The Arabs: A Short History with Documents

Heinz Halm is an internationally renowned scholar of the Middle East. The Arabs, Heinz Halm’s masterful narrative, is now available in two versions: as a general reader and introductory text for college courses and, now, in an expanded version with a new 160-page annotated appendix of primary sources.

The new source appendix, edited by Luke Yarbrough and Oded Zinger, greatly enhances the text’s value for teachers as well as for general readers. Some 40 primary source readings--ranging from Spain to Iraq, from classical antiquity to the 2011 Arab Spring, and from poetry and scripture to medieval economics and travelogue--provide a classroom-ready component for courses in history, area studies, and religious studies. Several of the readings occur here for the first time in translation; all have been chosen to give vivid and representative accounts of the Arabs’ history as told by those who experienced it. Taken together, they offer readers a glimpse into the vast, richly textured mosaic of texts that have been generated by and about the Arabs and encourage further exploration.