Jihad: A Short History

Never before has such a serious subject been written about with such elegance, wit and humour. Jihad: A Short History is entertaining popular history in strict chronological order enlivened throughout with wordplay, comedy, graphic detail and vivid anecdotes on leading figures. It describes Islam's 1,000-year assault on the rest of humanity, leading up to the concluding chapter where military jihad has been abandoned in favour of hijra, migration. It synthesises in a single readable comprehensive volume the records of the contemporary chroniclers and the works of later historians, which mostly treat some tiny aspect of this enormous subject.