His campaigns, military thought, and insurgent strategy There are many biographies of the Prophet, and they tend to fall into three categories: pious works that emphasize the virtues of the early Islamic community, general works for non-Muslim or non-specialist readers, and source-critical works that grapple with historiographical problems inherent in early Islamic history. In The Generalship of Muhammad, Russ Rodgers charts a new path by merging original sources with the latest in military theory to examine Muhammad's military strengths and weaknesses. Incorporating military, political, and economic analyses, Rodgers focuses on Muhammad’s use of insurgency warfare in seventh-century Arabia to gain control of key cities such as Medina. Seeking to understand the operational aspects of these world-changing battles, he provides battlefield maps and explores the supply and logistic problems that would have plagued any military leader at the time. Rodgers explains how Muhammad organized his forces and gradually built his movement against sporadic resistance from his foes. He draws from the hadith literature to shed new light on the nature of the campaigns. He examines the Prophet's intelligence network and the employment of what would today be called special operations forces. And he considers the possibility that Muhammad received outside support to build and maintain his movement as a means to interdict trade routes between the Byzantine Empire and the Sasanid Persians.

That Muhammad succeeded as a prophet is undeniable; a prominent military historian now suggests that he might not have done so had he not also been a great soldier. Best known as the founder of a major religion, Muhammad was also Islam’s first great general. While there have been numerous accounts of Muhammad the Prophet, this is the first military biography of the man. In Muhammad: Islam’s First Great General, Richard A. Gabriel shows us a warrior never before seen in antiquity—a leader of an all-new religious movement who in a single decade fought eight major battles, led eighteen raids, and planned thirty-eight other military operations. Gabriel’s study portrays Muhammad as a revolutionary who introduced military innovations that transformed armies and warfare throughout the Arab world. Gabriel analyzes the environment in which Muhammad lived and the religion he inspired as they relate to his military achievements. Gabriel explains how Muhammad changed the social composition of Arab armies by replacing traditional ways of fighting with a new command structure. Muhammad’s transformation of Arab warfare enabled his successors to establish the core of the Islamic empire—an accomplishment that, Gabriel argues, would have been militarily impossible without Muhammad’s innovations. Richard A. Gabriel challenges existing scholarship on Muhammad’s place in history and offers a viewpoint not previously attempted.

Recent outbursts sparked by a viral video and controversial cartoons powerfully illustrate the passions and sensitivities that continue to surround the depiction of the seventh-century founder of Islam. The Lives of Muhammad delves into the many ways the Prophet’s life story has been told from the earliest days of Islam to the present, by both Muslims and non-Muslims. Emphasizing the major transformations since the nineteenth century, Kecia Ali shows that far from being mutually opposed, these various perspectives have become increasingly interdependent. Since the nineteenth century, two separate streams of writing, one hagiographic and the other polemical, have merged into a single, contentious story about the life of Muhammad. Protestant missionaries, European Orientalists, Indian and Egyptian modernists, and American voices across the spectrum, including preachers, scholars, Islamophobes, journalists, academics, and new-age gurus, debated Muhammad’s character and the facts of his life. In the process, texts written symbolically came to be read literally. Muhammad’s accomplishments as a religious and political leader, his military encounters with Meccans and Medinan Jews, and—a subject of perennial interest—his relationships with women, including his young wife Aisha, are among the key subjects writers engaged, repurposing early materials for new circumstances. Many of the ideas about Muhammad that Muslims embrace today—Muhammad the social reformer, Muhammad the consummate leader, Muhammad the ideal husband—arose in tandem and in tension with Western depictions. These were in turn shaped by new ideas about religion, sexuality, and human accomplishments.

