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Worlds of Islam
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  • Published: 21 April 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241828359
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 608
  • RRP: $50.00

Worlds of Islam

A Global History

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
21 Apr 2026
EBook
20 Jan 2026
Audiobook
20 Jan 2026
Hardback
20 Feb 2026
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An expansive history of Islam, tracing the 1400-year evolution of a diverse community of faith and its place in the modern world

From its birth in seventh-century Arabia, Islam has been a faith on the move. In Worlds of Islam, James McDougall explores its origins and transformations from Late Antiquity to the digital age.

Over the span of a thousand years, armies, missionaries, and merchants carried it to the edges of Europe, the coasts of Southeast Asia, and the remote interior of China. By the nineteenth century, Islam encompassed a world of great diversity, from Muslim-ruled empires to nations where Muslims lived out their faith among many others. In the twentieth century, while monarchs in the Gulf asserted dynastic privilege and fundamentalists in Egypt and Pakistan preached social morality, revolutionaries from Algeria to Indonesia fought for national self-determination, and activists in North America and Europe campaigned for civil liberties and social justice.

As empires fell and new superpowers rose, Muslims proved to be as adaptable and dynamic as modernity itself. Sweeping and authoritative, Worlds of Islam narrates the epic story of how Muslims emerged as a community, built empires, traversed the globe, came to number in the billions, and became modern.
  • Published: 21 April 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241828359
  • Imprint: Allen Lane
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 608
  • RRP: $50.00
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Praise for Worlds of Islam

A truly global work of history ... [Worlds of Islam] makes a case for a historicist approach to Islam as a religion [and] manages to show the scale of Islamic interactions with non-Muslims over the course of fourteen centuries without losing sight of what Islam meant to Muslims. Rather than denial or avoidance, [McDougall] reaches for the historian’s tools of contextualization and comparison ... his approach is constantly analytical, questioning what facts signify

Nile Green, Times Literary Supplement

An elegant, erudite guide ... eclectic and unpredictable ... never los[ing] sight of the bigger picture, it shows us how Islam took root, well beyond its heartlands in the Middle East in sub-Saharan Africa, central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines, China and Afro-Americans in the United States .... It is impossible to sum up the skilful manner in which the author navigates his way around 1,500 years of history across such a wide geographical expanse – the historical vignettes are extremely diverse, giving greater evidence from parts of the Islamic world the West talks less about than the Middle East

Francis Ghilès, Arab Weekly

epic, authoritative and multilayered ... McDougall firmly rejects the "Clash of Civilisations" theory adopted more than 30 years ago by US post-Cold War warriors to depict Islam as an alien, backwards monolith. Instead, he stresses the plural in Worlds of Islam’s title ... a powerful education

Andrew Lynch, Irish Times