The Golden Age of Islam

In this book, Maurice Lombard portrays the Islamic world as the center of civilization at a time when the West was primitive and backward. Its reach extended from Córdoba to Samarkand, and it maintained and developed the tradition of wealth, cultural and artistic achievement, and thriving urban life that it had absorbed from its predecessors, the civilizations of Greece, Egypt, and Persia, and the ancient cities of the Middle East.