NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. With footnotes.

CHAPTER 1

1. See Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (New York: Penguin, 1980), p. 148.

2. Conan Doyle, for example, uses “Parthian shot” to mean “parting shot” in his 1886 novel A Study in Scarlet.

3. The eleventh-century Persian poet Firdausi drew on this vast body of Persian leg­ends to write the Shahnama (The Book of Kings), an epic poem in which Kay Khos- row the Just figures largely.

CHAPTER 2

1. From a passage by Tabari, excerpted in The Inner Journey: Views from the Islamic Tradition, edited by William Chittick, (Sandpoint, Idaho: Morning Light Press, 2007), p. xi.

2. Akbar Ahmed’s Islam Today (New York and London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), p. 21, for excerpts from Mohammed’s last sermon.

CHAPTER 3

1. Reza Aslan, No god but God (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 113.

2. This is Tabari’s description; an excerpt appears on page 12 of Islam: From the Prophet Mohammed to the Capture of Constantinople, a collection of documents edited and translated by Bernard Lewis. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

3. The core of a document purporting to be Omar’s original declaration to Jerusalem appears in Hugh Kennedy’s The Great Arab Conquests (New York: Da Capo Press, 2007), pp. 91-92.

CHAPTER 5

1. From Ibn Qutayba’s ninth-century history Uyun al~Akhbar, excerpted in Islam: From the Prophet Muhammed to the Capture of Constantinople (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 273.

2. NafasulMahmum (chapter 14), Sheikh Abbas Qummi quoting from thirteenth­century historian Sayyid Ibn Tawoos’s book Lahoof (Qom, Iran: Ansariyan Publica­tions, 2005).

3. G. E. von Grunebaum, Classical Islam (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1970), p. 70.

CHAPTER 6

1. Wiet, Baghdad: Metropolis of the Abbasid Caliphate., pp. 12-24.

2. From Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census by Tertius Chandler.

CHAPTER 7

1. My rendering of a poem that appears in Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, edited by A. Harvey and E. Hanut, (Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books, 1999).

2. From Muhammad Zubayr Siddiqi, “Women Scholars of Hadith,” at http://www.jannah.org/sisters/womenhadith.html.

3. Maulana Muhammad Ali, The Early Caliphate (1932; Lahore, Pakistan: The Ah­madiyya Anjuman Isha’at Islam, 1983), p. 119.

4. Ghazali, “On the Etiquettes of Marriage,” The Revival of the Religious Sciences book 12 at http://www.ghazali.org/works/marriage.htm.

CHAPTER 8

1. Chaim Potok, History of the Jews (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), pp. 346-347.

2. Mohammed Ali, A Cultural History of Afghanistan, 120-123 (Kabul: Punjab Ed­ucational Press, 1964).

3. My cousin Farid Ansary quoted this line from a contemporary of Firdausis; he couldn’t recall the poet’s name. However, similar (but more extensive) anti-Arab vitu­perations can be found at the end of Firdausi’s Shahnama.

CHAPTER 9

1. Philip Daileader discusses the fragmentation process in medieval Europe in lec­tures 17—20 of his audio series The Early Middle Ages (Chantilly, Virginia: The Teach­ing Company, 2004). See also the Columbia Encyclopedia, 6^th edition, entry for “knight.”

2. Amin Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), pp. 38-40.

3. Ibid., p. 46.

4. Quoted by Karen Armstrong in Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Todays World (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), pp. 178-179.

5. Ibid., p. 73.

6. Ibid., p. 39.

7· David Morgan, The Mongols (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2007), p. 17.

8. Ibid., pp. 64-71.

9. Sabbah’s sect resurrected itself as the Nizari Isma’ilis, gained new converts, and rose again, but it morphed into a peaceful movement that is now one of the most pro­gressive sects of Islam, devoted to science and education. Its leader is called the Agha Khan, and the Isma’ilis run the Agha Khan University in Pakistan, one of the bright­est centers of learning in today’s Islamic world: everything changes.

10. An account of the sack of Baghdad by Muslim historian Rashid al-Din Fazlul- lah (1247-1318) appears in The Middle East and Islamic World Reader (New York: Grove Press, 2003), p. 49.

11. The mamluk army was much bigger than Hulagu’s, but the Mongol’s terrible success made them the Goliath in every confrontation.

12. Morgan, 146.

CHAPTER 10

1. Morgan, pp. 16-18.

2. See Akbar Ahmed’s interesting discussion of these differences between the two religions in Islam Today, pp. 21—22.

3. Muhammed ibn-al-Husayn al-Sulami, The Book of Sufi Chivalry: Lessons to a Son of the Moment (New York: Inner Traditions International, 1983). These stories appear in the forward, pp. 9—14. The ghazis apparently borrowed the story about Omar from a traditional older story about a pre-Islamic king named Nu’man ibn Mundhir.

4. Alexandra Marks, writing for the Christian Science Monitor on November 25, 1997, said the Coleman Barks’s translation of Rumi, The Essential Rumi (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995), had sold at that point, a quarter of a million copies worldwide.

