أَعُوذُ بِاللّٰهِ مِنَ الشَّيْطَانِ الرَّجِيمِ

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

In the name of ALLAH, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Book "Worlds of Islam: A Global History" by James McDougall

James Robert McDougall (1974 -aged 52 years) also known as Jack Davidson, is a British historian and actor. Until 2025, he was a Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Oxford and Laithwaite Fellow in History at Trinity College, Oxford. James McDougall has taught history at Princeton; the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; and Oxford. The author of two previous books, his writing has appeared in The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and The New Statesman. He has authored the latest Book "Worlds of Islam: A Global History" which is published in April 2026.

Reza Aslan, author of "No god but God" says about the Book "Worlds of Islam: A Global History" by James McDougall; "A sweeping global history of Islam, tracing the 1,400-year evolution of a diverse community of faith and its place in the modern world. Anyone who wants to understand not just the past of Islam but its present and future should read Worlds of Islam.”

Book "Worlds of Islam: A Global History" by James McDougall is about Islam from its birth in seventh-century Arabia, as Islam as a religion has been a faith on the move. Over the span of a thousand years, armies, missionaries, and merchants carried it to the edges of Europe, the coasts of Southeast Asia, and the remote interior of China. By the nineteenth century, Islam encompassed a world of great diversity, from Muslim-ruled empires to new nations where Muslims lived out their faith among many others. As empires fell and new superpowers rose, Muslims proved to be as adaptable and dynamic as modernity itself.

Book "Worlds of Islam: A Global History" by historian James McDougall explores Islam’s origins and transformations as Muslims adapted to changing times and conditions, from Late Antiquity to the digital age. In the twentieth century, while monarchs in the Gulf asserted dynastic privilege and fundamentalists in Egypt and Pakistan preached social morality, revolutionaries from Algeria to Indonesia fought for national self-determination, and activists in North America and Europe campaigned for civil liberties and social justice.

Sweeping and authoritative, Worlds of Islam narrates the epic story of how Muslims emerged as a community, built empires, traversed the globe, came to number in the billions, and became modern.

From its emergence in seventh century Arabia, Islam has been a faith on the move.

Over the span of a thousand years, armies, missionaries, and merchants carried it to the edges of Europe, the coasts of Southeast Asia and the remote interior of China. From the Arab caliphate to the Mongol empire, from West Africa to the Philippines, Islam was a world-shaping force. By the nineteenth century, Muslims lived everywhere from South Africa to North America. In the age of European empires, through two World Wars and a Cold War, and into the globalised and fractured 21st century, Muslims lived through global conflicts and everyday struggles for adaptation and survival.

Book "Worlds of Islam: A Global History" by historian James McDougall charts the epic global story of Islam’s origins and transformations, as Muslims adapted to their changing times from late antiquity to the digital age, constantly remaking their own worlds as the wider world around them changed.

Sweeping in scope and colourful in detail, Book "Worlds of Islam: A Global History" by James McDougall shows how Islam’s place in the world has been part of how the world – with all its frictions and inequalities, its promises and aspirations – became modern.

Book "Worlds of Islam: A Global History" by James McDougall is a detailed account of Islamic History, with a particularly detailed focus on the more modern aspects.

Beginning with the origins of Islam in Chapter 1, this is a broadly Chronological account of the individuals and events which constitute a history of Islam. The book narrates the momentous events such as the fall of Constantinople and 9/11, as well as telling stories about individuals living in specific places like Africa and Afghanistan.

While it is generally helpful to approach historical issues Chronologically, it did mean that some regional aspects ended up being somewhat artificially spread across multiple chapters. That was particularly noticeable with issues relating to Pakistan, where the Mughal Empire was in one chapter, Victorian Colonialism was in another, Independence was in yet another, and the East-West Pakistan issues were in yet a different chapter. In terms of reading experience that ended up feeling a bit disjointed. That may make it somewhat difficult for readers who are interested in dipping into the book to read about Islamic history in a specific geographical region.

One of the issues with historical accounts which relate to specific religions is that there can sometimes be questions of objectivity. I felt that the Modern aspects of the book were noticeably working hard to be objective, and that was very welcome. For example, Hamas were identified as both raising genuine issues, as well as being involved in unacceptable violence and antisemitic rhetoric. In a similar vein, the accounts of recent events in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, did well to identify the contributions of both local factors as well as specific Western policies which had arguably exacerbated issues.

Where I was less sure of objectivity was in some of the earlier aspects of the book, where it was dealing with the origins of Islam and some of the more faith traditions. Sometimes the author went out of his way to stress that specific details were being provided ‘according to Muslim Tradition’ (such as the prophetic revelations in the cave at Mecca).

But at other times, points were made that sounded on the surface as if they were portraying objective historical facts, yet they were potentially embedding contentious faith-based interpretation. For example, in chapter 1 the book tells us that Indian trade routes ran to Mecca and ‘skirted it and passed through it.’ However, there is a question about the extent to which that view reflects Muslim tradition, rather than historical evidence, as some scholars have noted that Mecca does not appear on some early trade maps.

Where these issues of trade seemed to come to a bit of a head was in footnote 8 in chapter 1, where the author cited Patricia Crone in relation to the leather trade in Mecca, but didn’t acknowledge her (other) book where she questions the core idea that Mecca was a major trading centre, as portrayed in Muslim Tradition. Clearly the author cannot engage with every possible point of controversy, but it seemed odd that the controversy wasn’t even noted in passing.

