No god but God

A history of Islam written for readers outside it, tracing the faith from the Arabia of Muhammad’s lifetime through the schisms, empires and legal traditions that followed. Aslan argues that the conflicts convulsing the Muslim world today are best understood as an internal struggle over who has the authority to define the religion, a reformation playing out in real time. He writes as a scholar but keeps the narrative moving, giving equal weight to the theology and to the politics that shaped it.