This book is an ingenious collection of translations woven together, sometimes one line from one source with pages from another, to form a continuous homogeneous narrative using only original materials. Here history and theology become exciting and fascinating, and very real. There are no comments from the author, only authentic texts; yet thousands of mosaics fit together to form a true vision, a feeling that one has actually experienced the events and the ideas. The reader feels as if he has lived and seen several centuries of history first hand.
The book begins with passages from Doughty's "Arabia Deserta" to set the stage and then carries the reader from pre-Islamic times up to the Seljuks in the actual words of the historical players: prophets, peasants, believers, unbelievers. soldiers, princes, cooks, doctors, mystics, and miscreants. It should be read from beginning to end because the material builds upon itself. The book contains the cream: the most compelling, instructive, and genial passages from the original Arabic and Persian sources: fables, stories, poetry, speeches, history, theology, mysticism--even humor and all the spice of life. In a painless fashion the reader, even one without any background, begins to feel a familiarity with a civilization because he sees the first occurrence of an idea and its subsequent reappearance in changing times and places in an amazingly accessible way. Harun al-Rashid acts and reacts, utters statements, in an understandable context that the reader recognizes and "remembers" from centuries before because the reader was there when it all began. The reader is himself the continuity of consciousness as he sees cities rise and fall. The result is an extraordinary, rich education about the Islamic world in considerable depth achieved in a short time and very enjoyably. Indeed, it is a book to be read for pleasure and entertainment, a scholarly thousand and one nights.
Interspersed in the text is about 1/10th of the Koran in the best translation ever made, one which conveys mystery and beauty. Schroeder's "Muhammad's People" is a magisterial introduction to Arabs and the Islamic world. It is a sourcebook with a difference because of how all the material works together so successfully to make scholarship read like a gripping novel. It is an anthology of translations, some reworked by Schroeder. some translated by him for the first time but is nevertheless a work of genius in its own right by an author with remarkable insight and intelligence.