One of the best jokes in Whit Stillman‘s 1994 comedy Barcelona could apply to much academic writing of the past half-century. Fred, a naval officer who is a new arrival in Europe, asks his expatriate cousin Ted about something he noticed in the books he has been reading while waiting for the fleet to arrive. “One of the things that keeps popping up is about ‘subtext.’ Plays, novels, songs — they all have a ‘subtext,’ which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know,” Fred says. “But what do you call the message or meaning that’s right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what’s above the subtext?”

“The text,” Ted replies.

“OK, that’s right. But they never talk about that.”

This joke about the postmodern monofixation with subtexts and deconstruction kept popping into my head as I read Michael Cook’s A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity. This book is glorious, wonderful text. Across 846 pages, Cook has written an obvious masterwork that covers all of the lands touched by the explosive emergence of Islam from the sixth-century Arabia of Muhammad’s birth to the turn of the 19th century. 

Not many histories touch equally on Andaman Island cannibals and the imperial palaces of the Ottomans. Necessarily a dense work, it is also delightful in its sheer scope and variety. This is especially true in a writer as witty as Cook, who sustains a breezy, Socratic style throughout, inviting the reader to consider with him the “good questions” of history, those without any clear-cut answer. He has also plainly benefited from decades of teaching undergraduates and is able to pierce through complicated bits of theology and theory.

His explanation of the Christological schisms from Orthodoxy in early Christianity is Chestertonian in turning a doctrinal quagmire into a quip. “There were the Arians, for whom God had not always had a son; the Nestorians, for whom God did not have a mother; and the Monophysites, for whom God died on the cross. Eventually, in the Orthodox view, these heretics would be joined by the Catholics of western and central Europe over a doctrinal issue of such nuance that we can ignore it.” Cook sustains this combination of wit and insight on topics as varied as the Tuareg practice of veiling males, the challenge of saddling a camel (how do you deal with the hump?), and a millennium of Russian insobriety. 

Dates, names, and places are important in this book, in another break with the trendier history of recent decades. He also benefits from eschewing jargon and political correctness in writing about the adherents of what might be the 21st century’s most thin-skinned religion. His explanation for why he continues to use anno Domini dating in place of the abominable “Common Era” is as succinct an argument for the secular use of Christian dating as I have come across. “In references to ancient history I occasionally use the abbreviations ‘BC’ and ‘AD’ to avoid ambiguity; I do so in the same spirit as I speak of ‘Wednesday’ or ‘Thursday’ without implying a belief in the pagan gods these days are named for.”

Cook’s resistance to the postmodern/poststructural/postcolonial/post-everything academic assault on telling the story of Islam in a traditional fashion makes his History refreshing from at least two directions.

In the first place, Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism challenged all Western study of the Islamic world as a racist, colonial endeavor. The book was a powerful shot across the bow of the entire field, but it was fired from Columbia’s English department, and it has arguably remained more influential there than among faculty studying the actual philology, history, geography, and culture of the Near East. Cook’s repeated citations of Bernard Lewis, who, in the 1980s, clashed with Said in the New York Review of Books over the Orientalism thesis, strike me as quiet evidence that Lewis was right in believing that the quality of Western study of the East would eventually speak for itself.

From the opposite direction of Said, it would be impossible to know from this book that Cook once co-authored perhaps the most ferocious assault on the traditional Islamic narrative in secular academic history when he wrote Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World with Patricia Crone in 1977.

“This is a book written by infidels for infidels,” the pair wrote in an arresting preface. “It is based on what from any Muslim perspective must appear an inordinate regard for the testimony of infidel sources. Our account is not merely unacceptable; it is also one which any Muslim whose faith is as a grain of mustard seed should find no difficulty in rejecting.”

Both Cook and Crone ended up largely disowning the book, which had scratched a long-burning itch among Western scholars of Islam to disregard the main Islamic sources composed hundreds of years after Muhammad’s death. It dispensed with those accounts and relied instead on non-Muslim sources, and the early Islam described in Hagarism was a kind of Arab Judaism, complete with “Muslim Rabbis,” and focused on the descent of all Arabs from Abraham’s concubine Hagar and her son Ishmael, with Muhammad as an Arab messiah.

