Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past (Kindle) Updated Edition
Firas AlkhateebIslam has been one of the most powerful religious, social & political forces in history. Over the last 1400 years, from origins in Arabia, a succession of Muslim polities & later empires expanded to control territories & peoples that ultimately stretched from southern France to East Africa & South East Asia. Yet many of the contributions of Muslim thinkers, scientists and theologians, not to mention rulers, statesmen & soldiers, have been occluded. This book rescues from oblivion & neglect some of these personalities & institutions while offering the reader a new narrative of this lost Islamic history. The Umayyads, Abbasids, & Ottomans feature in the story, as do Muslim Spain, the savannah kingdoms of West Africa & the Mughal Empire.
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I was born & brought up in a conservative Muslim society. After graduating in India, I moved to the West for furthering my education. Despite my conservative Muslim background, I grew up with a liberal outlook…
I had been told all my life that Prophet Muhammad was the ideal human being: most merciful & just; that Islam is the most peaceful religion; & I believed it. But the Quran reads like a manifesto of open-ended war against non-Muslims for converting them or for subjugating them into horribly degraded dhimmi subjects.
My curiosity grew. Over the past years, I have done extensive research on Islamic theology as well as on Islamic history: from Prophet Muhammad to modern times. It has been a harrowing tale of forced conversion, brutal imperialism & devastating slavery. It’s a saga of great human tragedy—all in the name of Islamic holy war or Jihad, the foundational creed of Islam. This tragic tale is the subject of this book. — Preface by author Firas Alkhateeb