The Cambridge History of Islam, Volume 2B: Islamic Society and Civilization

The Cambridge History of Islam #2.2

by P.M. Holt (Editor), Ann K.S. Lambton (Editor), Bernard Lewis (Editor)

First published in 1970, The Cambridge History of Islam is a most comprehensive and ambitious collaborative survey of Islamic history and civilization. On publication it was welcomed as a work useful both for reference and reading, for the general reader, student and specialist alike. It has now been reprinted, with corrections, and for ease of handling the original two hardcover volumes have each been divided into two separate paperbacks.

Genres: History, Islam

543 pages, Hardcover

First published April 21, 1977

About the author

Peter Malcolm Holt (1918–2006), a Fellow of the British Academy, was an historian of the Sudan, of the Middle East more widely, and of the development of Arabic studies in early modern England. Born at Leigh in Lancashire, he went to Lord Williams's Grammar School at nearby Thame, and then read History at University College, Oxford from 1937 to 1940. Having obtained a Diploma of Education (1941), he joined the Education Department of the Government of the Sudan, where he worked as a secondary school teacher and inspector. In the year before the Sudan became independent in 1956, Holt was appointed as a Lecturer in the History Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies. Articles investigating aspects of the earlier period of Sudanese history represent part of his scholarly output during the 1960s. While the main body of Holt's academic research occupied three, approximately successive, phases (the Sudan, Egypt under Ottoman rule, and the early Mamluk sultanate in Egypt and Syria), the development of Arabic studies in seventeenth-century England remained an abiding interest.