This thesis that Islam as we know it was a sort of a latter-day fraud and that Muhammad’s life might have been fabricated in whole cloth centuries later was all but definitively disproved with the discovery of very early manuscripts of the Quran in the 1980s, among other evidence. Cook, in the new book, takes a parsimonious route regarding sources that most acutely applies to the literary dark ages in which Islam emerged, but that applies for the anecdotes he uses throughout. “If it’s not true, it’s very aptly invented,” he writes, quoting the 16th-century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno.

This opaque, early period of Islam, which viewed from the outside and from the latter-day orthodox consensus seemed to include bizarre doctrines, takes up a brief portion of the book, but both Western and Muslim readers may be surprised by the longevity, popularity, and frequency of political movements backed by heresies starkly at odds with what we now often regard as the monolithic Sunni and Shiite Islam of Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Cook’s mastery of Islamic history allows him to describe the trans-Sahara, the islands of Oceania, and other remote parts of the Islamic world as fluently as he covers the core Arabic, Turkish, and Persian-speaking mainland.

Perhaps more challenging in telling the complete story of the Islamic world, though necessary, is the endless succession of -id dynasties. The Safavids and the Timurids are well known, but on a typical page describing the breakup of the Abbasid caliphate, Cook refers to the Annazids, Hasanwayhids, Marwanids, Shaddadids, and Rawadids, all minor Kurdish dynasties of the 10th and 11th centuries. There is a clear point here in the atomization of the unified Abbasid caliphate in this period into local and tribal statelets, but the effect can sometimes be a bit like reading through the “begats” in the Bible.

But the “begats” of the Old Testament, while perhaps boring, are another example of text over subtext. They establish a lineal history from the creation of Adam to the narrative present and are repeated in the “universal” histories that recur in the medieval Christian and Islamic tradition in writers like Tabari and Ibn Khaldun. I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to place Cook in that tradition of universal historians, though he humbly acknowledges that his work is less comprehensive than another Western classic of universal histories of the Muslim world, Marshall Hodgson’s uncompleted, three-volume midcentury epic The Venture of Islam.

That said, there are elements of the history of Islam that receive minimal attention. Cook’s decision to end his account around 1800 means that Europeans are absent from his story to a perhaps surprising degree. Viewed from the Muslim center, battles between Christians and Muslims like Tours in 732 and the Battle of Vienna in 1683, as well as the entirety of the Crusades, are minor interludes compared with the Mongol invasions or various internal succession crises. While events like the Crusades loom large in Western histories of interactions between Christendom and Islamdom, from the Islamic perspective, they appear important only retrospectively, as Cook makes clear in a sweeping epilogue about how the comparative standing of East and West turned against the Islamic world so quickly.

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Cook’s History is concerned primarily with political and cultural history, but here, economic, social, and intellectual factors come roaring back to the fold in fascinating, if unanswered, ways. Why are Western states so much more literate, liberal, and rich than their Islamic counterparts? Cook describes but does not particularly detail the bonanza of European colonization of Islamic territory launched in the wake of the 1798 French invasion of Egypt, but the weight of the preceding chapters makes the political causes of the relative decline of the Islamic world clear by repetition. Why would states formed by foreign nomads who most commonly veered between stealing everything and stealing just enough to permit economic growth care about, say, the literacy rate of women? “I don’t think the views I express in this subsection are mainstream, but I’m not sure what is,” Cook writes in an earlier section about the emergence of a distinct, Islamic civilization.

Cook’s descriptions of the conditions of the states governing the world’s roughly 2 billion Muslims compared to the West aren’t particularly mainstream, either. But they’re certainly worth thinking about. And they will have to be thought about. The payoff for writing a book this ambitious and successful is that, for anyone interested in the history of Islam, Cook is now a must-read.

Andrew Bernard is a correspondent for the Jewish News Syndicate.