...excellent, authoritative and illuminating.

The concept is dramatic, an epic in 15 acts. But with its fine drawing and mass of minute detail, reading the book is more like poring over the framed miniatures in a manuscript: here a Moghul lolls by a pool, there a Timurid rampages across the page.

This is an accessible, popular history to introduce readers to the kaleidoscopic sweep of 16 centuries of Islamic history.

Marozzi does not dispute [the] excoriating charge sheet against contemporary Arab regimes. What he does provide is a compelling counterpoint to the present state of affairs by recalling the pluralism, cosmopolitanism and magnificent achievements of the Islamic empires of the past.

[Marozzi's] book is a relief from the often downbeat tone of literature about the region.

I lost count of the number of beheadings and executions in this book, all told with a grisly relish. Muslim chroniclers are Marozzi’s sources, of course, but like all chroniclers they rexaggerate for political reasons or simply to impress the reader...Marozzi has a wide-eyed credulity about such numbers to match that of those literalistic Muslims wedded to every detail of the prophet’s life story.

Smith is a professional archaeologist who has excavated many ancient ruins around the world. As she conjures the lives lived among those now tumbled stones, she depicts people who bear an uncanny resemblance to contemporary, urban Californians. If she has conjured aright, the nature of the urbanite has been more or less set from the start.

...expect long lists of exotic cargoes and the palaces and mosques they filled, from Cordoba to Cairo, Jerusalem to Isfahan. As modern-day visitors to Dubai have sometimes found, too much opulence can sometimes be wearing.

Assigning a city to a single century is a bit artificial but Marozzi treats the century more as a pivot than a strict chronological delimiter. A more serious quibble is that Marozzi has nothing East of the Indus. He associates the Mughals with Kabul rather than Delhi or Agra and one could, as Marozzi acknowledges, make a good case for the inclusion of Jakarta.

The charm of this book lies in the fact that it is so obviously the adult sublimation of a boyhood passion for the lands and history of Islam. Mr. Marozzi is now 49, but his prose often has the wonderment of a young man who has devoured a shelf of books and is dying to tell everyone about the things he has read. Like an erudite magpie, he gathers material from every available source—primary texts, both religious and historical, as well as a profusion of secondary ones—and weaves it all together with dexterity.

...a skillful overview of the important seats of Muslim power while resisting narratives of 'faith and fable' in the process.

Marozzi...a former foreign correspondent for the BBC and the Economist, combines travel writing and history in this fluid, enriching series of vignettes about the great cities of Islamic civilization.