The product of over twenty-five years of research, the essays in this book challenge the notion of Islam being a fixed, monolithic entity. Eaton presents case studies and reviews scholarly trends, offering seminal insights on such issues as the nature of religious conversion and the place of Islam as the hostile 'other' to the western world. Eaton writes...with commendable scholarly objectivity and clarity about his subject...He displays a wide acquaintance with the newer scholarship on the origins and early history of Islam in Arabia and in the adjacent Fertile Crescent.