The Arabs in History [antikvár]

Preface to the New EditionThis book was written in 1947 and first published in 1950. Thereafter, it went through five editions and many reprints, both in Britain and in the United States. Translations were published in eleven languages, four of themArabic, Turkish, Malay, and Indonesianin Muslim countries. The Arabic version was made by two distinguished Arab historians and was praised by such eminent Arab scholars as Shafiq Ghorbal in Egypt. This did not save it from being banned in Pakistan, because of a disrespectful reference to the Prophet which I had quoted from Dante as an example of medieval European prejudice and bigotry. More recently, it has been attacked, principally by the exponents of the new school of epi-stemology.Despite such strictures, the book was widely used and frequently reprinted in many countries, presumably because of the shortage of alternative works treating Arab history with the same brevity and at the same level of analysis and generalization. It has, however, in several respects become out of date, and when I was asked to prepare yet another new edition, it seemed to me that a more thorough overhaul was necessary. My original intention was to confine this overhaul in the main to the final chapter dealing with more recent events, where extensive revision and additions were obviously required. But in rereading the text which I wrote almost forty-five years earlier, I soon realized that many more changes would be needed before I could publish this as a revised and updated edition.These changes are of several kinds. Some are primarily verbal, to take account of changes of usage that have occurred during the past half century. For example, the