The Islamic World in Ascendancy: From the Arab Conquests to the Siege of Vienna

(Hardback)

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This volume examines the thousand year ascendancy of political Islam from the Arab conquests to the zenith of Ottoman expansion under Suleiman the Magnificent. It argues that it was with the emergence of Islam that the combination of geopolitics and religion reached its most volatile form and provided the ideological context for war and peace in the Middle East for more than a millennium. The conflation of geopolitics and religion in Islam is predicated on the concept of jihad (struggle), which may be understood as a crescentade, in the same sense as the later Christian crusade, which seeks to achieve a religious goal, the conversion of the world to Islam, by militant means. This equates to a concept of perpetual war with the non-Muslim world, a concept that underlays Muslim geopolitical thinking throughout the thousand-year period covered in this book. However, as Sicker demonstrates, the concept often bore little relation to the political realities of the region that as often as not saw Muslims and non-Muslims aligned against and at war with other Muslims. The story of the emergence and phenomenal ascendancy of the Islamic world from a relatively small tribe in sparsely populated Arabia is one that taxes the imagination, but it becomes more comprehensible when viewed through a geopolitical prism. Religion was repeatedly and often shamelessly harnesssed to geopolitical purpose by both Muslims and Christians, albeit with arguably greater Muslim success. Islamic ascendancy began as an Arab project, initially focused on the Arabian peninsula, but was soon transformed into an imperialist movement with expansive ambitions. As it grew, it quickly registered highly impressive gains, but soon lost much of its Arab content. It ended a millennium later as a Turkish - more specifically, an Ottoman - project with many intermediate transformations. The reverberations of the thousand-year history of that ascendancy are still felt today in many parts of the greater Middle East.

Reviews

By reading this book the reader gets exposed to a wide range of fascinating issues, indeed.-American Review of China Studies
Sicker's narrative is a usable sythesis of this material and as such can be recommended to nonspecialists as a brief introduction to the political history of the premodern Middle East.-The Historian
"By reading this book the reader gets exposed to a wide range of fascinating issues, indeed."-American Review of China Studies
"Sicker's narrative is a usable sythesis of this material and as such can be recommended to nonspecialists as a brief introduction to the political history of the premodern Middle East."-The Historian

Author Bio

MARTIN SICKER is a private consultant and lecturer who has served as a senior executive in the U.S. government and has taught political science at American University and George Washington University. Dr. Sicker has written extensively in the fields of political science and international affairs, with a special focus on the Middle East. He is the author of twelve previous books, including a companion volume in his multi-volume history of the Middle East, The Pre-Islamic Middle East (Praeger, 2000).