Map of the Muslim world in the tenth century

Several impulses led to the writing of this book and, since these impulses dictated its scope and its format, there is a point in defining them briefly. A first one is that in the field of Near Eastern art there are almost no intermediates between the very specialized scholarly study and the very general book. The former rarely elicits much enthusiasm except in rarefied circles, while the latter is often general to the point of meaninglessness or erroneous in too many details because of the …