"Spanning virtually the entire twentieth century and as timely as the outbreak of the 2011 ‘January Revolution,’ this work has much to say about where Egypt has been, who Egyptians are and, ultimately, where they may take their country." --Joel Gordon, author of Nasser: Hero of the Arab Nation "A truly extraordinary accomplishment that is thought provoking, creative, and inspiring. Belli is the first in Middle Eastern studies to examine the cultural history of twentieth-century Egypt through the interactions between education and remembrance. Her revised theoretical approach is applicable not only to Middle Eastern societies and cultures, but to others worldwide." --Israel Gershoni, Tel Aviv University "An interesting history of memory that is diverse, dynamic, and disparate. Makes an outstanding contribution to our understandings of Egyptian national identity and memory." --Nancy L. Stockdale, University of North Texas Examining history not as it was recorded, but as it is remembered, An Incurable Past contextualizes the classist and deeply disappointing post-Nasserist period that has inspired today’s Egyptian revolutionaries. Public performances, songs, stories, oral histories, and everyday speech reveal not just the history of mid-twentieth-century Egypt, but also the ways in which ordinary people experience and remember the past. Constructing a ground-breaking theoretical framework, Mériam Belli demonstrates the fragility of the "collectivity" and the urgent need to replace the current method for studying collective memory with a new approach she defines as "historical utterances." Contextual and relational, these links between intimate and public historical narratives are an integral part of a society’s dialogue about its past, present, and future. Three major vernacular expressions constitute the historical utterances that illuminate the Nasserite experience and its present. The first is universal schooling and education. The second is anti-colonial struggle, as exemplified by Port Said’s effigy burning festival. The third is the public’s responses to the "miraculous millenarian" apparition of the Virgin Mary. Using an extensive array of sources, ranging from official archives and press reportage to fiction, public rituals, and oral interviews, Belli’s findings penetrate issues of class, religion, and social and political activism. She shows that personal testimonies and public representations allow us a deep understanding of Egypt’s construction of the modern in its many sociocultural layers. Mériam N. Belli is associate professor of history at the University of Iowa.

Given the Prophet Muhammad’s immense impact on history, surprisingly few books specifically analyze his understanding and employment of warfare as an economically, politically and socially transformational process, even though he was continuously at war for a decade and initiated around eighty armed missions, twenty-seven of which he led himself. Most Islamic biographies deal with this issue by using an understandable but insufficient logic: that because Muhammad, as the Messenger of Allah, was the ideal and paradigmatic human, he must have been an ideal and paradigmatic military commander. His successes flowed from his prophetic status and his moral perfection. Following this logic and wanting Muhammad’s behavior to conform to very modern ethical concepts and widespread (but not necessarily accurate) beliefs about the nature and conduct of war, the writers have inadvertently created a narrative which, in significant ways, departs from the account clearly and consistently revealed in the earliest extant Arabic sources. The writers’ narrative also removes the Prophet from his historical and cultural context and the realities of the harsh and competitive tribal society in which he lived. Professor Joel Hayward sees this as an unhelpful explanatory tendency and believes that the modern depiction of the Prophet’s relationship with warfare -- which presents him as being rather antipathetic to war, indeed as virtually a pacifist who only fought reluctantly in self-defense -- cannot actually be sustained by an even-handed analysis of the early Islamic sources. A committed Muslim himself, Hayward agrees that Muhammad was a moral and decent man who saw peace as a highly desirable state in which humans should live and as a goal worth pursuing. Yet Hayward has approached the Prophet’s understanding and employment of warfare from a different vantage point. He has painstakingly scrutinized the earliest Arabic sources impartially according to the strict standards of historical inquiry in order to ascertain whether Muhammad’s actions, habits and methods can -- when understood within their original seventh-century stateless Arabian context -- provide any substantial and meaningful insights into the way that he understood and undertook warfare. Hayward concludes that Muhammad was an astute, situationally aware and self-reflective man who created and communicated a believable strategic vision of a necessary and desirable future. That vision persuaded increasing numbers of people to follow him and risk everything willingly in the struggle to create the optimal conditions for their survival, security, and prosperity. In a competitive and conflictual environment with ubiquitous threats, warfare was necessary to make real the bold new world that he foresaw. Through original, meticulously researched and rigorous analysis, Hayward covers all the raids and campaigns and demonstrates that Muhammad correctly understood the necessity and utility of force and duly developed into an intuitive, effective and victorious military practitioner who developed and enforced a strict moral code so as to attain his goals whilst safeguarding the innocent. This engaging, accessible yet deeply scholarly book makes a major contribution to strategic and military analysis and to the Prophet’s biography.