Similar questions sprang to mind when I read in chapter 3 that ‘all Muslims agreed on the contents of the Quran.’ Yes, that is what Muslim Tradition states, yet there are some scholars now referring to issues of Quranic variants, who are effectively arguing a different thesis. Again, it is not possible to engage with those kinds of complex textual issues in a book like this. But surely its possible for the book to express itself more carefully so that it is not (inadvertently?) assuming faith Traditions as if they were facts?

Those kinds of issues made me feel less confident about the earlier sections of the book. However, when the text moved to the medieval and modern era, I felt more confident that what I was reading was indeed evidenced history.

Overall, this is a weighty tome with an impressive breadth of detail. I think it was aimed at a non-academic readership, as only 10% of the text is footnotes.

It is one of those books that I suspect will eventually become a definitive introduction to Islamic history. What it does particularly well is move beyond the Arabs and their initial conquests to tell the story of the peoples they conquered, as well as those on the fringes of the early Islamic empires. Many of these peoples eventually adopted, adapted, and transformed Islam, propelling it into what McDougall refers to as new “worlds.”

I would not say I have been necessarily learning a large number of new facts, but the book has been exceptionally good at connecting the dots and making sense of developments in Islamic history across very different geographies and periods. Notably, what I find most interesting - and what feels like the implicit thesis of the book - is the way Islam, despite being politically fragmented into many dawlas (states), arguably created the first truly global civilization.

Unlike the modern West - particularly Britain, and later the United States - which would eventually achieve something similar through the sheer political, economic, and military power of its states, as well as the institutions they built around them, Islam was able to create an interconnected global civilization without being dependent on a single imperial state. Muslim states and empires were obviously central to this process, but it was a common, broadly shared dīn, usually translated simply as “religion” but more accurately understood as a comprehensive way of life encompassing laws, customs, beliefs, and social norms, that allowed this civilization to transcend its political fragmentation.

A concrete example of how this worked in practice can be seen in the life of Ibn Battuta, one of the most widely traveled men in history. It was this shared dīn that enabled an individual born into a Berber family in the western Maghreb (modern-day Morocco) to travel thousands of miles from home into lands whose languages and cultures were entirely foreign to him, and yet find gainful employment along the way in scholarly and administrative positions. Ibn Battuta’s classical education in Islamic jurisprudence gave him a form of cultural and intellectual currency that was recognized across the vast and otherwise extraordinarily diverse worlds of Islam.

This, in turn, offers an interesting lens through which to understand the Muslim world’s difficult, and still incomplete, adjustment to the Western-defined modern world. Critics of Islam often portray it as too rigid and unchanging, and therefore inherently incapable of reforming and adapting to new circumstances. As you read this book, however, you start to see the challenge somewhat differently, especially when you consider how flexible and adaptive Islamic civilization was in responding to different circumstances and environments throughout its history. (I am now at the section on how Muslim societies adapted to life under their initially non-Muslim Mongol conquerors, for instance, and it is a particularly striking example of this.)

The issue is, therefore, not simply that Islam is too resistant to change; it is that Islam had already produced its own form of globally interconnected civilization, on its own terms and through its own institutions, and that this order functioned for centuries. I think this lingering civilizational memory helps explain why the transition to a global order defined largely by others has been so difficult. The Muslim world is not encountering globalization or new cultures for the first time, but rather confronting a new form of global civilization after the displacement and dismantling of one it had once helped organize.

The author seems to treat pluralism as the central trait of Islamic civilization, as the only true "fact" about Islam's history.

Book "Worlds of Islam: A Global History" by James McDougall, is a stunningly ambitious and authoritative global history, and the author paints a compelling picture of change, adaptation, and growth in Islam from its origins over a thousand years ago to its myriad expressions in today’s digital age.

We live in an era of self-appointed experts on Islam, its doctrine, history, and canons. Even a cursory glance at social media or the burgeoning podcast-sphere reveals a near endless series of discussions about Islam and Muslims, and their supposed incompatibility with the West. It is within such an environment that James McDougall’s new book, Worlds of Islam: A Global History, has emerged as a beautifully written and highly readable survey of Islam as a global force.

What McDougall shows – in a tone the book describes as ‘humane’ – is that the secret of Islam’s global force has been less through the type of coercive power it is so often associated with in contemporary commentary, but, instead with its pragmatic adaptability. Islam’s expansion was rapid and, within two decades of the Prophet’s death, had reached as far as the gates of China’s Tang dynasty where it first settled in Guangzhou. Indeed, one of Islam’s oldest mosques (at least, according to Muslim folklore) was established there, the Huaisheng Mosque. Driven by trade, this wealthy port city in southern China was an obvious landing point for Muslim merchants who had taken to the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.

‘The world that Muslims had made was tied together by worldly interests and material goods, by merchants, money, and trade winds, at least as much as by religious teaching and spiritual values, itinerant scholars and wandering Sufis’, McDougall writes. About 600 years later, those very trading routes would also lead to the establishment and proselytisation of Islam in Indonesia, now the world’s most populous Muslim nation. McDougall observes:-

"Merchants were noted, too, for their displays of piety through charitable works and frequent pilgrimage (also, often, an opportunity for business). In keeping with both a concern for the ethical propriety of trade and the open, community-oriented nature of religious learning, many merchant families combined accumulating wealth with gaining distinction in hadith collection [narrated Prophetic tradition] and legal scholarship. In the absence of a separate clergy or professional priesthood, many legal scholars up to the eleventh century either came from merchant families, or engaged in trade themselves."