The Great Arab Conquests - gebunden oder broschiert

Lieutenant-General Sir John Bagot Glubb, (1897-1986), known as Glubb Pasha, was a British soldier, scholar and author, who led and trained Transjordan's Arab Legion between 1939 and 1956 as its commanding general. In 1939 Glubb became the commander of the Arab Legion (subsequently known as the Jordan Royal Army). During this period, he transformed the Legion into the best-trained force in the Arab world. Many people today have barely heard of the Byzantine or Arab Empire. In a sense, the story related in this book contains one of the principal keys to the understanding of the modern world. In less than fifty years, the Bedouins of Arabia established the greatest empire in the world of their day, and one of the greatest in history. These years, from A.D. 630 to A.D. 680, not only transformed a whole vast region but ensured that the pattern of life in the Middle East would never be the same again. Muhammad and his immediate successors, these Arabs who started from nothing, decided the framework of many things for thirteen hundred years or more. The fantastically short time in which this empire was built up, the ludicrous simplicity of its "administration" under the barefoot khalifs, these victories won through burning religious zeal and desperate courage by relatively untrained and unorganized armies all make for exciting reading. This is a book made vivid and relevant by General Glubb's knowledge of the terrain and of the Arab character, his gift for seeing modern parallels, the care he has taken not to assume background knowledge of the period on the part of his readers, and the maps he has personally prepared. Just as he learned Arabic as a living language, so the author has set down this story as something which came alive for him while he lived and traveled and fought in the mountains, deserts, valleys and passes which are its setting.