Mokhtar Moktefi

This is one of my daughter's textbooks, part of the "Peoples of the Past" series. It's a brief overview of the Arabic culture from the founding of Islam in 612 to the end of the Abbasid dynasty in 1258. Actually, that sounds a bit misleading. Except for the account of the life of Muhammad, there's no real sense of historical progression to the book at all. It simply looks at various areas of life and describes how it was in the Arabic golden age, pulling an example from some place and time within that era. And it does a good job of that, so the book is worth checking out. It is slightly too rah-rah for my tastes--apparently the golden age Arabs could do no wrong--but a rah-rah attitude is almost to be expected in the genre of history books. And since the book gives a good picture of a people and era too often ignored in Western history, I'm willing to let it slide.
--J.… (more)