Witnesses to a World Crisis ─ Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century

James Howard-Johnston provides a sweeping and highly readable account of probably the most dramatic single episode in history, the human equivalent of the Big Bang---the emergence of a new religion (Islam), the destruction of two established great powers (Roman and Iranian), and the creation of a new world empire by the Arabs, all in the space of not much more than a generation (610-52 AD). Warfare looms large, especially where operations can be followed in some detail, as in Iraq 636-40, in Egypt 641-2, and in the long-drawn-out battle for the Mediterranean (649-98). Howard-Johnston finds the reasons for Muslim success not so much in circumstances in the wider world as in the fusing together of a religious force of unprecedented dynamism with the organizational capability and statecraft of a developed city-state. Muhammad's controversial decision to replace the Holy City, Jerusalem, with the pagan cult centre of Mecca as the focus of Muslim worship, and to incorporate the annual pagan pilgrimage with all its traditional rites into the new religion, is identified as a key moment in world history, in that it released the new faith from confinement in Medina and allowed it to spread within Arabia and beyond.

As the first history of the formative phase of Islam to be grounded in the important non-Islamic as well as Islamic sources, Witnesses to a World Crisis is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand Islam as a religion and political force, the modern Middle East, and the jihadist impulse, which is as evident today as it was in the seventh century.

James Howard-Johnston is Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and was University Lecturer in Byzantine Studies from 1971 to 2009.