Sword And Scimitar Fourteen Centuries Of War Between Islam And The West Raymond Ibrahim by Raymond Ibrahim 9780306825552, 9780306825569, 0306825554, 0306825562 instant download after payment.

RAYMOND IBRAHIM’S SWORD AND SCIMITAR IS A MUCH-NEEDED HISTORY of landmark battles between Islam and the West. Ibrahim offers eight representative engagements across time and space from France to the Middle East, and over a millennium from 636 to 1683. The study is first and foremost riveting military history. It offers blow-by-blow concise accounts of the eight battles, and interprets them in the context of the times—or rather, takes seriously what contemporary leaders claimed were their intentions and how they worked out their strategies. Such a first-hand approach requires extensive work in untranslated Arabic and occasional Greek sources, as well as a general background in comparative military history. For example, in his discussion of the

pivotal battle of Yarmuk (near the current Syrian and Jordanian border), Ibrahim—who previously worked with various languages and manuscripts at the African and Middle Eastern division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.—marshals together a diverse body of sources to offer a more accurate reconstruction of the battle that makes sense of how the numerically superior Byzantines suffered such an inexplicable and catastrophic loss.

Beyond its value as a meticulously researched chronicle of the major (and many minor) engagements between Islam and the West, the book advances larger cultural and religious arguments. (From the Foreword)