In THE LlFE OF MUHAMMAD, Haykal achieves two objectives admirably: first, a biography which reveals the career of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in the full light of historic reality; second, bringing out the essence of Islam, as exemplified in the life of the greatest Muslim. It includes complete coverage of the Prophet's life, a detailed analysis of pre-Islamic Arabia, the situational context of revelation, and a comparative study of the basics of lslamic and western civilizations. It is based upon a scholarly examination of all of the extant Sirah and Hadith literature (the Prophet's life, his sayings and narrations of his teachings by his contemporaries) with the eye of an objective, scientific and critical scholar who is well-versed in modern historical critical methodology. THE LlFE OF MUHAMMAD is an essential book for all English-speaking Muslims, as well as non-Muslims. This English version has been approved by the Supreme Council for lslamic Affairs, Cairo.

"A first-class job of primary archival and media research on the origins of American involvement in Palestine, an area of major interest and importance to Zionists, Palestinians, and the United States."--Michael W. Suleiman, Kansas State University "Davidson develops an important thesis concerning the impact of perceptions on foreign policy, with reference to U.S. policy toward Palestine. . . . [His] emphasis on the pre-state period makes his study unique."--Ann M. Lesch, Villanova University In a revisionist look at the history of U.S. relations with Palestine, Lawrence Davidson offers a critical study of the evolution of American popular and governmental perceptions of Zionism and Palestine, from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the founding of Israel in 1948. Zionism, which sought to transform Palestine into a Jewish state, emphasized the biblical and religious connections of the West to Palestine. Davidson argues that this orientation predisposed the American people to see Zionism as a form of "altruistic" imperialism that would bring civilization to a backward part of the world. However, American Zionists met resistance from the State Department, particularly the Division of Near Eastern Affairs, whose neutral stance until 1945 was shaped by a fear of foreign entanglements. Exploring rising tensions on both sides, Davidson describes how the American Zionists overcame this resistance and outmaneuvered the State Department by using lobbying techniques and appeals to popular sentiment. Showing how a powerful and determined interest group turned the U.S. political system to its advantage and shaped foreign policy, America's Palestine is an important study of one of the 20th century's most controversial international stories. Lawrence Davidson, professor of history at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, is the author of Islamic Fundamentalism and of numerous articles on U.S. attitudes toward and relations with the Middle East.

"This is the outstanding book on Saudi Arabia for readers desiring a comprehensive view of the subject embracing both background and contemporary foreign policy issues."--David L. Mack, chairman, Department of National Security Policy, National War College "The first general survey of Saudi Arabia, to my knowledge, that combines scholarly analysis with breadth of scope, as well as a detailed and nuanced understanding of the country."--Bernard Reich, George Washington University David Long's portrait of Saudi Arabia depicts the kingdom as one of the least understood countries in the world. Encompassing all facets of Saudi life--the land and people, their religion and culture, the country's history, politics, economics, and foreign policy--the book presents scholarship in a highly readable narrative. Drawing upon extensive firsthand experience, Long depicts the often contradictory impulses of a country committed both to modernization and to the values of a traditional society. Alongside his discussion of oil and the Saudi economy, for example, is a chapter on the annual Hajj, or pilgrimage, to Makkah, a subject about which little has been written in English but one that is far more important to the millions of Muslims worldwide than the kingdom's oil wealth. At every turn Long looks at issues from a Saudi point of view as he explores the kingdom's successes, failures, and, most of all, its remarkable resiliency in response to the pressures of social change. David E. Long, a retired Foreign Service officer, has been a visiting professor at several American universities and is currently an international consultant on the Middle East and international terrorism. His publications include The Anatomy of Terrorism (1990) and The United States and Saudi Arabia (1985).

The third book in Professor Christian Potholm’s war trilogy (which includes Winning at War and War Wisdom), Understanding War provides a most workable bibliography dealing with the vast literature on war and warfare. As such, it provides insights into over 3000 works on this overwhelmingly extensive material. Understanding War is thus the most comprehensive annotated bibliography available today. Moreover, by dividing war material into eighteen overarching themes of analysis and fifty seminal topics, and focusing on these, Understanding War enables the reader to access and understand the broadest possible array of materials across both time and space, beginning with the earliest forms of warfare and concluding with the contemporary situation. Stimulating and thought-provoking, this volume is essential for an understanding of the breadth and depth of the vast scholarship dealing with war and warfare through human history and across cultures.

Ascending from obscurity and without dynastic credentials, Nadir Shah tried and failed to establish his right to rule the people of Iran from the 1720s until 1747. This biography of Nadir tells how Nadir Shah's novel strategies influenced successive rulers of Iran in their own defense of power.