A comprehensive introduction to Islam. Annemarie Schimmel is a Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages at Harvard University.

An overview of Islam chronicling the religion's impact historically and in the modern world and discussing its origins, basic beliefs, structure, places of worship, and rites of passage.

Fazlur Rahman's Islam is aptly titled, in that this slim volume constitutes an incisive and surprisingly comprehensive history and analysis of Islam-its history, its conflicts, its legacy-and its prospects. From Mohammed to the late twentieth century, Rahman traces the development of Islam as a religion and, more importantly, as an intellectual tradition, offering both an easily understood introduction to the faith and an impassioned argument for...

First published in 1957, Destination Mecca was both an ambitious travel book and a work of ethnographic and cultural research. Shah documents a wide range of fascinating journeys, from his quest for the gold mines of King Solomon on Sudan's Red Sea Coast, to encounters in desert caravanserais and sojourns with Mediterranean contraband smugglers, to his time as a personal guest of the elderly King Ibn Saud. As readable now as it was when first published,...

F. E. Peters is Professor of History, Religion, and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University and past chair of those departments. His books include The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and the two-volume The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition (all Princeton). The Quran is a sacred book with profound, and familiar, Old and New Testament resonances. And the message it promulgated, Islam,...