Acknowledgment
This book had its origins in a series of conversations
with the writer Jonathan Raban, and I am immensely
grateful for his continuing interest in it and for the
contribution of his ɹne, sharp mind in comments on the
manuscript.
I am also grateful to Wilferd Madelung, Laudian
Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford, England,
for his early encouragement, and to Ingvild Flaskerud of
the Centre for Peace Studies at the University of Tromsö,
Norway, for generously sharing her research.
Deep thanks to Stephen Rubin at Random House for
his wholehearted support, to my editor, Kris Puopolo, at
Doubleday for her advocacy of this book and for her
splendidly acute editorial eye, and, as always, to my
great friend and agent, Gloria Loomis.
Most of all, I am indebted to a man I never met and
never could have: the famed Islamic historian Abu Jafar
Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, who died in Baghdad in
the year 923. Without his magisterial work, this book
could never have been written.