Lost Islamic History - Book Review

Centuries of Muslim past narrated within the pages of a concise book

Image by the author

If one made a Prezi presentation, the kind that gives a spatial overview of the presentation and then uses animation to zoom into a particular part, of the timeline of major eras in the history of Muslim civilization you would get something that reads like the book the Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past by Firas Alkhateeb. The book leads the reader through the history of Islam beginning from its origins up to the present day, through a brief and easy-to-read text.

The author raises questions that a typical person who practices a religion might find himself thinking about in the present day.

Alkhateeb begins with a geopolitical description of Arabia before the prophethood of Prophet Muhammad in 610 CE, which helps explain why the message of Islam was able to gain a foothold at a time when the Roman and Persian Empires were dominating the world. The major events in the life of Prophet Muhammad which influenced the spread of his message are narrated. Including the hostilities and persecution that early Muslims had to face, the migration to Medina where the first Muslim state was set up, and the subsequent wars which eventually led to the spread of Islam in Arabia.

The following chapters outline the time of the first four caliphs after the passing of Prophet Muhammad and the rise of Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. What follows next is the story of the glorious period of the Muslims’ past, an era of intellectual progress with great advances in science, arts, medicine, theology, and Islamic jurisprudence at a time when the rest of the world was still in the dark.

“Ibn al-Haytham’s scientific achievements can fill volumes on their own, and indeed they did. He reportedly wrote over 200 books, but no more than a few dozen survive today.”

In the story of Islam, next, the reader can spot a pattern of rising and falling of different empires as we learn about the loss inflicted by the Crusaders and the Mongols, the rise of Al-Andalus in present-day Spain their fall at the hands of the Catholics from the North and the rise…