Tolan is professor emeritus of history at Nantes University (France). This book is an English version of the French version (Nouvelle histoire de l'islam) published in 2022; though, as Tolan notes in his acknowledgements, it is no mere translation of that work. This book is split into three parts: “Foundations,” “Expansion,” and “Modernities.” The introduction takes on readers' potential concerns about Tolan's authority as an author of a book on Islamic history, what it means to be a Muslim, and what the image on the cover entails for the history of Islam. Under Part One, “Foundations,” Chapter One covers the creation of the Quran and Islam through the Prophet Muhammad. Chapter Two documents the Umayyad dynasty and the “clear emergence of Islam as a religion and a civilization.” Chapter Three details the Abbasid revolution in the 740s and 750s and the making of Baghdad the Abbasid capital of the Caliphate. Tolan also first discusses Sufism in this chapter. Chapter Four chronicles the three caliphates of the Islamic world—the Abbasids, the Fatimids, and the Caliphate of Cordoba—around the year 1000. Under Part Two, “Expansion,” Chapter Five covers the various invasions of the caliphates from the Turks, the Franks (western Europeans), and the Mongols from the 1000s to the 1200s. Many of these invaders, except the Franks, eventually converted to Islam. Chapter Six focuses on the life of Ibn Battuta, a traveler in the fourteenth century who had journeyed across the Islamic world and well beyond, reaching Mali, Kenya, Malaysia, and China. Chapter Seven documents various Muslim empires from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, including those in Western Africa, the Mediterranean, modern-day Iran, and South and Southeast Asia. Under Part Three, “Modernities,” Chapter Eight covers European colonization of predominantly Muslim areas like South Asia (by the British and Dutch), Algeria and Egypt (by the French and British), Iran (by the Russians and British), and Nigeria (by the British). Chapter Nine details the emergence of so-called “political Islam” through twentieth-century decolonization and state-building efforts, primarily in places formerly colonized by the British and French. Chapter Ten details the various experiences of being a Muslim in the twenty-first century, including the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks and the various academic and political debates about “modernizing” Islam. This brilliant work would be most useful for introductory undergraduate courses on Islam and Islamic history, though many nonspecialists (like myself) can benefit from reading this new view of Islamic history.
Jacqueline Parker (Mon,) studied this question.