Arabs In History.

LEWIS, Bernard.

Item Number: 144695

London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1950.

First edition of this classic study by one of the world’s premier historians of the Middle East considers the achievement of the Arab peoples and their place in world history, from pre-Islamic times to the present-day. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For John Bernard Lewis.” In near fine condition. Rare and desirable signed.

For more than 50 years, Lewis has strived mightily and successfully to explain the cultures and histories of Middle Eastern peoples to Western readers. The task of writing a political history of the region has already been fulfilled by him and by many others. In his latest work, Lewis has chosen to accentuate the social, economic, and cultural changes that have occurred over 20 centuries. He ranges from seemingly trivial concerns (changes in dress and manners in an Arab coffeehouse) to earth-shaking events (the Mongol conquest of Mesopotamia) in painting a rich, varied, and fascinating portrait of a region that is steeped in traditionalism while often forced by geography and politics to accept change. "... enormously influential history ... after reading 'Gibbon on Muhammad', it is tempting to speculate that Lewis's long-standing interest in the eighteenth-century historian may have influenced his own ambition to scan grand horizons, his taste for irony and his unmistakably elegant literary style"-(Robert Irwin).