The Umayyad World captures the new wave of scholarship on the formative era of Islam and helps shape fresh avenues of inquiry. The volume integrates early Islamic history into wider global history, through the growing recognition that the first century or so of Islam (c. 610-c. 750 CE) belongs in many respects to a 'long late antiquity'. With this recognition in mind new approaches to thinking about the nature of the earliest Muslim Empire are explored, often in a comparative world historical perspective, as well as examining the development of the religion of Islam...