"No religion in the modern world is as feared and misunderstood as Islam. It haunts the popular Western imagination as an extreme faith that promoted authoritarian government, female oppression, civil war, and terrorism. Karen Armstrong's short history offers a vital corrective to this narrow view.

The distillation of years of thinking and writing about Islam, it demonstrates that the world's fastest-growing faith is a much richer and more complex phenomenon than its modern fundamentalist strain might suggest."--BOOK JACKET.