Search results for ""author justin marozzi""

For much of its extraordinary life, Baghdad, known for centuries as the "City of Peace," enjoyed both cultural and commercial preeminence. For five centuries it was the seat of the Abbasid Empire, a marvel of glittering palaces, exquisite parks, magnificent mosques, and Islamic colleges. It was a city boasting the most accomplished astronomers, mathematicians, doctors, musicians, and poets-it was here, in the time of the caliphs, that the great Arabic classic One Thousand and One Nights was set. With its teeming markets watered by the Tigris, Baghdad was a thriving trading emporium, attracting merchants from Central Asia to the Atlantic; its economy was the envy of West and East alike. Yet Baghdad's inhabitants have also seen many terrible hardships, from epidemics and famines to invasions and devastating floods. And it has also been one of the most violent cities on earth. When U.S. troops entered in 2003, they became the latest participants in a turbulent history stretching back to the city's founding in 762. Over most of its thirteen-century history, Baghdad has endured the rule of brutal strongmen, from capricious caliphs to Saddam Hussein; and it has suffered violent occupations at the hands of its conquerors, from the Mongol Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, to Tamerlane, known as the "Sword Arm of Israel." Here, in this vivid new history-the first published in English in nearly a century-Justin Marozzi brings to life the whole splendorous and tumultuous story of what was once the greatest capital on earth.

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The story of the seventh- and eighth-century Muslim conquests, when armies inspired by the new religion of Islam burst out of Arabia to build the Islamic Empire. 'This book delivers drama through sublime writing, but mainly through marvellous images... As sharp as the Arabian desert in the midday sun' Gerard DeGroot, The Times, Books of the Year 'An excellent prelude to Marozzi's previous books' Spectator 'Thoroughly good fun... The narration moves swiftly but gracefully from episode to episode' Sunday Times By the time of his death in 632, the Prophet Mohammed had united the feuding tribes of Arabia at the point of his sword. In the decades that followed, armies inspired by the new religion of Islam burst out of Arabia to subjugate the Levant, southwest and Central Asia, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. The Arab Conquests lasted until 750, by which time several generations of marauding Muslim armies had carved out an Islamic empire, soon to be centred on Baghdad, which in size and population rivalled that of Rome at its zenith, extending from the shores of the Atlantic in the west to the borders of China in the east. In the process they had completely crushed one great empire (the old empire of Byzantium), and hollowed out another (that of the Iranian Sasanids). These conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries represent one of the greatest feats of arms in history. Justin Marozzi charts their lightning progress across the Middle East and vast tracts of Asia and explains how an unknown and radically militant faith swept out of the Arabian desert to change the world for ever.

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In the Western mind, Afghanistan has come to mean many things in recent decades, most of them bad. Partly thanks to the relentless media coverage of the “War on Terror”, it has become synonymous above all with war and terrorism – from the Taliban to Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State – crushing levels of poverty and immiseration. In ways which would have been familiar to both Herodotus in the fourth century BC and Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth AD, it has also come to represent the latest testing ground for imperial hubris and overexpansion, another tomb in the “graveyard of empires”. This is an extraordinarily reductive and one-dimensional portrait of a nation. Afghanistan is, and always has been, vastly more interesting than that. Its long and tumultuous history at the centre of the world, at the heart of cultural exchanges between East and West, encompasses high culture, low politics, domestic dynasties, international adventures, Great Power rivalry and a completely compelling vein of skulduggery. This anthology will celebrate this rich, engrossing heritage with a captivating blend of history and geography, religion and culture, politics and poetry, drama and memoir, home-grown fiction and the self-serving literature of invaders. It will celebrate Afghan voices as much as those of foreigners who, for better or worse, have been bewitched by this staggeringly beautiful mountain kingdom.

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Herodotus is known as the Father of History, but he was much more than that. He was also the world's first travel writer, a pioneering geographer, anthropologist, explorer, moralist, tireless investigative reporter and enlightened multiculturalist before the word existed. He was at once learned professor and tabloid journalist, with an unfailing eye for fabulous material to inform and amuse, to titillate, horrify and entertain. In his masterpiece the Histories, tall stories of dog-headed men, gold-digging ants and flying snakes jostle for space within a mesmerising narrative of the Persian Wars, from which Greece emerged triumphant in 5BC to give birth to Western civilisation.Using the effervescent and profoundly modern Herodotus as his guiding light, Justin Marozzi takes the reader back to his world with eclectic travels to Greece, Turkey, Egypt and war-torn Iraq.

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'Outstanding, illuminating, compelling ... a riveting read' Peter Frankopan, Sunday Times Islamic civilization was once the envy of the world. From a succession of glittering, cosmopolitan capitals, Islamic empires lorded it over the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and swathes of the Indian subcontinent. For centuries the caliphate was both ascendant on the battlefield and triumphant in the battle of ideas, its cities unrivalled powerhouses of artistic grandeur, commercial power, spiritual sanctity and forward-looking thinking.Islamic Empires is a history of this rich and diverse civilization told through its greatest cities over fifteen centuries, from the beginnings of Islam in Mecca in the seventh century to the astonishing rise of Doha in the twenty-first.It dwells on the most remarkable dynasties ever to lead the Muslim world - the Abbasids of Baghdad, the Umayyads of Damascus and Cordoba, the Merinids of Fez, the Ottomans of Istanbul, the Mughals of India and the Safavids of Isfahan - and some of the most charismatic leaders in Muslim history, from Saladin in Cairo and mighty Tamerlane of Samarkand to the poet-prince Babur in his mountain kingdom of Kabul and the irrepressible Maktoum dynasty of Dubai. It focuses on these fifteen cities at some of the defining moments in Islamic history: from the Prophet Mohammed receiving his divine revelations in Mecca and the First Crusade of 1099 to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the phenomenal creation of the merchant republic of Beirut in the nineteenth century.

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