Islam in World History

Islam in World History looks at how the Islamic faith tradition has connected people from Sub-Saharan Africa to Eastern Europe, to Central Asia, China and South East Asia, since it's fomration in the 7th century, affecting their private, social, cultural and economic lives in a multitude of ways. In doing so Cemil Aydin looks not only at the impact of Islam as a religion but at the role of Muslims in world history across the globe.

In five thematic chapters Cemil Aydin breaks with the traditional decline paradigm, which assumes a golden age of classical Islam between the 9th and 12th centuries, and then a decline of Islamic civilization after the 13th century. Instead he argues that there cannot be a simplistic rise and decline narrative and so each chapter has its own periodization. He looks firstly at the formation of Islam from the 7th century onwards, and its relationship in this to other religions such as Christianity and Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Then further chapters go on to discuss education and knowledge production, achievements in in science and technology, travel, trade and global connections, political culture, and finally the development of Islamic Modernism in the context of Muslim intellectuals' engagements with dominant Western paradigms of race, civilization, history and progress from the mid 19th century.

Islam in World History presents Islamic history not simply as the history of the Islamic religion, but also the development of a social structure, polity, and a culture with religious and non-religious dimensions. It captures both the diverse political, social, and cultural contexts in which Islamic history unfolded and the continuities that traversed the Islamic world. Incorporating and engaging with the most up to date scholarship and exploring overarching themes in a broad, comparative context, Cemil Aydin demonstrates the nexus between Islamic and World History.