HIS 256 The Islamic World to 1683

During the heyday of camel caravan traffic--from the eighth century CE arrival of Islam in North Africa to the early twentieth-century building of European colonial railroads that linked the Sudan with the Atlantic--the Sahara was one of the world's great commercial highways, bringing gold,slaves, and other commodities northward and sending both manufactured goods and Mediterranean culture southward into the Sudan. Historian Ralph A. Austen here tells the remarkable story of an African world that grew out of more than one thousand years of trans-Saharan trading.

Far more than a history of the Silk Roads, this book is truly a revelatory new history of the world, promising to destabilize notions of where we come from and where we are headed next. From the Middle East and its political instability to China and its economic rise, the vast region stretching eastward from the Balkans across the steppe and South Asia has been thrust into the global spotlight in recent years. Frankopan teaches us that to understand what is at stake for the cities and nations built on these intricate trade routes, we must first understand their astounding pasts.

This book traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages converted to Judaism. Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Ghengis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the cradle of Western Jewry.

Contents: Islam in the northern hinterland and its influence on the development of the Sierra Leone colony -- Trade and Islam in Sierra Leone, 18th-20th centuries -- Alhaji Momodu Allie: Muslim Fula entrepreneur in colonial Sierra Leone -- Religion, gender, and education in Northern Sierra Leone, 1896-1992 -- Muslim Fula merchants and the motor transport business in Freetown, 1961-1978 -- Islamic organization and influence in Sierra Leone, 1930-1990 -- Popular Islam and political expression in Sierra Leone -- The effects of Arab Foreign Aid on Sierra Leone's economic growth: a quantitative analysis

Maurice Lombard portrays the Islamic world as the center of civilization at a time when the West was primitive and backward. Its reach extended from Cordoba to Samarkand, and it maintained and developed the tradition of wealth, cultural and artistic achievement, and thriving urban life which it had absorbed from its predecessors, the civilizations of Greece, Egypt, and Persia and the ancient cities of the Middle East. It is this Islamic economy and civilization which the author portrays at its height and brilliantly sets into its context of satellite, in part semi-civilized, peripheral worlds.