Reviews for Islam: A Short History (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

The average rating for Islam: A Short History (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-05-04 00:00:00 randall skiles Armstrong tends to view all of history through the prism of the specific conflicts of our day -- to be accurate: from a vantage point situated near the Arab-Israeli Conflict. That is helpful, but also distorting, occasionally. Not a good book to learn about Islamic history, but useful as a corrective read for those already familiar. It gets quite tiring to be repeatedly referred back, even if with every justification, to the crusades and to the colonial harassments when referring to the west, and to the cultural superiority and religious universalism of Islam...

Review # 2 was written on 2009-03-26 00:00:00 B B Honestly, why do I keep picking up Karen Armstrong's books? It's not that she is a bad writer, just an exceptionally boring one. When I listen to 'Islam: A Short History' I feel like I'm being hit by a verbal machine gun fire of names, dates and places. Unfortunately few of these fact 'bullets' remain in my brain. She starts off innocently enough, giving an account Muhammad's life and then ....'BANG, BANG BANG!' she hits you with a blitzkrieg of boring, impersonal facts. About three quarters of the way through the book Armstrong picks you up, dusts you off, and tries to console you with a bit of modern history on Islamic fundamentalism. But it's too late. I'm already suffering from academic PTSD. Yet I sense that I'll still read her next book, 'A Short History of Myth'...