A HISTORY OF THE MUSLIM WORLD

An esteemed academic presents a timely, wide-ranging examination of the Muslim world.

Weighing in at nearly 1,000 pages, this book is a daunting undertaking. Cook, a Princeton professor of Near Eastern studies who has penned several well-regarded works, aims to explore what he calls “one of the great Black Swan Events of history.” The author explores the life of Muhammad and the schisms and conflicts of Islam’s early period, but he is particularly interested in how Islam interacted with nascent concepts of the state and how the spread of the faith transmitted important political ideas. Cook makes use of a good deal of primary source material, underlining how Islam has never been a monolith but more of a set of competing ideas about how to translate Koranic doctrine into practice. In the second section, the author follows the global spread of Islam up to around 1800. This expansion moved the intellectual weight of Islam away from the Arab countries and toward the Turkic, Persian, and Egyptian cultures. The Arab countries, as keepers of the holy places, maintained a crucial influence, but numerous tensions remain. A lengthy epilogue summarizes the progress of Islam from the beginning of the 19th century to the present, as Cook analyzes the friction between the fundamental conservatism of Islam and the desire for “modernity” and economic development. The author is well aware that not everyone will want to tackle such a large, dense book, so he provides an introductory summary of each chapter, helping readers to choose those areas of most interest to them. “Broadly speaking,” he writes, “I give systematic attention to two things: the making and unmaking of states, and really major cultural shifts that affect large populations.” However approached, this is an interesting text.

Cook’s study sheds crucial light on Islamic development and influence across borders and centuries.