BARNABY ROGERSON

Timely and penetrative history of the battle for the Mediterranean in the 15th and 16th centuries by the forces of Islam and Christendom. Una novela de gran vigencia y calado que narra la historia del Mediterraneo en los siglos XV y XVI, con el Islam y el Cristianismo como protagonistas.

A masterly engagement with the most delicate and important of subjects filled with gentle empathy learning and rare balance Rory Stewart Rogerson is an original eloquent and always fascinating William DalrympleRecommended on The Rest is Politics and EmpireAt the heart of the Middle East with its regional conflicts and proxy wars is a 1400 year old schism between Sunni and Shia To understand this divide and its modern resonances we need to revisit its origins which go back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 the accidental coup that set aside the claims of his son Ali and the slaughter of Ali s own son Husayn at Kerbala These events known to every Muslim have created a slender faultline in the Middle East The House Divided follows these narratives from the first Sunni and Shia caliphates through the medieval caliphates and empires of the Arabs Persians and Ottomans to the contemporary Middle East It shows how a complex range of identities and rivalries religious ethnic and national have shaped the region jolted by the seismic shift of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 Rogerson s original approach takes the modern chessboard of nation states and looks at each through its particular history of empires and occupiers minorities and re

The Prophet Muhammad is a hero for all mankind. In his lifetime he established a new religion, Islam; a new state, the first united Arabia; and a new literary language, the classical Arabic of the Qur''an, for the Qur''an is believed to be the word of God revealed to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel. A generation after his death he would be acknowledged as the founder of a world empire and a new civilisation. Any one of these achievements would have been more than enough to permanently establish his genius. To our early twenty-first century minds, what is all the more astonishing is that he also managed to stay true to himself and retained to his last days the humility, courtesy and humanity that he had learned as an orphan shepherd boy in central Arabia. If one looks for a parallel example from Christendom, you would have to combine the Emperor Constantine with St Francis and St Paul, an awesome prospect. Barnaby Rogerson''s elegant biography not only looks directly at the life of the Prophet Muhammad, but beautifully evokes for western readers the Arabian world into which he was born in 570 AD.