’s Kitab’at-Tabaqat al-Kabir which deals exclusively with the women who met the Prophet Muhammad, blessings and peace be on him and on his family and Companions, or who transmitted from him. The author is one of the greatest authorities on early Muslim biography, and his detailed work helps to make the Companions of the Prophet come alive for the reader.

You May also like to Read this: Book Reviews of Islamic Books