Arabs

Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Three thousand years of Arab history told through the thing that kept binding it together: the language.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith spent decades living in Yemen, and writes a three-thousand-year history of Arab peoples with language at its centre: how a shared tongue repeatedly created unity where geography and politics did not. It runs from pre-Islamic tribes to the present, and is unusual in treating the Arabic language itself as the main character.

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Recommended by 1 Person

Derek Sivers

Founder of CD Baby, writer and musician

3000 years of factual Arab history, and personal insights from this Oxford Brit who lived in Yemen for 37 years, translates classical Arabic, and clearly cares a lot. Huge and thorough but really wonderful for those with the interest.

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