5. See Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (London: Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1965) pp. 33—51.

6. Details of Ottoman society come largely from Stanford Shaw’s History of the Ot­toman Empire and Modern Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), especially pp. 55-65, 113-138, and 150-161.

7. Zahirud-din Muhammad Babur, Babur-nama, translated by Annette S. Bev­eridge, (1922; Lahor: Sang-e-Meel Publications, reprinted 1987), p. 121.

8. Waldemar Hansen, The Peacock Throne, The Drama of Mogul India (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972) pp. 113-114, 493-494.

9. Marshall Hodgson, RethinkingWorldHistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) p. 97.

CHAPTER 11

1. See Ñ. M. Woolger, “Food and Taste in Europe in the Middle Ages,” pp. 175—177 in Food: The History of Taste, edited by Paul Freedman, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

2. Peter Russel, Prince Henry the Navigator (London: Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Council, 1960).

3. Daileader, Lecture 15, Early Middle Ages (Chantilly, Virginia: The Teaching Company, 2004).

CHAPTER 12

1. Great Britain was born after King James VI of Scotland inherited the crown of England. He and his successors held both crowns separately until the Act of Union in 1707. Only after that date is it correct to speak of “the British.”

2. For a detailed inside picture of life in the Ottoman harem, see Alev Croutier s Harem: The World Behind the Veil (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989), especially pp. 35-38, 103-105, 139-140.

3. James Gelvin points out these global interconnections in The Modern Middle East. See pp. 55-60.

4. Nick Robbins, “Loot: In Search of the East India Company,” an article written for openDemocracy.net in 2003. Find it at http://www.opendemocracy.net/theme_ 7-corporations/article_904.jsp.

5. Gelvin, pp. 84-86.

6. As reported by Frederick Cooper, deputy commissioner of Amritsar, in a dis­patch excerpted by Reza Aslan, No god but God (New York, Random House, 2006), pp. 220-222.

7. Jamil Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 249-257.

CHAPTER 13

1. Ernest Renan, “La Reforme intellectuelle et morale” (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1929).

2. Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted (New York: New Press, 2007), pp. 58-59.

CHAPTER 14

1. Mark Elvin coins this phrase in Pattern of the Chinese Past (London: Eyre Methuen Ltd, 1973), which includes an analysis of why China failed to develop high- level technology in the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, when it had the prosperity to do so.

2. Dabashi, pp. 60-61.

3. Gelvin, p. 129.

4. Joseph Mazzini, On the Duties of Man. Included in its entirety in Franklin, Read­ings in Western Intellectual History (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 561.

5. Garry Wills discusses this idea in Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).

6. Gelvin, p. 82.

7. Hamit Bozarslan, writing about the Ottoman Empire for the Online Encyclope­dia of Mass Violence at http://www.massviolence.org/_Bozarslan-Hamit, includes this quote from Ziya Gokalps Yeni Hayat, Dogru Yol.

8. Quoted by Taner Ak^am in Türk Ulusal Kimligi ve Ermeni Sorunu (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 1992), pp. 175-176.

CHAPTER 15

1. Suroosh Irfani, Revolutionary Islam in Iran: Popular Liberation or Religious Dicta­torship (London: Zed Books, 1983), p. 50.

2. Article 22, Covenant of the League of Nations.

3. Gelvin, p. 86.

4. Benjamin Shwadran, The Middle East, Oil and the Great Powers (New York: Fred­erick A. Praeger, 1955), pp. 244-265.

CHAPTER 16

1. See http://countrystudies.us/algeria/48.htm. The statistics come from the Fed­eral Research Division of the Library of Congress Country Studies/Area Handbook Series sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Army.

2. Frank Thackery and John Findling, Events That Changed the World in the Twen­tieth Century (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1995). (See Appendix D, “States Achieving Independence Since 1945.”)

3. The phrase came from American Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill. What he ac­tually wrote, however (in 1901), was “Palestine is a country without a people, the Jews are a people without a country.” Whether anyone actively used the phrase as a basis for a “slogan” is a matter of dispute.

4. Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), pp. 14-17.

5. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question, 6th edition (New York: The Maccabean Publishing Company, 1904 ), p. 29.

6. Nizar Sakhnini, writing for al-Awda at http://al-awda.org/zionists2.html in­cludes this quote from Weizmann’s Trial and Error (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), pp. 93-208.

7. Qutb’s Milestones can be found online in its entirety at http://www.young muslimsonline.ca/online_library/books/milestones/hold/index_2.asp.

CHAPTER 17

1. For a concise Arafat bio, see http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/ 1994/arafat- b io. h tml.

2.David Cook, Understanding Jihad, p. 130.

3.Irfani, Revolutionary Islam in Iran, pp. 98—100, 121, 131.

4. Dabashi, pp. 164-166.

5. Quoted by Thabit Abdullah in Dictatorship, Imperialism, and Chaos: Iraq Since 1989 (New York: Zed Books, 2006) p. 76.